But in the meantime, what became increasingly clear was that the US policy-making elite had been focused, as Bradford DeLong would put it, on the “wrong crisis.”57 The crisis that will forever be associated with 2008 was not an American sovereign debt crisis driven by a Chinese sell-off but a crisis fully native to Western capitalism—a meltdown on Wall Street driven by toxic securitized subprime mortgages that threatened to take Europe down with it.
