I meant to add some text up top, but posted this on mobile without time to do so. I agree with your assessment. It is purposefully opaque. The part you highlighted, and the rest of last quoted paragraph was what I thought was most interesting: He concludes that it is easy monetary policy that is to blame, because look how fucked up things were in 2008, and how they are fucked up now, even though regulation tried to limit some types of gambling after the last crash. IMO he is right in one sense, and dead wrong in another. Easy money helps this happen. There exists an unholy relationship between the several investment banks in the world, and the Central Banks that ostensibly try to give us a healthy economy through incentivising them. It's a fool's errand. Investment banks will gamble with the money they are given, and if they don't like the instruments they have at their disposal they will create ones that suit them. "CDOs, excessive banking and leverage" were exactly what fucked over the world economy in 2008. Sure, you can say that it was the Central Banks bankrolling the operation that were to blame, but then you can also blame the repeal of Glass–Steagall that created the whole casino operation. The problem is that investment banks do some investing, but do a whole lot more betting on investments, and betting on those bets, and upon those bets... Easing money from Central Banks cannot get passed the vacuum of the derivatives markets. This is just gambling. Until the derivatives market is deflated to be less than the value of the market it is based upon, the tail is going to wag the dog. The Japanese economy contracted 1.4%, and the Nikkei rallied 7% yesterday. That is because shit data means the junkie is going to get another dose.If the pre-crisis problem was not CDOs in and of themselves, or excessive bank lending and leverage, it must have been something else. The most obvious candidate is overly easy monetary policy stimulating unsustainable credit expansion and ultimately asset price bubbles. Banks were certainly an instrument through which this policy was enacted, but financial leverage itself – especially that behind relatively low-risk arbitrages within financial markets – was a very limited part of it. Had leverage not been available, easy money would have taken effect some other way, either by spreading to other banking systems which were less constrained, or through stimulating an expansion of credit via bond markets instead. The years since the crisis have of course seen both.