So free and easy were American banks and credit institutions during this period that bank robbers stopped wearing ski masks and carrying guns; all they had to do was to ask for the money like everyone else.

Quelle: Alan Greenspan’s Money Isn’t Everything

Schreckliche Situation, in der die us-amerikanischen Häuslebesitzer* und Geldverleiher stecken:

For one thing, nobody really knows where the actual ownership of the individual mortgages has actually landed. This is a major awful consequence of the scheme to disperse risk so widely in the creation of these derivatives. The scheme was so successful that now nobody knows which mortgage belongs to whom and how to begin renegotiating it. So any talk about restructuring these mortgages is absurd, since to do so would require agreement between the borrowers and the lenders. All the lawyers who ever lived would not be able to sort out this mess, and most of the money at stake would end up going to the lawyers now living if the process were to go forward.

Quelle: MAGIC WAND FINANCE

The run-up of home prices made even less sense than the dot-com bubble — I mean, there wasn’t even a glamorous new technology to justify claims that old rules no longer applied — but somehow financial markets accepted crazy home prices as the new normal.

Quelle: Innovating Our Way to Financial Crisis

Auch in diesem Artikel in der New York Times wird das böse „R“-Wort wieder in den Mund genommen. Was sagt Google?

Google Trends: recession

Hmmm …

Der Markt steht über allem!

Wahrscheinlich hat sich der Staat immer noch zu stark in die Wirtschaft eingemischt …

At a deep level, I believe that the problem was ideological: policy makers, committed to the view that the market is always right, simply ignored the warning signs.

[…] The bottom line is that policy makers left the financial industry free to innovate — and what it did was to innovate itself, and the rest of us, into a big, nasty mess.

Gibt es wirklich eine Rezession (in den USA)? Wie schwer wird sie ausfallen? Auf Web-Sites, auf denen ich verkehre, werden Horrorszenarios geäussert. „Schlimmer als die Great Depression“ werde es werden, hört man dort fast schon täglich:

Do you remember the rule, dear reader? The force of a correction is equal and opposite to the delusion that preceded it. What would you expect to follow the biggest credit expansion of all time? Something pretty dramatic.

Quelle: Credit Expansion Ends, Leads to Falling House Prices