this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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Unrelated to the overall point you're trying to make, but shorts didn't cause the '08 recession. They just profited from it. The cause was banks treating mortgage backed securities as if they were an unsinkable asset class.
Relating things back to your point though, I'm not convinced that blockchains solve this. Take the crypto crash of spring/summer '22: You have a few products (TerraUSD/Luna, CEL token) "generating" yield that everyone (DEFI, CEFI, retail, institutions) piles on top of. Then that base layer of "value" turns out to be a naked emperor and there's a massive crash when everything based on that system is now backed by nothing. Rigid computerized rules are only as solid as the axioms that underpin them. You can decentralize the interpretation of rules, but somebody can always start with a flawed assumption and then it doesn't matter how reliable your decentralized system is.
As long as any asset can be rehypothecated into another, shinier asset, there's always a risk that the underlying asset is shit. It's no less true in crypto as in conventional banking.
He did not claim that shorting caused the 08 crash, or am i missing something?
According to "the big short", the reason was that banks gave loans to people who could not really afford them in case of an unexpected drop in the housingmarket (mortage backed, as you say), bundled the loans into packages, went to rating agencies who gave best ratings for the packages, sold them to other institutions and then shorted them when they noticed that the market unexpectedly dropped, knowing people would not be able to pay back the loans in the packages. Which was completely reasonable, just somewhat unethical.
So, i think you could say it was an error of the rating agencies, as they underestimated the risk of a drop in the housing market when giving out the rating.
The way I read this, it suggests that banks shorting the housing market with my deposits caused a global recession.
You're right about the ratings agencies (as far as I know, also from The Big Short), I was skipping over that for brevity.
At the very least it compounded it. But didn't the banks that short it know the crash was going to happen? Why would an institution that large bet again the housing market, when the stigma was