When Wall Street rules: The real culprits of the global financial crisis

Wall Street's unmoderated greed and policymakers' shortsightedness encouraged banks to take risks they did not understand and created the network effects that led to contagion in 2008, writes TN Ninan

When did the western financial meltdown of 2008 happen? Most people date it to the collapse of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008. But Europeans mark the start of the crisis more than a year earlier, to August 2007, when BNP Paribas froze three of its investment funds — setting off ripples that led to the collapse a month later of Northern Rock, Britain’s fourth-biggest bank. If you listen further to Europeans, they uniformly blame Americans for the crisis. Italy’s finance minister at the time argued that his system was stable because “it did not speak English”.
 
More seriously,