Friday, April 03, 2020

Crises

The 2008 was, in the beginning, a financial crisis. That's a polite way of referring to the fact that it was a crisis caused by every institution of our financial system levering up bets 1000x by borrowing from each other and then all somehow simultaneously taking the exact same side in a bet. Even I'm not entirely clear on how that can happen, but basically that happened. One way or another the banks did need to be bailed out, though that didn't mean that their shareholders and executives needed to be bailed out, or that after they were bailed out there was no need to bail out people who were losing their homes, but, ah, well, nevertheless. Bail out the banks, let several million people lose their homes, give a few bucks to everyone, and wait 7 years for the recovery. Good job, everybody!

But it didn't break the country. This is going to break the country.