Essay: Revisiting the Financial Collapse of 2008: Lessons about Causal Factors and the Path to Serious Economic Stress

Abstract

This article disputes the view of financial markets expressed by Alan Greenspan and others in arguing that the economic crisis of 2008 was not caused by an “unquenchable capability” of human beings to seek excessive wealth but instead by a failure of the United States regulatory system to appropriately mitigate speculative investments including those made by Wall Street investment bankers and financial lending institutions. Greenspan may be correct in his assessment of the predictably selfish nature of investors and lending institutions. However, to blame the near collapse of the U. S. and global financial system on “human nature” is grossly oversimplifying a complex string of events in a way that shifts blame away from those who were responsible for the collapse - including Greenspan. In contrast to Greenspan’s claim I argue that overly aggressive lending policies and regulatory failures were the product of theory that assumes markets function efficiently and individual actors within an economy act rationally. What I characterize as failed theory resulted in over-reliance on a vast set of risky investment tools and practices that treated the marketplace as an entity that would function best without significant regulation or oversight.