> You can certainly go on about all the folks who didn't stand up and say 'Stop!' - but really, we've got a bunch of those brewing in tech, and no one listens to anyone saying stop there either. There are a million apocalypses predicted every day - and it's rare if any of them ever ACTUALLY happen.
They built models on the basis that house prices do not go down, counter to lessons I learned in a 9th grade economics class about boom and bust cycles. They lobbied to remove regulations designed to reduce risk and over leveraging, and the risk increased and they became over leveraged. They continued to repackage bad loans from predatory lenders as AAA investments well after they understood the consequences. That's why the major firms offloaded those financial instruments to anyone they could find, even if it meant wiping out the life savings of millions of people by saddling pension funds with negative equity. It was not an apocalypse. It was history repeating itself.
> In retrospect, you can find those doing it in Finance back then, but they couldn't stop this mess anymore than anyone else - and plenty of people easily papered over the possibility of the crash, the same as we paper over a million other issues in tech.
It looks like we agree that they are incapable of regulating themselves. If they aren't competent enough to understand the regulations they dismantled, or to take boom and bust cycles into account for financial planning, what is their purpose? If they can't mitigate risk or provide liquidity in a crisis, what function do they serve in the economy?
> So you can blame 'finance', same as someone could blame 'tech' for the election. But it doesn't really mean anything and it won't change anything, because it doesn't provide any useful information or potential corrective action.
Nations like Canada did not remove the regulations, and did not have a similar liquidity crisis, although they did suffer economically because the US financial system crash was so severe. There was a wealth of information on the effectiveness of regulation and firewalls between banking institutions, and many economists predicted another financial crisis before Glass-Steagall was effectively repealed after decades of lobbying from the financial industry. Canada was able to apply this useful information and take corrective action which kept them out of the crisis.
Similarly, there was plenty of literature on why placing social media outside the regulatory environment for all other media was dangerous well before the election and QAnon. The tech industry could do something similar, but you and I both know they are lobbying to keep regulations out. They are purposefully avoiding corrective action, despite the severity of the consequences, because it means they may make less money and have more competition. They want all the profit from their monopolies, but they don't want to spend any money to moderate it or comply with regulations. It's nothing but greed and hubris, and it is just as contemptible as the same motivations in the financial industry.
The solution is not mysterious or unknown, it's effective regulation. Your hypothesis is that no one in the tech or financial industries are capable of understanding the effect of their actions, or accepting accountability for them. I believe they do understand the effects of billions of dollars in lobbying activity, and know that if their scheme fails, they can avoid accountability, keep their profits, and still get bailed out. In either case, the "potential corrective action" is the same: effective regulation.
