i think bernacke is a bag holder plain and simple. greenspan created this mess and then retired to write book and pontificate on what a mess this is. i don't think ben could do anything given the very short time he has had to conch... (which greenspan still won't let go of)
The problem is, Alex, that USA is no longer a capitalist free society. It used to be much more free, but now it's just a semi free, semi capitalist society. As for morons that get into bad housing loans they can't afford, well I agree, they can eat it. Unless the lender committed fraud, I don't want to hear any whining from a guy who works at Wal Mart who acts shocked that he can't afford a million dollar home here in wacky Los Angeles.
99.9% of these people who took stated income loans lied about their income to get into mortgages they couldn't afford. For those who may not be familiar with the term stated income mortgage...it is when you literally fill out a mortgage application and put whatever the hell you want to as your income, and it is NOT VERIFIED BY THE UNDERWRITERS. Yes, seriously a mortgage where you get to just be taken at your word as to how much money you make. No underwriter verification, no tax returns, no pay stubs, nada. LOLOLOL Those people deserve everything they got or will get and then some. A little while back before this stuff got way out of hand...right at the beginning of the foreclosure wave there were a couple articles about people who got into mortgages and tried to sue their mortgage brokers for "making them lie about their income". No kidding there was a single mother of three kids who made like $1200 a month plus like $200 in child support or SSI or some crap, and got not one but TWO houses. Yes TWO! The first one was her dream home I believe it was somewhere in the $400K range, and the second one was to rent out (about the same $400K or so price) and make a fortune......only thing is...she was lying about her income to an obscene degree....and then it came time to pay the piper, and she tried to sue her mortgage broker for conning her into applying for the loans. LOLOLOLOL Sad thing is...the magazine was painting the article in a sympathetic light to these poor poor people who were duped into lying about their income to get mansions they couldn't afford. hahahaha I knew the real estate market was doomed as soon as I read that story...then a couple months later, all hell broke loose.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3Z7orioQYM&NR=1 Also check out the money masters videos if you can find them. It's almost 3 hours and boring but extremely important.
"99.9% of these people who took stated income loans lied about their income to get into mortgages they couldn't afford." So it is the lying loan-takers vs the give-them-a-loan-any-way-you-can-and-bundle-it-into-a-CDO guys. One is probably desperate and looking for a pipe-dream. The other is in a business that (at the time) was booming, probably wearing a suit to work every day, and - you can only hope - had some knowledge of the business he/she was transacting from dealing with it every day. Soooooo........was the lender taken advantage of? Only after the scam hit the fan.
Hell no the lender wasn't taken advantage of... Both parties were equally liars and deserve everything that happens to them. They were both taking advantage of the system and it blew up in their faces. Everyone involved *knew* damn well what they were getting in to..they just never thought it wouldn't work for them....Kids are taught that it's wrong to lie since pretty much the day they are able to understand human language... It's only too bad that after these losers file bankruptcy they will all start over with credit scores probably even higher than mine(who'se never missed a single payment on anything -EVER and have no credit cards above even 15% of the limit and have a mortgage) and get into debt all over again.
"Both parties were equally liars and deserve everything that happens to them." The problem of course, is that they are not the only ones who will deal with it. Like the S&L scandal of the Reagan era, we will all deal with it. So Bernanke will lower rates to save the institutions that bought these CDOs and parked them into SIVs. And in so doing he will devalue the fiat currency by increasing it's supply. Of course, he also said that he saw economic growth slowing too. So he will inflate the money supply while growth is slowing. What was the name for that again....Stagflation?
I agree with Easy. Bernake is screwed no matter what he does. The situation was not of his making. My problem with the FED is that although lower rates may help Wall ST, it will do nothing for the housing market. The FED has no control over long term rates, and if lower short term rates are seen as inflationary, long term rates actually rise. This happened briefly after the .50 cut. Just let the damn markets correct. Take the pain now. If you keep putting it off, it will only be worse later. And yes, inflation is going gangbusters, unless you don't eat or drive. Jay