A Global Recession? Who could have possibly foreseen?

A pair of British experts have counted up the top 20 signs and portents for how recession happened. Would the world's top 20 list look the same? You betcha!

1. China. Did the post-Reaganomic scheme to bust American unions by letting the Chinese manufacture goods cheaper than the U.S. ever could (meanwhile ensuring that American minimum-wage workers could continue to buy their Walmart trinkets) implode?


2. The liquidity bubble. All that 401(k) money found a home on Wall Street. But where did it go?


3. Search for yield. The Reagan Revolution rewrote the book on what made a business profitable - high CEO salaries, lots of worker layoffs, and debt, debt, debt! Who are we to question the financial wisdom of Saint Ronald?


4. Sub-prime lending. Didn't poor people spend every evening of the last decade hounding bankers with phone calls begging for mortgages to houses they couldn't afford?


5. Leverage. And didn't those same poor people convince the banks the mortgages could pay for themselves when the house rose in value?


6. Originate and distribute. And didn't those same poor people force the mortgage houses to offload the mortgages onto overseas investors?


7. Alan Greenspan. His job was to instill public confidence in an economy based on lies. He did his job well.


8. The Democrats. Specifically, one Democrat: Bill Clinton, who thought "centrist" meant toady to the right so conservatives like him.


9. The Republicans. Specifically, all Republicans, who put the "con" in "conservative."


10. Regulators. People paid a lot of money to look the other way. 'Nuff said.


11. Credit rating agencies. People paid considerably less money to spread the "look the other way" message.


12. Financial Services Authority. Again -- people paid to look the other way. Why so many layers of pseudo-oversight?


13. Greedy bankers. They were the guys the regulators, credit rating agencies, and financial service authorities worked for.


14. Consumers/housebuyers. They are the ones who must be punished for believing what Alan Greenspan, the Democrats, the Republicans, the regulators, the credit rating agencies, the financial services authorities, and the greedy bankers told them.


15. Margaret Thatcher. Ronald Reagan, in Brit-speak.


16. Moral hazard. Keep the system going until you retire to some nice, warm country with no extradition. Something Alan Greenspan achieved but Henry Paulson didn't.


17. Gordon Brown. Britain's Henry Paulson -- except he gets to run the U.K. now.


18. Mark-to-market accounting. Supposed to pass for transparency.


19. Basel 2. No American equivalent, because we don't even pretend to regulate like those socialist countries do.


20. Estate agents. We call them real estate agents. They've all gone back to the jobs they left when they were going to get rich selling houses.