A Different Angle On The Economy

With the stock market roller-coastering daily, Paulson and Bernanke giving hourly updates on the state of the economy, Suze Orman traveling to every single show on television to try to soothe the panic out of everyday people, the causes and consequences of the bailout keep getting more and more confusing. We can and should blame Wall Street greed. We can can should blame the Republican worship of free market. But we also should be able to look at the the problem from a slightly different angle.

Over at the New Republic, Alvaro Vargas Llosa discusses how it all happened, for him, in "Myth Busters." He writes that University of Texas professor Stan Liebowitz "chronicles the long march toward what we could call the Mortgage State, starting with the creation of the Federal Housing Administration in 1934 and all the way to the norms that made Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae acquire substantial loans given to people with weak credit."

Again, it's difficult to undestersand exactly what's going on right now, but this gives us one more tool to aid our comprehension.