This guy never ceases to crack me up.

Zawahiri blames global financial crisis on 9/11 in latest al-Qaeda video

Al-Qaeda's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has said in a new internet video that the international financial crisis is the result of a US war on Muslims and the Sept 11 attacks.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/f...eda-video.html

Well, a huge deficit funded spending spree on destructive consumption rather than creative/productive investment probably was a contributing factor. Not the only one though, the bloke does have delusions of grandeur.

Please show your math and how this lead to a break down of the lending system, the mortgage crisis, and a real estate bubble. Where is the connection? Other than the bottom line deficit the two were not related IMHO.

What is this "math" you speak of? ;)

As I said, a contributing factor. I'm not saying it caused everything.

Other than our deficit, which is astronomicallyjupiterproprotionally out of this universe, I don't see who it contributed.

Deficit spending for the WOT inflated the number of dollars in the system. That created a push to find clever ways to invest those dollars because conservative investments probably wouldn't keep up with inflation. Easy money is the fundamental problem at the heart of this whole mess, which apparently now is to be solved with easier money. :eyeroll:

I don't agree. Deficit spending for the WOT went to a very narrow number of industries. It was not the source for America's new found wealth. Easy money came from the lenders, not from governmental deficit spending on The WOT. Easy money came from lending practices and a desire to get money out there at any cost. More people became eligible to buy, many whom should not have, and lent money flooded the market. Many more buyer drove up the prices and greed and competition met on the real estate market place. The hyper-over inflated home values plus the new lent money created the bubble. None of this has anything to do with money from the The WOT. As we know the majority of those billions was poured into the Middle East where it went down a black hole.

The money didn't magically disappear after it was spent. By WOT, I mean the original definition where supposedly the Iraq war was part of it.

But it didn't pour into the market place either, infusing the economy with new found wealth. A narrow number of people and industry got rich, the rest disappeared into the pockets of the Middle East.

I'd be interested in seeing a money trail on that, if it were even possible. [shrug] I also left out the easy money policies of Al Greenspan, which were supposed to save asia.

Me too. There were many trails where where there was no path. People who had duffle bags of taxpayer money, in cash, to pay the way to an end at the wim of the sargent in charge. Hundreds of thousands of dollars used to grease the palms to get things done. It is gone forever.

The real money was in men and material not goofy black ops.

I agree with Griff. True, there was a large amount of cash used in Afghanistan, but much, much more went to US industries, Lockheed Martin, Halliburton etc. And those lucky few who got rich then spent some of it on consumer goods and services within the US.
But, as a wishy-washy wimp, I also acknowledge a lot of truth in Merc's point: there were a lot of factors that had little or nothing to do with the WOT.

No end in sight.

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php...show_article=1

Editorial
Bailing Away

The federal government is going for broke in an attempt to avert the type of calamitous financial collapse that led to the Great Depression. No one would fault the objective, but throwing money at the problem is becoming an end in itself.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/opinion/30sun1.html