linguoboy wrote:The Swiss I'll grant you, but the Brits? Name six.
Gabon, the Philippines, El Salvador, Uruguay, Estonia, and Palau
Seriously? You just conflated professional banking experts with hoi polloi.
Okay, fair enough, European bankers didn't get the idea from TV. How about this? The US is the most powerful country in the world. European leaders generally try to maintain good (or at least not have bad) relations with the US. Right? And American bankers encourage
and engage in high-risk lending and borrowing. Some of their customers are European bankers! Why wouldn't the European bankers also encourage and engage in high-risk lending and borrowing?
Also, kindly take your words out of my mouth.
I wasn't putting them in your mouth; I was trying to tell you how absurd your argument sounds to me. It really sounds as absurd to me as saying that anyone who makes bad financial decisions has only themselves to blame when in fact there are people who have power over them actively encouraging them to do it. (Yes, I know, you don't think Americans have significant power over European bankers, and I think they do).
It revealed the weaknesses of some countries' financial regulation and economic systems, but it didn't cause those weaknesses.
I disagree. It has to have caused lots of weaknesses or else they wouldn't have been impacted negatively. And again, how do you know it didn't cause those weaknesses?
And now we have an
argument from ignorance!
No, actually, that wasn't an argument at all. You said the global financial crisis didn't cause certain weaknesses, and I asked you how you know that. That was a request for evidence and nothing more. EDIT: Okay, it was also playing devil's advocate, which admittedly was dumb, but still, I was curious if you had evidence for this. If you don't, that's okay. I obviously don't have evidence to back myself up, either.
And this has what to do with international finance exactly?
How does it not?!

How do
international trade imbalances have nothing to do with
international finance?
But what does either have to do with
international coffees? CHECKMATE!
...
What?Finance and trade are almost the same thing. Coffee is not the same thing as either of those. I mentioned international trade imbalances because the Wikipedia article specifically listed that as one of the causes of the European financial crisis.
Hardly. I'm disputing it's as overweening as you claim it is. So far I've seen you nothing at all to make your case but repeat your original claim. It's getting tiresome.
Okay, but I've seen you present nothing to make your case, either, so that makes two of us, and at least I'm not rudely criticizing you for it even though you're the one who picked a fight with me for blaming the US. This is pretty much what I expected all along: We have different opinions on how great the role of the US was in this, and, like I said, I don't think we'll ever agree.
The preexisting property bubble in Spain is not relevant to your argument that the USA precipitated the Catalan crisis by wreaking an economy which would have been perfectly fine otherwise? Um, okay.
I mean I think American interference plays a much bigger role than any of this stuff.
DEFINE THAT ROLE. You keep making extremely broad assertions about American influence that you fail to back up with any concrete evidence.
I don't
have evidence, okay? I have an opinion and a weak argument to back it up, and that's it. That's why I
tried not to get into an argument over it, to just say "I disagree," and to leave it at that. To me, my opinion makes sense because the US seems to have sweeping influence
everywhere these days, and while I can agree that Europe still has significantly more power than most parts of the world, I also think it has significantly less than the US does and the US is thus significantly more privileged than Europe is.