Wall Street’s bad behavior was not the main cause of the housing bubble, columnist Robert Samuelson argues in the Washington Post.
He cites a new study recently published by the National Bureau of Economic Research that “rejects or qualifies much of this received wisdom.” Samuelson writes that the deeper cause of the burst was “bubble psychology, [which] rose in the 1980s [and] lulled people into faith in a placid future. They imagined what they wanted: perpetual prosperity.”