Note here that this has nothing to do either with the state, which now gets the blame for the debt stemming from this crisis—a wonderful confusion of cause and effect—or with the individual moral failings of the bankers. You can blame regulators for being lax or negligent and politicians for caving to banking interests all you like, but this was a quintessentially private-sector crisis, and it was precisely how you get a multi-billion-dollar financial panic out of a bunch of defaulting mortgages. But it was not yet sufficient to cause a global crisis. To get there, you have to understand how the structure of these mortgage securities combined with unbacked insurance policies called “credit default swaps” (CDSs) to produce a “correlation bomb” that spread the repo market crisis into the global banking system. Again, this had nothing to do with states and their supposedly profligate spending habits and everything to do with weaknesses internal to the private sector.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 86