There is no mystery about who was responsible for the economic slump we are in, although the list is long. Clever fools at the banks, as vain as they were greedy, who messed around with the financial system like Victor Frankenstein messing around with body parts. Credulous or corrupted politicians, who believed the puffery of these financial mad scientists or hoped to get jobs from them later, and allowed increasingly brazen forms of embezzlement to be legalised in the form of bonuses and outrageous overvaluation of phoney assets. Marketing geniuses who persuaded us that we were always just one purchase short of happiness, and that it was perfectly normal to spend money we didn't have to make it. Us, because we believed them. The governments of developing countries, who instead of investing the cash we had given them for their goods (China) or their resources (Russia, Nigeria, the Gulf) at home, lent it back to us and our rulers so that we could live our splurgey, bingey lives and simultaneously fight unnecessary wars.
From the Business section of today's Guardian......
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