Your "observations" have little to do with reality. The simple fact of the matter is that life doesn't work like some idyllic Utopian fantasy laid out in a future history novel. In real life there are bad actors who are going to trample over another's personal freedoms, behave irresponsibly and do Bad Things(tm). Seriously, do you honestly think that any loan originator would have written the object of this thread a mortgage if there was a regulation in place that required the loan originator to hold the paper until a payment history of 24 consecutive months of on-time payments were recorded before they could re-sell it to Wall Street? And how, exactly, would that sort of regulation reduced my personal freedom? If the SEC had not allowed the IB's to gear up to 30:1 leverage, combined with a regulation like the above, do you honestly think that BSC, LEH and MER would have still blown up? And how, exactly, would that have reduced my personal freedom? Do you think that the mess that is AIG could have happened if there was a regulation that required reserves for each CDS written, just as there is for insurance and one that prohibited the writting of a CDS unless it was directly matched to a bond? And how, exactly, would that have reduced my personal freedom? Look, I'm not asking for, nor do I want a Nanny State. I also find the PATRIOT to be morally repugnant and a glaring example of reprehensible power grab. Just the same, we do need laws to keep wonton greed in check and more importantly, we need to find the backbone to cull the herd of these assholes not slapping them on the wrist as is the norm today.
Who put the whole idea of refi in her head? Newsflash: she's an adult, not a child. There's simply no excuse for adults to not know what they can and cannot afford. Arguing to the contrary only makes you look foolish.
Sure you are... you're arguing that people need to be protected from themselves... probably because you need to be protected from yourself.
The losers here and the deadbeats who overextended themselves all know damn well... they're just short on personal responsibility and long on entitlement.
+1 It's all about personal responsibility, but if there's any blame to be laid at the feet of anyone other than those who signed the contracts without taking 5 minutes to read them, it belongs to those who disconnected the risk from the seller of the risk
I know this will come as a shock, but there are millions of people in the country who can't read. Many can't do even basic math. When did it become okay to sell them mortgages beyond their means?
Lots of them even have a high school diploma.......and some who are good athletes even have college degrees. Stosh
I didnt say it was ok. If you read my original post you will see that I said the people who gave her the loan deserve to lose every penny they gave her too...they both have a responsibility for what they did. But for this lady to say "Well they told me I could do it" and act as though that obsolves her is a glaring example of what is wrong with our entire moral fabric in the United States these days. The fact that people actually defend her behavior is sickening. Should she have been given a loan? No! But, even if she was offered it, she should have been smart enough to realize she could not afford it. My five year old struggles with math, it aint his thing..he's a C math student. I asked him, a C level 1st grade math student....."If you have $16, can you buy something that costs $21?" His reply: "NO" If my five year old can understand it so can an adult, even a stupid one.
Your argument would hold more water if you checked your facts on 1st grade a bit more before trying to con the rest of us that you're actually a parent of one. First off, the entry age for first grade is to be at least 6 years old sometime before the school year begins. And, while I'm sure that exceptions are made for a precocious child, yours is a self-admitted 'C' student, which leads to the second flaw; letter grade performance. That comes later on. At the first grade level you get scored along the lines of: outstanding, satisfactory, needs improvement and unacceptable. Finally, when it comes to math, the average first grade math curricula is designed to get your child to be able to count to 20 and be able to subtract up to 15 by the end of the school year. At this point in the year, your 5 year old, if he actually exists, would be a confirmed idiot and probably damned close to very person you railed against at the start of this thread.