The Democrats believe the roots of the crash were laid by the private sector’s derivatives trading and housing bubble that was facilitated by deregulation and lax enforcement of the remaining regulations.

The Republicans believe the crash was caused by the US Government encouraging home ownership and the expansion of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.  (Of course you have to get time to run backward to support this theory.)

However, there may be another theory that I bet you never considered.

In found the article US Military Spending and the National Debt: Roots of the 2008 “Crash” of the Global Capitalist Financial System by Hassan Ali El-Najjar, Ph.D. “…presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in Atlanta, on August 15, 2010, in the regular session of the Political Economy of the World System.” Below is a taste of the presentation to whet you appetite.

Abstract

In this paper, I investigate the roots of the 2008 perceived “crash” of the global capitalist financial system, in its center, the United States.

I argue that the so-called “crash” was nothing more than a necessary measure to end the financially chaotic period of the Bush administration (2001-2008). The chaos was caused by the cash-saturated financial markets as a result of about $4.3 trillion dollars issued by Congress to finance the so-called “War on Terror.”

I don’t want to color your perception of this paper, so I will make no further comment.