Paul Krugman, an economist at Princeton University, told the FCIC, “It’s hard to envisage us having had this crisis without considering international monetary capital movements. The U.S. housing bubble was financed by large capital inflows. So were Spanish and Irish and Baltic bubbles. It’s a combination of, in the narrow sense, of a less regulated financial system and a world that was increasingly wide open for big international capital movements.”
It was an ocean of money.
—(Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, Final Report of the National Commission on the Causes of the Financial and Economic Crisis in the United States, Official Government Edition, 2011, 104)