but do you really think that this microeconomic perspective will help understand the current financial crisis?
it does not only consist in the effects of deregulation of banking, abandonment of oversight on mortgage loans, "risk management" etc.--it also has other dimensions--the crash of the dollar, for example---the spiking of energy prices/inflation--these seem of a different order/of different orders. then there's the impotence of the fed/nation-state level systems to manage this--it's almost like the united states is starting to experience the consequences of transnationalization in ways that it had previously been sheltered from, mostly because the us was the dominant player in the institutions that externalized many of these consequences via structural adjustment, etc..
i keep thinking that this is the limit of what in the states is called monetarism, but which everywhere else is neoliberalism, and that these are structural problems converging and not simply the result of a version of the "few bad apples" argument--you know, greed in banking, irresponsibility in borrowers--simply because the effect of these arguments is to abstract problems from the system level--you know, if it weren't for these "bad apples" things would be hunky dory--and i dont think that's true in this case.
maybe the problem is the entire ideology--and everything it has enabled--that you see in this statement from alan greenspan:
Quote:
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"I do not recall a decade free of surges in angst about the mounting debt of households and businesses," he wrote. "Such fears ignore a fundamental fact of modern life: in a market economy, rising debt goes hand in hand with progress."
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bit from this article in the washington post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...l?hpid=topnews