Political Bloviation

My god this is depressing:

Daily Kos: Things Become More Serious
I won’t bore you with the bloody details; others, such as bonddad, have already sliced open the corpse and described the basic anatomy of the crisis, which is depressingly identical to the aftermath of every other speculative bubble since Adam and Eve tried playing the apple futures market.

Bells and whistles aside (such as the fungal growth of a $10 trillion global over-the-counter credit derivatives market, or Wall Street’s blind faith in its own ability to transubstantiate subprime mortgages into AAA-rated, investment-grade paper) the only thing remarkable about this one is the scale of the recklessness.

Some mistakes look even dumber in hindsight than they did at the time: Like the creation of a parallel depository banking system (a.k.a. the money market mutual fund industry) without any sort of insurance fund (either public or private) and only cursory regulation — which is roughly like building a 150-story skyscraper with one fire alarm and no sprinklers.

Investors drove both stocks and US treasury notes down in trading. This sets the scene for a 1970s’ like stagflation.

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