This weeks little atoms has once more a really interesting discussion, this time on John Lanchester’s book Whoops!: Why everyone owes everyone and no one can pay.
As a fisch of little brains, I would like to add one little comment. A lot of people suggest, that separating the commercial banks from the investment banks might have avoided the crisis. I just can’t see how this would have taken place. In “The big short” the bad debt is send to “Düsseldorf” and by now we know who “Düsseldorf” is. Mainly state owned “Landesbanken” and pension funds with a lot of politicians in the boards. They were clearly separated from the commercial banks, but not from the government. So maybe we might better talk about separating investment banks from government 😉
And then we will see who’s too big to fail…
brainfisch 