Why Smart People Kept Buying Toxic Assets

Bahnsen argues incompetence, misjudged hedges, and belief in models—not pure malice—drove Wall Street failures.

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Episode notes

I sat down with investor and economist David Bahnsen to unpack what really happened in the 2008 financial crisis. Socialists blame capitalism and Wall Street, while libertarians blame the government, especially the Federal Reserve, but David argues that all of the popular narratives are missing a key piece. He places a significant amount of the blame on what he calls the “Crisis of Responsibility,” also the title of his book on the subject.

Bankruptcy and foreclosure were once seen as shameful events, not standard parts of the American dream of homeownership. By the time of the financial crisis, signing up for a mortgage you obviously couldn’t afford had been normalized on all sides: lenders, investors, and even “average Americans” themselves.

We dig into how easy money, government backstops, and cultural decay fueled a nationwide housing bubble and, in the end, turned both the left and right against free markets and toward populism.

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Follow David Bahnsen on X (formerly Twitter): https://x.com/DavidBahnsen?s=20

Preorder a copy of “Crisis of Responsibility”: https://a.co/d/04GlVHsW

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Outline:

[0:00] The financial crisis broke the American economy

[10:12] What is “neoliberalism”?

[15:20] Was Ron Paul right about the financial crisis?

[20:21] The moral failing of the financial crisis

[29:07] Low interest rates and government-backed mortgages

[37:40] Wall Street really believed their own lies

[41:20] The crisis of responsibility and the cult of housing