It was more like dominos falling than a feedback loop. It was poor / fraudulent mortgage underwriting standards which caused a housing bubble and subsequent col

It was more like dominos falling than a feedback loop. It was poor / fraudulent mortgage underwriting standards which caused a housing bubble and subsequent collapse of house prices and increase in mortgage defaults. The CDO market provided a large part of the funding for those mortgages and suffered as a result. The panic over the CDO market's collapse caused a widespread credit crisis for anyone suspected of having exposures to CDOs, and then the US government decided to allow a major bank to fail due to credit crisis (Lehman Brothers). This was a terrible mistake that nearly caused the cascading failure of the entire financial sector and forced the US government to execute a huge bailout operation. The blame lies with the US government, for first failing to properly regulate the market, and then allowing Lehman Brothers to fail without understanding the consequences. The consequences of the 2008 financial crisis reverberated for over a decade, and then COVID-19 pandemic arose and the government decided that it wasn't going to make the "same mistake" again and started bailing out everyone. However, they overshot, misallocated funds, caused runaway inflation, then failed to recognize the persistent inflation and acted too late to curb it. That brings us to today, where there is ongoing speculation about whether this will be a "soft landing" or a "hard landing." If history is any guide, then I think that this kind of market situation this means we can expect another spectacular crash in the near future. The consequences of the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent rescue operation were still unresolved when the pandemic began, because the Fed had not figured out how to unwind its bloated balance sheet from all those years of Quantitative Easing. Just when the Fed thought it would start unwinding, the pandemic hit, and the Fed balance sheet grew astronomically. Now, for the first time in decades, the Fed is facing the runaway inflation that "common sense" would have predicted, and they have no choice but to initiate a "rug pull" on the economy in order to bring inflation under control. This will only end when the US consumer is bruised badly enough to reduce consumption, which will put the economy into a tailspin which will cause massive wealth destruction for investors. It's hard to see how the Fed can keep kicking this can down the road. Somewhere along the way there will be a black swan event. Perhaps Russia will choose to escalate cyber, kinetic and/or economic warfare against NATO at the very moment that a US market crash is occurring. I sincerely hope that I'm wrong, but my Spidey Sense is tingling like it's 2001 or 2008.