Interesting discussion, but we all know that this crisis didn't start in 2008. The Kondratief winter started in 2000. The internet/technology bubble crashed that year. Fine, so far.

It could have been a normal economic crisis. But Greenspan thought he could survive the winter by creating the biggest bubble of all times, the housing bubble. This was when the additional unlimited leverage came into the system, at a moment that the Western economy was supposed to go through a natural deleveraging cum capacity destruction period to be able to start from scratch by the end of the decade. Greenspan didn't like the idea of ending with a crisis. He sought to trump natural economic law. Bernanke inherited a situation which was already too big to fail, because the housing bubble had leveraged the system to nuclear proportions.

Politicians will always twist reality and that's why nobody takes action.