This post was originally made in our forum by a user. The forum is now closed but we’ve moved the post here to keep the conversation.

It seems to be me that the financial crisis would already have started after the burst of the dot.com bubble in late 2000/beginning of 2001, had George Bush not implemented huge tax cuts, which gave the consumer some relief. The investment banks’ strategy of a heavy focus on assets, causing them to continuously expand their leverage, worked fine from the 80’s until 2000, because this was undeniably a period of economic boom, where stock markets and other indicators rose rapidly. However since 2000 economic growth was only possible with the help of low interest rates (way too low) and huge tax breaks. This delayed the financial crisis, because key financial indexes and commodity prices went up, enabling the investment banks to post staggering profits. But this growth wasn’t sustainable.

Do you agree?