[ExI] What is Grace?

[Jeff Davis]

On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 11:14 AM, Dagon Gmail <dagonweb at gmail.com> wrote:

> ... several undesirable things that transpired would not have happened if, say,
> Gore would have been elected in 2000.  For one thing I am sure we would not
> be in a global economic collapse right now...

I'd ask for your reasoning behind this claim.

The housing bubble like the tech bubble before it, sucked everyone
into the irrational exhuberance.  Though several individuals saw and
sought to alert others to the bubble problem, they went unnoticed in
the mad dash for fast money.  Buy this house and flip it, build this
condo or housing development or commercial property and sell it at a
huge profit to a mob of people clawing past one another for a chance
to plunk their money down.  Correction: to plunk some money down that
they got from some banker: just sign here, no questions asked.  Then
the (unregulated Wall Street investment)banker bundles the mortgages
as fast as he can sell them (pretty fast) into securities, and sells
them again (around the world -- ain't globalism wonderful?!), collects
his commissions again, and waves "bye bye!" (he thinks) to the
funky-ass financial instruments based on funky-ass mortgages.   How do
you put the brakes on the magical money machine that's making everyone
(fictitiously) wealthy, right up to the moment when it turns on you
and kills the real golden goose -- the genuine and legitimate
capitalist free-enterprise golden goose?

Gore might well have kept focus on OBL and prevented 911, but the
economic house of cards?  I think that blind-sided everyone.
My question is, How could that have happened?  I mean the boom and
bust pattern is all but cliche, totally predictable, so where is the
structural defect in "the system" that directs/enables humans to drive
over the same cliff again and again?

Anyway, that's my two cents.

Best, jeff davis

Everyting's hard till you know how to do it.
                        Ray Charles