De vrije markt als religie met eigen dogma's en vooroordelen:
Whoops! Why everyone owes everyone and no one can pay:
"The credit crunch was based on a climate (the post-Cold War victory party of free-market capitalism), a problem (the sub-prime mortgages), a mistake (the mathematical models of risk) and a failure, that of the regulators. It was their job to prevent both the collapse of individual companies and the systemic risks which ensued; they failed. But that failure wasn't so much the absence of attention to individual details as it was an entire culture to do with the primacy of business, of money, of deregulation, of putting the interests of the financial sector first. This brought us to a point in which a belief in the free market became a kind of secular religion. The tenets of that religion are familiar ... : the primacy of laissez-faire capitalism, the supernaturally self-regulating nature of the market, the superiority of the free market to all other forms of human organization. These are all debatable, contestable positions – but in the Anglo-Saxon world we forgot to contest them. This should be the enduring lesson of the crisis – an understanding that the rules governing the operating of markets were not handed down on stone tablets but are made by people, and are in constant need of revision, supervision and active, imaginative enforcement. We can't afford to forget this point: human beings create markets. A general recognition of that fact, led by the economic profession and taken to heart by politicians, would be a step so important as to be almost worth what it has cost to be reminded of."
Op psychologisch vlak zou je kunnen zeggen dat onverantwoordelijkheid en hebzucht een grote rol spelen in de crisis. Het probleem is dat dit en het bovenstaande in veel landen nog niet doorgedrongen is, en dat de vrije-markt ideologie nog woedt als nooit tevoren. In sommige landen kregen de neoliberalen zelfs meer stemmen bij recente verkiezingen. Dus voeg domheid ook maar bij de oorzaken.