What do you believe is the cause(or causes) of the current economic crisis?

• I've been arguing about this with a few friends (I won't name the sides) and I wanted to know what you guys thought

• Answer:

  I think there's several causes for the current economic crisis. First of all, there's the war in Iraq, which not only has the government spending lots of money on things that go boom and then are gone, but it also interferes with the production and distribution of oil-based fuel. Second, there's the energy crisis. The war is a small part of the energy crisis -- but may have been the straw that broke the camel's back. We are running out of oil, and it's getting harder and harder to extract what we've got, and to find more. It takes fuel-based energy to do almost anything in this world today, and that is what has supported cheap factories, cheap transportation, and cheap products that free our money up to buy more things like cell phones or computers. I really think the energy crisis is the biggest, but not the only, cause. Crop failures probably have something to do with the current economic crisis. That, and the fact that a lot of grain has been diverted from the food chain (feeding people and feeding animals that feed people) to the fuel chain (feeding cars via ethanol). This has helped make the price of food rise . . . I don't know what it's like in your country, but in Japan, flour has gone up by about half over what it was two years ago. Butter is about twice as expensive as it was two years go. Almost all food products are more expensive. Then, we can top it off with the housing crisis, the individual credit crisis, the big-business crisis, and the stock market crisis. We really must learn to invest in sound investments, and not in fairy dust. This is both on a personal, and on a governmental basis.