This is such bullshit. When AIG and Lehman went down, the crisis had already hit. That's what was meant by "financial crisis". The government actions to abilou

This is such bullshit. When AIG and Lehman went down, the crisis had already hit. That's what was meant by "financial crisis". The government actions to abilout AIG only happened after. So you have your timelines backwards. And the NINJA mortgage issuers (like Goldman's Countrywide) weren't issuing dodgy mortgages because the government was taking on the risk, they were doing it because they could offload the risk to chumps like AIG and Lehman. Pure systemic free-market failure. Basically the banks were trusted to regulate themselves, and the risk controls all over New York, Frankfurt and London were pants. If we still had the heavy regulations of the 1970s, none of it would have happened.