While failings in advanced economies were undeniably involved in the run-up to the financial crisis, consider events from the perspective of emerging markets that have had innumerable crises of similar magnitude.
Ricardo Caballero of MIT offers a theory which investors should consider seriously. He professes that the global economy suffers from a critical shortage of safe assets.
It was this shortage that lit the fuse of more proximate causes in the financial crisis. Housing bubbles and the deterioration of bank lending standards were symptoms of a much deeper problem that developed over a decade ago, when the emerging world's ability to generate wealth outpaced its ability to generate sound and liquid stores of value to house that wealth.