re: #385 subsailor68

That’s about the size of it. The financial institutions were overly leveraged, but the jolt that brought down the house of cards was the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market. Maybe something else might have done that, but I’m not sure anything else was as big a risk.

Interesting point Ferguson makes: Chimarica will live on. The tight relationship between US & Chinese financial institutions, based upon the mutual necessity of US & China for each other, means that the Chinese will continue to buy up US treasury bonds, if not as much as before. This explains the rather warm & gentle words Hillary murmured in Beijing two weeks ago. It’s in nobody’s interest to break up the marriage.