…and it’s nice to see you have confirmed you are a communist and do not believe in private property rights.
Would the collapse not have been equally attributable to those loans not being stress tested in the first place. Central Banks increase and decrease rates all the time for complex macroeconomic reasons. They aren’t obliged to keep rates low so that shysters can keep shoveling cash out to people who can’t pay it back. It’s a bizarre argument you are making here in a desperate attempt to implicate big government and make them the fall guy for capitalist failure.
That would make your ancestors and the majority of Irish tenant farmers in the 19th century communists, so.
As I said, we all know whose side you would have been on in that struggle - and during the famine.
The point is that central banks, who believe they are doing the right thing because their historical economic models tell them so, are driving the excess boom and bust cycles we are seeing. The business cycle is a normal aspect of a free market, and shallow recessions that eliminate waste are healthy in the long run. There was absolutely no reason to drop interest rates to 1% in response to the dot.com bubble bursting, it was one segment of the economy and would have (and did) recovered. Maintaining interest rates at 1%, which encouraged excess risk taking and speculation, led to the 2006 bubble and 2008 crash. Humans respond to incentive, when you give them free money they tend not to resist.
I’m not against government, or even relatively big government, I’m against bad government. Someone living in Ireland should surely understand that.
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Your responses are getting increasingly hysterical.
Don’t forget that in the US and Ireland that the Government also incentivesed borrowing and speculation in the property market. Certain segments like to focus on “regulation” and lack thereof. The property market is naturally one of the easiest markets for the State to intervene in.
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Excellent point.
In the US, a major drive was started by Democrats in the 1990s, to drive up home ownership. Several laws were passed and enforced which encouraged banks to lower their lending standards. The Community Reinvestment Act and Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, two government agencies, were the primary root causes of the 2007 housing collapse.
Home ownership is now lower than it was before the crash, so all for naught.
https://www.forbes.com/2008/07/18/fannie-freddie-regulation-oped-cx_yb_0718brook.html
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Have a read back over your own posts to see who’s getting hysterical.
Given that the “rights of private property” are the central tenet of your politics, of course you would have been on the side of the landlord class in 19th century Ireland - any modern reading of that struggle through the lens of your politics cannot come to any other conclusion but that the cause of the landlord class was the righteous one and that they should have been allowed do whatever they liked.
Similarly as regards the famine, it was a basic demonstration of market ideology. Those that could not afford to pay for food starved.
The British demonised the natives as being lazy, backward and feckless. That’s exactly what you do routinely.
You basically have the mindset of a 19th century British colonist, which, presuming that your ancestors lived in rural western Ireland during the 19th century, is terribly ironic.
Alan Partridge voiced similar sentiments in that episode where he said about those that died in the famine in Ireland : “if they could afford to emigrate then they could afford to eat in a modestly-priced restaurant”.
But Alan Partridge was a comedy character. You’re not - well, you sort of are, but, you know, not in that way.
I’m going go to stop you there, because, once again: wrong. Please don’t attempt to hijack discussion by trying to impose your own ludicrous definitions on everyone.
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There you have it, Tossy, labane and Timmy on one side of the debate. 
And Tim and Labane wonder why and cry when I don’t engage with them. Waa waa waa.
And yet here you are, still engaging with everyone on this thread. 
He keeps putting socialism in with Communism, and in a way like he thinks the rest of us don’t see.
That ir he is a bullshitter who does not know the difference.
Define socialism, communism, and capitalism then for us.
The three of them all have blood coming out their wherever. Sad!
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This is socialism
A multi millionaire and a wealthy layabout who has never done an honest days work in his life, lecturing a field full on people who had paid £230 a ticket on how capitalism has failed, I mean you couldn’t actually make it up at this stage 
cc @HBV
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You couldn’t make that up.
Think he just did
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You thought wrong.