Q&A: Do you agree this is what caused the economic crisis?

Question by what?: Do you agree this is what caused the economic crisis?
I found this on fact check

The Federal Reserve, which slashed interest rates after the dot-com bubble burst, making credit cheap.

Home buyers, who took advantage of easy credit to bid up the prices of homes excessively.

Congress, which continues to support a mortgage tax deduction that gives consumers a tax incentive to buy more expensive houses.

Real estate agents, most of whom work for the sellers rather than the buyers and who earned higher commissions from selling more expensive homes.

The Clinton administration, which pushed for less stringent credit and downpayment requirements for working- and middle-class families.

Mortgage brokers, who offered less-credit-worthy home buyers subprime, adjustable rate loans with low initial payments, but exploding interest rates.

Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who in 2004, near the peak of the housing bubble, encouraged Americans to take out adjustable rate mortgages.

Wall Street firms, who paid too little attention to the quality of the risky loans that they bundled into Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS), and issued bonds using those securities as collateral.

The Bush administration, which failed to provide needed government oversight of the increasingly dicey mortgage-backed securities market.

An obscure accounting rule called mark-to-market, which can have the paradoxical result of making assets be worth less on paper than they are in reality during times of panic.

Collective delusion, or a belief on the part of all parties that home prices would keep rising forever, no matter how high or how fast they had already gone up.

http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/who_caused_the_economic_crisis.html

Best answer:

Answer by new mom
uh, yep that about sums it up

Give your answer to this question below!

Do you agree that the profession of “Economist” and all related professions have been thoroughly discredited?

Question by billke: Do you agree that the profession of “Economist” and all related professions have been thoroughly discredited?
No one predicted and prevented this financial crisis. If anything, the prevailing view of Economists was to add fuel to the flames due to their insistance on globalization, securitization, and idiotic interest rate policies.

But the main point is… why the fck didn’t anyone predict this before it happened. WHy are all these economists with PhD’s running bloviating their theories, yet did absolutely nothing to predict or prevent this. They are all bull-shyt artists.

Best answer:

Answer by SDD
On the contrary. Many, many economists* and other observers predicted this sort of thing based on the way Congress encouraged Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy government subsidized high risk loans. The Senate even considered a bill in 2005 to block more of this sort of lending, but Democrats blocked it.

* To name one — Bob Schiller of Yale. You’ll recall that he was also the one that warned about the “irrational exuberance” of the stock market in the late 90s. Few responded then either.

What do you think? Answer below!