The Crash of 2007-08, as it seemed at the time
It began, as great events so often do, as a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand. Yet within eighteen months the capitalist world was close to panic, with share prices slammed, credit markets gridlocked, bailouts of some of the world’s largest banks, and failure of many others, industrial production falling as fast as in the Great Depression of the 1930s and unemployment and underemployment rising sharply. Vast and generally wasteful schemes of fiscal expansion were underway, interest rates were close to zero in many nations and widespread ‘quantitative easing’ (‘printing money’ in oldspeak) was underway.
