In one sense—and leaving behind the Mother of All Moral Hazard Trades that was the generator of the European side of the crisis—the trigger for all of this was a classic case of good intentions gone bad. While the US financial system was, as we saw in chapter 2, an accident waiting to happen, what brought us down the particular path we find ourselves stuck on now was the decision to bail out the banks, starting with the US TARP program, in 2008.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 618