To understand the financial collapse of 2008-9, as it is called, it is best to answer the questions, who benefits? and what strategic goals are being realized? The standard explanations: incompetence, greed, inaccurate risk algorithms and etc. are not sufficient to explain what is happening to the world financial system if you take as a baseline that the meltdown is a combination of design and accident.
The destruction of equity wealth in combination with the lowered price of oil has effectively staged the first phase of a global trade war and realignment of powers. The calculated shutdown of purchasing power in the US forces the hand of China, whose massive accumulation of dollars, should they not have been spent on domestic stimulus, would have continued to acquire larger and larger segments of the means of production and raw materials throughout the world, and especially in the eastern hemisphere and South America. With a staggering loss of jobs, the meltdown threatens social stability in China, and thus the Communist Party - who, instead of expanding from a base of an endlessly growing economy, must now focus inward on its expanded middle class and restive population of highly educated graduates and students.
The meltdown similarly threatens India's expansion, particularly in its burgeoning software and communications sectors - sectors which threaten western domination of these fields.
The meltdown successfully reduces the effectiveness of organized labor worldwide - since losing one's job creates almost instant poverty - particularly as housing prices collapse. Homelessness exists in order to ensure workers stay in their jobs, fearing the alternative. This creates a pliant workforce and ensures the continued submissiveness of workers generally. The US can sustain 10% or more unemployment before any significant social reaction occurs, and the unemployed are more easily attracted to the military - which has not shrunk nor gone without a level base, if not increases in funding despite the generalized contraction of the economy. Consequently, the collapse can be seen as a very effective tool of social control. Similarly, the evaporation of wealth as equity, which is widely perceived as a blow against the reputation of capitalism itself, can be instead read as a blow against the so-called middle classes - whose wealth funded global trade to purchase foreign made goods through giant retail centers.
With the disappearance of the artifice of capital wealth, the middle class becomes helpless as it ages and thus more vulnerable to political controls - and at the same time, its assets become vulnerable to the purchasing power of the truly wealthy, who will buy these 'toxic' assets at significantly reduced capital costs and gain for themselves the wealth generated in the next boom cycle, which is part two of the overall strategy.
In the aftermath of Katrina the generally accepted view is that the government failed miserably - but by whose standards? In actuality, for the companies that got paid to rebuild white New Orleans fared well, the libertarians who do not believe that government can be competent gained propaganda points, there was no public outcry or enforced accountability for agencies or leaders responsible - and the black diaspora provided the basis for a resurgence of the Republican party in Louisiana. The management of the Katrina disaster was an almost total success by the standard of judging who won or lost.
The third component of the overarching strategy in place is the destabilization of Russia and Venezuela, whose oil wealth challenged the geopolitical balance of power in South America and in Europe. The drop in oil prices is explained as a reduction in demand - true enough, but how was the demand lowered? and who wins? With the staggering profits accumulated as shown on the balance sheets of the largest western global oil corporations - one could say that the upward spiral was merely a means of providing a sustainable baseline for the shareholders of these corporations - knowing that the subsequently engineered collapse would have profoundly different effects on the economies of Venezuela and Russia, one of which countries had launched massive social spending that could not be sustained, and the other which had begun to use its oil wealth and supply chain to aggressively move toward regaining economic and political clout in Europe.
While the world economies rebalance, and the political economies of China, Russia, India become unstable - the relatively minor suffering of the american public who are tools in this game is a small cost to pay given the enormous damage to centrally planned strategies funded by trade surpluses and cheap labor.