No doubt, the "voters" are equally culpable and most of these gullible voters lost their house as a result of their stupidity. But what about the fatcat executives on Wall Street who structured the massive CDOs or the rating agencies that colluded with them? Not only did they get to keep their jobs (and their homes) but got a fat bailout from the government. I might be naive to believe that the government has our best interest at heart but something is utterly wrong with that picture.
I wish people would stop believing that people amongst each other are highly similar and/or equal. If you give a dog too much food to eat, do you blame the dog for eating itself to death? That is what seems to be the consensus around here. Let me clarify this for you: you cannot logically or empathically blame another person for being dumb (because there isn't much you can do about being stupid, whether it's genetic or poor education your lot was decided long ago), and you cannot blame them for taking dumb decisions. One poster is correct, the guys in the suits have outsmarted the poor folks once again (is this something anyone should be proud of?). It saddens me that people here are actually taking the side of those who are unnecessarily vicious towards their fellow man. It seems lost on some that there is actual human suffering going on in large parts of America and the rest of the world due to these people's decisions. Yes, if everybody was financially savvy there would be no problems like this. But wisen the fuck up, not everyone is smart and so responsibility falls to those who are capable of making the decision and not to those who are not.
As a society we can simply no longer put the entire foundations of our country at risk under the guise of the "free market". There were no free market concepts guiding the residential real estate market post WWII and while it might be reasonable to contend that those who make stupid decisions should suffer, it is unreasonable to set up a paradigm that allows those who think 2+2 = 5 to endager it all. Just because preying on the 2+2 = 5 crowd is easy money for some there is no reason of us to condone a subsidized system that creates a game reserve of docile and retarded prey if that shooting gallery creates enough walking wounded to bury the rest of us financially. In the old days the weak were slaughtered and no longer a burden but today they become the living dead that weigh us all down. Since we are not going back to the days of Genghis or Attila (we aren't are we?) we better figure out a construct that stops the madness. I am fed up with the pretense that these bankers (and many others) are only proper capitalists -- when the obvious reality is that they are parasites sucking on the public tit. While I have disagreed on some of the details of what Random.Capital has said, his basic point is correct. Let us stop pretending we have free markets and try some free markets. And then let's have straightforward comprehensible rules that, when violated by those who are superbly educated and can easily know when they are operating beyond the pale, have harsh penalties. Let them do a dime on the inside and see if their well tailored colleagues have the balls emulate their behavior and risk their freedom. I don't think so. BTW ... I thought the movie sucked. They took a good solid book and made it into a joke.
Yes, there is a great deal of parasitism at work. But it is *necessary* parasitism, otherwise the policies voters keep demanding aren't implementable.
Hard to blame the child that has been spoiled when the parent pretends they can't say no. It is a symbiotic relationship: The slime political establishment and those to stupid to see the forest for the trees. I apportion the blame at least 70/30.
You are WRONG!!!! The immigrant strawberry-picker who was given a loan to buy a $750,000. home OBVIOUSLY was much smarter than the loan officer who gave him the loan!! Just because the loan officer was making (hundreds?) of loans a year - and did that for a living - does NOT automatically make him smarter than Pedro the strawberry-picker!!! This is where your logic FAILS you badly!! Instead, you should be focusing on the penniless scum who tricked and deceived the innocent bankers who had no knowledge that Pedro the strawberry-picker could not pay back that loan! The investigation should start with all those who signed the loan deal with "X".
I hope those three smileys at the bottom means this post is a joke. No loan officers were outsmarted. Fanny and Freddy were mandated to provide these high risk loans. They were mandated to accept lower credit scores, lower to no down payments and better terms for the borrower. The regular banks had to follow suit in order to compete. Otherwise their loan business would have completely evaporated. If Fanny and Freddy had never been created, there wouldn't have been a housing bubble.
there's plenty of blame to go around. Seriously. If you want an answer for 'who's to blame' you just have to understand what happened and how it happened and the only logical conclusion is that there were a ton of people to blame. There are many components to the problem that made it as big a mess as it was. Sounds to me like the movie was too honest to try and come up with a scapegoat here.
Wow. So they made that guy give the strawberry-picker a $750k loan??? http://piggington.com/strawberry_picker_buys_720_000_house_on_15_000_yr_income "Strawberry Picker Buys $720,000 House on $15,000/yr Income" Wow.......
So we should just shut up and let everyone off the hook? Hank Paulson said the same thing as he was forking millions into Goldman Sachs: There's no time for blame. Obama regurgitated the same refrain as he was piling on a shitload of debt: There will be enough time for blame later. Well, it's high time the government prosecute those who are responsible for the mess. Must someone light oneself on fire like the poor Tunisian fruit vendor to start the public uproar?