HN Academy

https://www.coursera.org/learn/global-financial-crisis

This is a great course about the financial crisis of 2008.

They walk through the similarities between the Irish bailout and the American bailout of their banks and then they walk through the differences and point out why the Irish bailout turned out soo poorly and why the American bailout was a great success.

The course is very approachable for even a novice in monetary theory.

⬐ boomboomsubban

I haven't taken the course, but one of the instructors personally benefits from more people thinking the American bailout was a great success. Their free course for people without any prior knowledge is unlikely to be a trustworthy source.

⬐ chollida1

> I haven't taken the course, but one of the instructors personally benefits from more people thinking the American bailout was a great success. Their free course for people without any prior knowledge is unlikely to be a trustworthy source.

Alternatively you could argue that no one knows the material better given that they were there at ground zero and the ones who actually made the decisions.

I mean, I see where you are coming from but I hope I never become as jaded as your comment comes across as being:)

⬐ boomboomsubban

>Alternatively you could argue that no one knows the material better given that they were there at ground zero and the ones who actually made the decisions.

This isn't an alternative. This can be true, and they still have no reason to present an unbiased view in this course.

You should definitely be jaded enough to question the truth of someone spending billions in public money.

⬐ MrTonyD

Geithner advocated saving the big banks, and undermined any effort to help average people who couldn't pay their mortgages. That's why the "mortage relief" program was designed to not work. He represents the 1% who believe that wall-street is our real economy - and everyone else should just keep paying to support them in their endless quest for more money. I'd rather take a course from any of the economists who accurately described and predicted the problems - but they weren't the ones appointed to positions of power by either the Democrats or Republicans.

I'm currently taking the Coursera course "The Global Financial Crisis" [1] (from Yale) and quite enjoying it. Their answer to what caused the crisis is bubble thinking from all involved, not moral hazard on sub-prime loans or government failure. They back their finding up various studies, which seem convincing to me (but I'm a beginner, so don't take my word for it).

[1] https://www.coursera.org/learn/global-financial-crisis

⬐ tinco

The bubble thinking is not mutually exclusive with subprime loans and government failure. Bubble thinking makes banks take risks that they are blind to. I'm not super familiar with how debt is regulated in the US, but in The Netherlands the mortgage industry has been much more tightly regulated since 2008. If it is the governments task to regulate debt, then a mass default of course implies that they failed to do that properly.

If it was harder for banks to supply subprime loans, then that would have tempered the fire feeding the bubble, and the crisis could have been smaller.

Of course, you could also take a more liberal viewpoint and not blame it on under-regulation of the government, but instead on mistakes of the big banks. I'm not that liberal though, so perhaps someone else can explain how liberals think debt crises should be averted. If I'd have to guess the simple answer would be that they would say the banks should've fallen so that the healthy banks would be the only ones left standing, so the whole event could be a proper free market process (so they also would say the government failed by bailing out some of the banks).

⬐ henrik_w

The evidence they present points to bubble thinking, not the other two reasons. The material in question is here: https://www.coursera.org/learn/global-financial-crisis/home/...