There would still be bubbles without the douchebags, but the douchebags made the human costs of this economic cycle far greater. It's douchebags, after all, who have created the collection of trends known as "middle-class squeeze".
The Clinton regime had an expansion and a recession. So did the Bush regime. Neither leader nor political environment was able to alter the underlying business cycle. But, under Clinton, we had an unprecedentedly prosperous expansion and a mild recession; under Bush we had a shitty expansion ("jobless recovery" into 2004) and a devastating recession. Douchebags, enabled by the lax regulatory climate, had much to do with this change. Although there are certainly plenty of douchebags on both sides of the political aisle, the fact is that a Republican political and economic culture is more douchebag-friendly. Douche Czar Erik Prince, for example, thrived in the Bush administration.
Douchebags aren't responsible for the fact that a bubble occurred, but they influenced the character of it greatly, and magnified the human cost immensely. Most notably, there is the fact that this bubble was in real estate, a type of investment that appeals greatly to the status-driven douchebag mind. (If you don't consider house flippers and real estate speculators to be vintage douchebags, you're seriously out of touch.) A bubble in real estate has a monstrous human cost, whereas one in gold is relatively irrelevant to most people.
The Clinton regime had an expansion and a recession. So did the Bush regime. Neither leader nor political environment was able to alter the underlying business cycle. But, under Clinton, we had an unprecedentedly prosperous expansion and a mild recession; under Bush we had a shitty expansion ("jobless recovery" into 2004) and a devastating recession. Douchebags, enabled by the lax regulatory climate, had much to do with this change. Although there are certainly plenty of douchebags on both sides of the political aisle, the fact is that a Republican political and economic culture is more douchebag-friendly. Douche Czar Erik Prince, for example, thrived in the Bush administration.
Douchebags aren't responsible for the fact that a bubble occurred, but they influenced the character of it greatly, and magnified the human cost immensely. Most notably, there is the fact that this bubble was in real estate, a type of investment that appeals greatly to the status-driven douchebag mind. (If you don't consider house flippers and real estate speculators to be vintage douchebags, you're seriously out of touch.) A bubble in real estate has a monstrous human cost, whereas one in gold is relatively irrelevant to most people.