If not for invading Iraq, W would have been all over tightening regulations for home loans? He'd have seen through the Wall Street machinations of mortgage-backed securities and clocked to the collusion of the credit agencies? He's have rolled back the bi-partisan Commodity Futures Modernization Act that had only been passed the year he was elected that exempted derivatives from regulation and capital reserves requirements for major participants? He'd have been worried about the free markets not being able to self correct and gone over the head of Alan Greenspan the long-standing Chairman of the Fed at the time?

Nah, I'm not buying it.

So why did regulators let that happen? Either they are morons (they're not), or they had a strong motive. Greenspan and those guys were under pressure to keep the economy from going into recession while America was waging very expensive foreign wars. Greenspan viewed the housing industry as the answer, as just let it go on autopilot. They tried to sell everyone a house. They even tried to get me to buy one, though I told them I was totally broke at the time. 

Greenspan rolled the dice and we all lost. He wouldn't have had to make that gamble had GWB restrained his imperial ambitions in the Middle East and just focused on fighting Al Queda. 

Investment banks pay more and are not inclined to reveal more than legally required to regulators. It does not follow, therefore, that regulators must be morons if they are not immediately aware of what the investment banks are cooking up. It means they are up against the kind of sharp minds that top dollar buys and also hobbled by imperfect access to all the information.

By the by, GWB's post 9/11 actions staved off a post-Enron bear market by creating an entire new industry for the US (homeland security) and, had that correction played out in 2002, it's possible that the bubble wouldn't have been quite so big by the time it busted in the financial crisis. It's unreasonable though to judge the actions made at the time through the clear lens of hindsight. Though no fan of W or his actions in the Middle East, I genuinely think no-one had a clear overview of the storm that was brewing in terms of a global credit crunch and certainly Bush was not responsible for aspects such as the poor credit management of financial institutions worldwide or the unmanageably large sovereign debt that many countries had taken on.

And if Greenspan was rolling the dice as you say, it predated Bush. Greenspan had been on the side of unregulated OTC derivatives since the late 90s.

For starters, the partisan divide and the strategic stonewalling of the Congressional GOP was already fully in play and proven a successful strategy. Secondly, right wing media had already built to a bloc-manipulating monolith by that point. Obviously the impeachment of Bill Clinton and the contested and thorny Court decision in the 2000 Presidential Election started the Bush administration off on a sour note. And all of the economic issues were building long before 9/11. There'd be no change in our policy on climate, which is the major international crisis of the age - if anything, it's possible that the geopolitical circumstances of our energy policy (like our oil dependence on Saudi Arabia) that were laid bare by the attack shifted a part of the electorate favorably towards clean energy.

The main geopolitical change that I'd say can be traced from it is in Brexit and other strains on the EU, which was already in play before the Syrian refugee crisis.  I think the jury is still out if the rise of fascism as a political force globally is an outcome of 9/11 or if 9/11 and global fascism are both symptoms of the same source.  I lean towards the latter, given that the most successful inroads fascist leaders have made in the West is in Brazil, which is far removed from Islamist terrorism and any of its responses.

Hi Dave, could you expand on this for me please? I've tried to think what connection there is that you're seeing between 9/11 and Brexit, but I don't see it.

I don't know about the level of popularity that Britain's participation in the Iraq War had domestically initially, but it did Blair no favors when the sheer grind of it set in, so that no doubt sowed the seeds as well.

In the case of Brexit, the Syrian refugee crisis was just the extra little "scare the white folks" cream on top of the general UK "fuck this EU shit" attitude - so Brexit was likely inevitable, but happened when it did as the tail end of a Rube Goldberg-esque string of post-9/11 geopolitical follies.