<P> In May 2008, NPR explained in their Peabody Award winning program "The Giant Pool of Money" that a vast inflow of savings from developing nations flowed into the mortgage market, driving the U.S. housing bubble . This pool of fixed income savings increased from around $35 trillion in 2000 to about $70 trillion by 2008 . NPR explained this money came from various sources, "(b) ut the main headline is that all sorts of poor countries became kind of rich, making things like TVs and selling us oil . China, India, Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia made a lot of money and banked it ." </P> <P> Describing the crisis in Europe, Paul Krugman wrote in February 2012 that: "What we're basically looking at, then, is a balance of payments problem, in which capital flooded south after the creation of the euro, leading to overvaluation in southern Europe ." </P> <P> Another narrative about the origin has been focused on the respective parts played by the public monetary policy (in the US notably) and by the practices of private financial institutions . In the U.S., mortgage funding was unusually decentralised, opaque, and competitive, and it is believed that competition between lenders for revenue and market share contributed to declining underwriting standards and risky lending . </P> <P> While Alan Greenspan's role as Chairman of the Federal Reserve has been widely discussed (the main point of controversy remains the lowering of the Federal funds rate to 1% for more than a year, which, according to Austrian theorists, injected huge amounts of "easy" credit - based money into the financial system and created an unsustainable economic boom), there is also the argument that Greenspan's actions in the years 2002--2004 were actually motivated by the need to take the U.S. economy out of the early 2000s recession caused by the bursting of the dot - com bubble--although by doing so he did not help avert the crisis, but only postpone it . </P>

The main cause of the recession that ended in late 2001 was a decrease in consumer savings