For all the talk of greed, fraud and excesses in the analysis of what went wrong and how it caused global capitalism to suffer one of its worst crises in almost a century, one would have expected at least as much talk about the fundamental causes of the crisis. Those causes are rooted in US economic policymaking dating back to 2001. The burst of the housing market bubble in the US, which took the prices of other assets like stocks and corporate bonds with it, should not be looked at independently of the dotcom bubble burst in 2001. Indeed, the seeds of the housing market bubble were planted in reaction to the dotcom bubble burst, which ushered in one of the strongest policy easing responses the US market has ever witnessed, an expansionary monetary policy, very low interest rates and an easing of constraints on credit growth. The reasons behind
