they facilitated the sale by providing all of the upfront cost (loans) for nothing (no down payment) and the monthly payments came to a stop a long time ago. the repossessed it because they didn't really get anything for it in the first place, which actually means they were forced to buy it at an artificially inflated bubble price (think fannie/freddie here) based on the loan they gave out originally the taxpayer isn't paying the bill, the taxpayer is making it easy to finance these purchases with the zero interest rate policy, but that is self-serving since the interest rates are being artificially suppressed so that the homes don't flood the market at fire sale because that would cause deflation and make the debt our government has fired up completely untenable (think of all the tax money the housing market brings in)
That's medicine anybody would take. Make the spread between free money from the Fed Reserve and Treasuries? Nice medicine. Mark-to-make-believe your holdings, not mark-to-market, and say you're healthy enough to pay dividends. And the foreclosures? Robo-signing documents, court perjury, MERS which has no standing... Creating/selling liar-loan filled CDO's CDO^2. Then take bailout money and multi-million dollar bonuses for a job well-done. I'd say that's just a tad better than the R.E. brokers.....
Uncle Sam, with the help of Bernanke and Geithner, created investment funds to target toxic securities (aka "troubled asset"), such as mortgage-backed securities where Treasury, in most cases, contributes $1 for every $1 spent by the private sector. In addition, Uncle Sam created a Disposition Finance Program via the FDIC to buy troubled loans whereby the government agreed to contribute 80% of the financing. Moreover, in case something goes amok, the government pledged to soak up $4 for every $1 in losses. Does that answer your question?
Blame goes first to the street scum that opened up storefronts and lent to vermin. This was done on a small and large scale. Where are the lockups for these criminals? Where are the givebacks of commissions earned on liar loans.? The movie was done well enough, and for those that didn't move through the crisis with our heads up our asses, as 99% of the public did, it's a good reminder of how close we were to a smouldering shit pile. The script makes various obvious references to blame if you're not a 'tard, as most reviewers seem to be. no news there.
The storefronts opened and lent that way because they were paid to do so. They did not operate as a charity. So who paid them? In the end, who are the ones that made out the best after the spitstorm?
1. The banks that are the lien holders on all the defaulted mortgages. They sold off the debt on the mortgages to taxpayers and other banks and investors through the toxic derivatives, so now they have free and clean titles to resell once the market bounces back. 2. The real estate agents. They made a killing in commissions selling houses to people they knew couldn't afford them and would eventually default on them. Their commission structure is setup to encourage this behavior. IMHO their commission structure should be setup as a residual over the course of the loan. In other words they should receive the commission for selling a house in partial payments over the lifetime of the loan. They will only get the full amount of the commission IF the loan is actually paid in full (either over the full duration or early pay off/sell to another buyer). This offers them the ability to create good monthly income streams over time that will help them weather the ups and downs of the market better, while also encouraging them to put people in homes they can afford rather than in the most expensive home they can get financed. 3. Home builders also made a killing during the housing boom, selling tons of houses that the buyers couldn't afford. Unfortunately for them though now there is a LOT of excess inventory owned by banks and being sold cheaply so the builders are suffering now.
So you're letting these mortgage pimps off the hook because someone else told them to lie and cheat? You must be a libtard
The movie was a fluff piece. Left out a lot of the important parts of what really went down. This HBO movie actually made Paulson out to be a good guy. They should have covered his past at GS a bit, or at least mentioned that he was the leader of deregulation on Wall St when he ran GS. That GS sold a ton of the crap CDO's, and AIG owed GS the most (14 Billion) for Credit Default Swaps on the same garbage that GS was hawking. Watch "Inside Job" to see the real story.
So you don't think there is more than one group responsible? You must be a simpleton. It was easy for people to think in terms of "Trickle-Down" economics during the Reagan years - why the amnesia now? In the same manner, some folks at the top made a ton of money on those bad loans, and enough of it "trickled-down" in the process to make it worthwhile for the mortgage pimps to....pimp.
Illogical. No one can look in a mirror and see an "average American". The average American is a statistical fiction that has 2.33 children and 2/3 of a dog. By accepting the actual existence of an average American you assign blame for indiscretions committed by any group of Americans to all Americans; blame is "averaged" throughout the group. Responsibility for the subprime fiasco is lies entirely with those who determine lending policies - gov't regulators and the financial institutions that actually participated in the scam. There are clear cases of fraud to be found in the subprime mess - especially the deceptive marketing of bundles of doomed mortgages. Goldman Sachs undeniably perpetrated fraud on a massive scale but will go unpunished because GS is the hub of a conspiracy that reaches into the highest levels of national governments and national financial institutions. GS alumnus Hank Paulson exemplifies this corruption. Before he would present his scam solution to the crisis he and his associates created he insisted on immunity from future prosecution. Thanks to "free enterprise" the super-rich have concentrated the wealth of nations in the hands of a priviledged few. Money is power. Concentration of wealth is the concentration of power. Unbridled capitalism and democracy - in which power is vested in the people - are incompatible. The coupling of unrestrained capitalism and democracy is a con and a logical impossibility.