[narrator]

Boom and Bust is a feature, not a bug in western fractional reserve banking. In China, where they have a different system, the central bank would electronically print debt free money and recapitalize the bank and execute any bankers violating lending guidelines or otherwise giving "illegal loans" in order to prevent the moral hazard this would otherwise create. Being a banker and screwing around is an extremely serious crime in China.

The only reason the boom/bust cycle is implemented thus in the west is so the banks can periodically redistribute assets of their least successful borrowers to other people. In China, the reorganizations are more market priced since the ownership and control of distressed assets is written down by the central bank and they are resold for pennies, while in the west it tends to go through bankruptcy court, which is a slow complex bureaucratic process and tends to destroy what was left of the company.