There is some highly specious reasoning in that piece. First, the notion that the Afghan war bankrupted the USSR and led to their demise was a symptom of Bin Laden’s delusions, not a fact about the world. The war wasn’t unimportant, but the collapse of the USSR was much more complicated than that, and reflected the over-all trend of trying to outspend the US DOD with significantly less GDP.
The Federal Reserve, worried about a fear-induced recession, slashed interest rates after the attack on the World Trade Center, and then kept them low to combat skyrocketing oil prices, a byproduct of the war in Iraq. That decade of loose monetary policy may well have contributed to the credit bubble that crashed the economy in 2007 and 2008.
This is even more dubious. Certainly there is some relationship between reserve rates and mortgage markets but most of the excess money supply was “created” by the various financial arrangements that buried default risks, artificially lowering the price and returns on the secondary markets.
This piece reads more to me like a not-very-subtle dig at the author’s domestic political grievances.
There is some highly specious reasoning in that piece. First, the notion that the Afghan war bankrupted the USSR and led to their demise was a symptom of Bin Laden’s delusions, not a fact about the world. The war wasn’t unimportant, but the collapse of the USSR was much more complicated than that, and reflected the over-all trend of trying to outspend the US DOD with significantly less GDP.
This is even more dubious. Certainly there is some relationship between reserve rates and mortgage markets but most of the excess money supply was “created” by the various financial arrangements that buried default risks, artificially lowering the price and returns on the secondary markets.
This piece reads more to me like a not-very-subtle dig at the author’s domestic political grievances.