Bill Clinton says Energy Policy could have avoided the Financial Meltdown
Posted: (September 25, 2008 02:02 pm)

Laws and effect

Bill Clinton says smart energy policy could have avoided the financial meltdown


Clinton's basic argument was that the [financial] crisis was one of an overleveraged Wall Street system which emphasized the volume of transactions, and in which people were rewarded for chasing risky deals, and in which there were too few good investment opportunities. Money ended up being funneled into real estate that shouldn't have been. Clinton furthermore argued that if there had been a real clean energy policy, it would have created alternative investment opportunities in dealing with climate change -- because there wasn't such a policy, the money was "misspent." This last bit of the argument doesn't seem entirely plausible to me -- would there really have been enough investment opportunities generated by clean energy to suck up the loose cash sloshing around? -- but I'll leave it to those with more specific expertise to evaluate properly.

If there had been more clean energy investment opportunities, investment capital would have gone that direction instead of into dodgy housing, housing mortgages, mortgage-backed securities, mortgage-backed-security derivatives, derivative double-mortgage security flux capacitors, etc.