There is an ongoing trend, among financial experts and lay people alike, to explain away the financial crisis by saying that the hardship is "deserved", e.g. the american public was too spendthrift and now they're paying for their sins.
This sort of moralising can sway the mind towards certain ideas relating to economic policy e.g. since the recession is deserved we might as well egg it on by increasing interest rates or reducing government spending.
At the end of the day, moralising has no place in economics. So says this writer in espousing Keynesian economic intervention:
"Keynes’s genius – a very English one – was to insist we should approach an economic system not as a morality play but as a technical challenge."
As with much of life, macroeconomics doesn't always work the way it should. And so I'm a qualified supporter of measured government intervention to face this crisis.
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