Subsidies =/= Interest rates =/= Credit (In reference to the college example proposed)
Jay Cooke!!! The Northern Pacific Railroad 8D, haha. Good to see. The House of Cooke was also bankrupt after that one.
I've written my piece on the 2000~ dotcom bubble and 2008~ housing bubble, it would have happened anyway because there was a real belief IN THE MARKET that they would produce. It wasn't gov't propaganda. Then people bought it in expectation of gain, which lead to real gain which continued to create more real gain until someone realised that the assets had been overpriced and the bottom fell out, this is what a bubbles is. As I said before, it depends on your lean... if you're behind Ludwig von Mises' Austrian business cycle (or evil credit super-villian corp.) then your belief is accurate, but if you think that life has the tendency to make things good, great, bad, awful and everything in between on every person which then translates to the economy then you might lean to my belief. As I said before, the artificially low interest rates DID lead to a collapse but in all honesty the amount of re-regulation we had didn't help, the sub-prime market should have never taken off like it did and it wouldn't have if we had 'adequate' (entirely subjective) banking regulation. (Remember that that specific market is where a lot of the abuses occurred, like equity stripping)