This is a pretty good summary of everything that is going haywire in the economy. I like to think it is a realistic view of things, but then no one ever accused me of being an optimist. I think the article does get it right when it assigns first blame.
Who’s to blame?
There is plenty to go around.
In the estimation of many economists, it starts with the Federal Reserve. The central bank lowered interest rates following the calamitous end of the technology bubble in 2000, lowered them more after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and then kept them low, even as speculators began to trade homes like dot-com stocks.
Meanwhile, the Fed sat back and watched as Wall Street’s financial wizards engineered diabolically complicated investments linked to mortgages, generating huge amounts of speculative capital that turned real estate into a conflagration.
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