There is a wide spread belief that asset bubbles, like housing bubbles, are the result of the free market. Socialists claim that excessive risk taking on behalf of the banks, together with a lack of regulation, or even a wave of deregulation, caused the crisis of 2008.
However this is simply socialist propaganda and it does not even have the slightest element of truth. Asset bubbles arise when the peoples’ savings are misallocated, and the reason they are misallocated is always government intervention. This essay follows the tradition of the great Austrian economists, and demonstrates in a not technical way, how government intervention leads to savings misallocation, which in turn leads to asset bubbles.
And depressions are simply the aftermath of the bubbles’ collapse. The basics of the crises’ mechanics are always the same. There are no major differences between 2008 and 1929 as this document clearly shows. This is a very simple document that does not require any prior economic knowledge on behalf of the reader. A genuine interest on the subject will suffice.
