Originally Posted by Yandros

Yes yes, buy a Porsche, crash it, then claim it was a Ferrari and blame it on the engineering.

The global credit meltdown is a result of massive credit expansion in protected banking and insurance markets. The system in no way resembles a free market, and this is easily demonstrated: Attempt to start a bank, insurance company, or lending agency and see what you come up against. Laws, laws, and more laws. You need a billion dollars and a team of high class lawyers to start a bank or an insurance company which can compete in the actual marketplace. Half of that is for bribes alone.

State socialism caused this mess, and your implicit answer 'more socialism' will just exacerbate it. If *real* competition were allowed in the banking and insurance markets and indeed in the currency market -- the market for designing and printing money -- then this all would have been averted.

But no. If I print my own money (say Yandros Dollar Bills or Yandros Gold Coins), start a bank, or start insuring people, I go to prison for counter-fitting or loansharking. That coupled with artificially low interest rates and a decoupling from the gold standard has lead to massive credit expansion and huge inflation and huge mal-investment, which has now turned red on the books as the asset markets begin to slump. And instead of letting the individual companies fail, your lovely socialist dictatorship you call 'democracy' has decided to nationalize all the debt -- effectively stealing (more of) your money (from your bank account) to pay for someone else's bad debt.

How do you like them apples?