It's tulips all over again, isn't it?
Lemme explain ...
Here we are in the grip of this latest financial market crisis, trying to dig ourselves out from underneath the slippery remnants of yet another burst speculative bubble, checking for scabs and bruises AND trying to diagnose the disaster.
Well, trying to find somebody to put the finger point at. The rating agencies were to blame, the reckless mortgage salesmen, careless mortgage banks, too-much-in-love-with-sophisticated-financial-gadgets investment bankers, Alan Easy-Money Greenspan ... the list goes on and on. And, fair enough, some of the blame can be thrown at any of these parties. But that doesn't really get to the heart of the matter now, does it?
I tell you what caused this AND any other financial market bubbles, crisis, fracas, since the dawn of time: Religiously speaking, one of the deadly sins - GREED. Plain and simple greed. Or, as Karl Marx wrote in his DAS KAPITAL: "All nations with a capitalist mode of production are seized periodically by a feverish attempt to make money without the mediation of the process of production."