Housing crisis, system failure

This capitalist crisis resembles a certain kind of serious disease. Different symptoms keep flaring up at different locations. It began with sub-prime mortgages in residential housing. Then, sequential flare-ups hit the private banking system, forced millions out of their jobs and homes, drastically cut world trade, and undermined the public services and national debts of several European countries. Meanwhile, another symptom festered in the credit freeze crippling so much private borrowing. Now, yet another symptom matures as government subsidies and supports to our crisis-ridden private housing industry add rising billions to the deficit. The unspoken ideological taboo in most public discussion of the economic crisis prohibits seeing or treating the problem as systemic, as a problem of capitalism as a system. Instead, our political, journalistic, and academic leaders mostly see only symptoms and "develop policies" only for those symptoms. Alarms about one symptom -- and contested efforts to address it -- soon shift to another symptom and "policy responses" for it. Often such policies for one symptom actually worsen another symptom. For example, when stock markets collapsed early in 2000 (symptom), the Federal Reserve drastically cut interest rates (policy response); that move facilitated the excess lending that collapsed the entire economy in 2007.