johnhemming2 wrote:
The financial crisis was kicked off by the peak in conventional oil production causing an energy price spike.
What
ACTUAL EVIDENCE do you have that backs up this highly questionable statement?
Having worked in Investment banking up to 2005 there I find this statement to be lacking in any credibility. It seems to me that you are using the Peak Oil card as an excuse to blind yourself from the reality of what was actually going on in the banking sector.
What was far more relevant to the banking crisis was the fact that Risk management went entirely out of the window. Remember the liar loans? Any old numpty could get a mortgage with absolutely
ZERO checks being made on the suitability of said person to ever repay it back. There were 0% interest rate mortgages, 125% of property value mortgages, along with PPI that didn't actually insure you when you read the small print carefully.
Why were bank staff so keen to flog this worthless crap on the general public?
Because bank staffs' wages, in real terms were being restrained; there were, however, targets to sell such crap resulted in them achieving bonuses on a regular basis.
johnhemming2 wrote:
Secondly, over valued properly more generally and over borrowed mortgages which chewed into back capital buffers.
Which is precisely what happened to the likes of Northern Rock. Except that they didn't have adequate/any capital buffers that could save them. What has happened in the interim is that there is the Basel agreement and meaningless stress tests. The potential for another systemic banking failure is very real - the wholesale changes needed to reform the banking sector have not even been thought about.
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools - Douglas Adams.