by Patrick Trombly
Mises.org
Senator Elizabeth Warren is perhaps best known for advancing the narrative that the 2000s housing bubble, collapse, and Great Recession, from which much of the US and the world have yet to fully recover, were the result of “unfettered Wall Street bankers tanking the economy” by “tricking borrowers” into bigger homes and debts than they could afford. This, she asserts, was helped along by the banks’ dramatically increasing lending to “subprime” borrowers, thereby fueling a real estate bubble and then ushering in a “subprime foreclosure crisis” that “spread to” the rest of the economy.
Based on this thesis, she has proposed numerous new regulations, some of which happen to address other legitimate concerns, but none of which address the root cause of the housing and foreclosure crises in the US and around the world. Nor does she address the massive leveraging-up of most developed countries’ household sectors, whose debts continue to weigh upon the world economy.