The obligatory "best explanation of the financial crisis" post

Everyone around the blogosphere has got their favorite “best explanation of the financial crisis” so we might as well chime in with ours. The good folks at reason.tv break it all down here.

And lest we forget, when all is said and done, at the end of the day, we are at this point because, quite simply, we couldn’t pay our bills. Warning: prudery and potential “family values” admonitions found here.

Barney Frankophiles rage against this idea as “blaming the victim.” I ask “victim of what?” The economy?

I’m sorry, but folks who lost their homes during the Depression were victims of the economy. Twenty percent unemployment made it impossible for folks to pay the mortgage.

We are experiencing the opposite: Unemployment has barely hit 6 percent, and yet so many borrowers are walking away from their loans that they might take down the entire economy.

You can blame mortgage brokers willing to make loans to any warm body, but every transaction ended with that warm body - presumably a voting-age adult - signing their good name on a pledge to repay the loan.

Quick aside: Some of the opposition to the House bailout bill was because it did not do enough to provide relief/protection to the homeowners. Wait a minute. Its coming to us. The fog is lifting… Wasn’t Barney the brothel operator able to push through a $300 billion dollar bailout of individual homeowners back in June? Good lord, we had completely forgot. Well, shoot-howdy, when you’re throwin’ around hundred of billions of dollars like Congress has the past few months, one can understand how some bailouts just get lost in the noise.