Re: OT: Geek/Tech/Entrepreneur Stuff to do in PHX

>         I would examine the "free market" again. We are /not/ in a
>         free market,
>         and haven't even been close to one for a while. We never
>         deregulated
>         anything, indeed, the pages of regulation haven't decreased
>         since Regan.
>         Greenspan turned out to be one of the biggest
>         interventionists, only
>         outdone by Bernanke. You can't blame the mess on bankers, if
>         they didn't
>         make those decisions someone else would have, and the outcome
>         wouldn't
>         have been any different (in other words, it is a symptom, not
>         a cause).
>         The problem stems from many central banks including our own
>         Federal
>         reserve cutting interest rates from 2001-2004 by (essentially)
>         "printing" money. Since the housing market was one of the most
>         regulated
>         (that is to say, there were government-enforced lending
>         standards and
>         intervention my Fannie and Freddie), so people spent that new
>         money on
>         houses before anything else (Oil too, because energy is
>         closely tied to
>         the market), drove prices up, created a misallocation of
>         capital
>         disproportionate with consumer demand, and we crashed when not
>         enough
>         people could humanly gather the money to buy a new house at
>         the price
>         they were at.