In this piece for the Washington Post, Munger states that booms and busts are inevitable in free-market capitalism, but the extremes of the current bust and preceding boom were absurd.

There were many causes for the bust, including insufficient controls and reckless expansion of consumer credit, but the worst - by far - were the trillions of unregulated credit default swaps (insurance contracts on a company's debt that pay out in case of bankruptcy). Munger likened the CDSs to "a gambling facility that mimicked the 1920s 'bucket shops' wherein bookie-customer types could bet on security prices, instead of horse races, with almost no one owning any securities, and, second, a large group of entities that had an intense desire that certain companies should fail."

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