Comment by nuguy

What an over-simplification. The crisis depended on so many things. Ratings agencies. Insurance companies. Stupid people getting loans they couldn’t afford. And Goldman Sachs who were very clever in compounding the entire crisis in order to profit from it (good for them in my opinion). The creditors who provided the loans were giving loans to stupid people, those loans were then rated highly as a source of debt by the ratings agencies, all of it being insured by short sighted insurance companies and then Goldman came in and made it all worse by adding more money to the fire. Take away any of those components and you no longer have Great Depression 2.