I'm not sure. I'd say the banking crisis was catalyzed by the lack of regulation, but it was going to happen anyways. The whole thing was largely a result of political pressure to create incentives for a home ownership society, and, if you go deeper, a result of political pressure fostering a growth-at-all-costs economic system that will periodically hit societal resource and efficiency limits, regulations be damned.
Not really. The GFC was a financial/banking crisis
There is nothing in "growth at any cost" style "capitalism" that means banks must all collapse together in a coordinated swan dive, like in 2008.
That sort of system will collapse, but not necessarily the banks.
There is no law of nature that says we have to use free to fuck anybody capitalism run rampant over all. It is a choice.
The current brand of capitalism is not "free to fuck anybody", it's actually worse, it's "target the poor". Neoliberal economists specifically call for stealing from workers:
> even in the long run, it’s really, really hard to cut nominal wages. Yet when you have very low inflation, getting relative wages right would require that a significant number of workers take wage cuts. So having a somewhat higher inflation rate would lead to lower unemployment, not just temporarily, but on a sustained basis.
Shorter: we create an economic policy to cheat workers out of the take home value of their earnings to make management easier and post favorable employment metrics for political leaders.
That "growth at all costs" policy, which, by the way is not inherently a free market policy, exists to short shrift the labor class by means of a compounding treadmill that most will fall off.
The point is that relative wages need to be adjusted as the value of jobs changes over time. Some work that was very valuable in the past might have low demand now. If wages are sticky then jobs where value drops faster than inflation will simply go away. That's not necessarily the best outcome if the employee could have coped with a pay cut.
High inflation does not imply that real wages shrink on average.
>High inflation does not imply that real wages shrink on average.
Certainly not! Inflation is great for the privileged, because it forces the hoi polloi into investment schemes to protect their assets from inflation, which disproportionately help finance the business adventures of the privileged (e.g. stocks, bonds).
Thus the average real wage will get higher as a few select individuals get huge astronomical wages.
I wonder if this isn't the US trying to solve its inability to work with Labor using inadequate macro tools. In workplaces where workers have a voice in management, like my country's Volkswagen plant, pay cuts seem possible to implement.
I’ve seen several people in the industry claim that Basel encouraged many of the problems. I don’t know enough about banking to say whether that’s true or not.
