Originally Posted by late

Actually, reactionary spew describes O'Rourke pretty well. The guy is funny, but not someone I'd take seriously.

I find your opinion odd, and counterfactual. Greenspan recently admitted he made a mistake. We h ave a couple examples in the last century of American economic collapse
that could have been largely prevented by using existing regulation. In both cases, regulators were restrained by politicians who were listening to guys in finance.

Your base assumption is incorrect, and ahistorical. Markets don't create magic. They do create bubbles and panics; part of a number of interesting ways you can crunch a healthy economy. A good place to start is Braudel's wonderful Wheels of Commerce.

If you look through some of Krugman's old editorials, you can find some good descriptions of how and why we got into this mess.
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinio...man/index.html

There is a gal who was the first person to realise there was a scam, and trouble in the financial markets.
She is currently on tour pushing a book about it. I just love her common sense and
blunt descriptions. I'll try and remember her name.

Originally Posted by pedex

and this is just unemployment, the rest of the charts are similar including GDP decline which globally btw is tracking the 1930's almost exactly