This is not unique in the history of capitalism. What is different this time around is the extent of it, and the degree to which the financing changed its manner. For instance, when the property market crashed in 1973, it was mainly local banks that got caught out, because if you had a mortgage, you had it with a local bank, and the developer would also borrow from a local bank, so the mortgage market was localized. During the 1980s the mortgage market became securitized, and they started to put together all these mortgages and push them into organizations like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, or they would get packaged into collateralized debt obligations and then sliced up and sold to some innocent party in Norway, or a pension fund in Florida, or a bank that had excess liquidity in Germany. So the mortgage market became really global.