Modern China is an even more interesting story. Their largest state-backed real estate firm collapsed years ago. The reason why China is in a mild recessions instead of a full-blown depression is because the state took control, triaged what they could, and chose losers in such a way as to prevent the worst-case scenario. A solution similar to what the US eventually dragged itself to after the 29 Crash. In a crisis, socialism works, actually.
It's definitely not socialism. The governments always aim to take over failing private industries or industries they want to modify for external reasons. After taking actions toward that end, they send the industry (in part or whole) it back to wealthy friends of the politicians in power. Socialism doesn't work at scale, any more than any other system. The possibility of an existing government doing what it thinks is necessary, is never far from anyone's mind.
>Because many people in the general public, especially leftists and socialists, believe that the 2008 Great Financial Crisis was caused by greedy US banks lending out money to unworthy people who had no ability to pay back loans, and take a profit from each transaction, and sell the toxic debt to other parties.
Most of the people that I've seen taking this position were conservative, free-market capitalists, giving themselves a little "Bad, me!" slap on the wrist. The leftists and socialists are well-read enough to know that the reason loans were backed the way they were is because the regulatory apparatus has been wholly captured by financial players, from regressive legislator campaign funding to the revolving door at regulators, and everything in between. Further, the fallout from 2008 hit most Americans so hard because insitutions leveraged this "in" to warp the shape of the federal and monetary response to the crisis in order to make them whole at everyone else's expense - a course that was not explicitly called for in law (and that some would say, in many cases, violated the duty of responsible parties to uphold the law). The problem remains the banks.
(Yes, I know, I'm making a point, ye who lives in the United States of "It's not what you know, it's who knows you.")
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