Call Santelli what you like but I think that someone who wastes 5 years of their life studying Economics and believes that qualifies them to have an opinion worth listening to -that's what I call moronic.
Wilbur Ross (billionaire chairman and CEO of WL Ross & Co.) made a startling point on CNBC on February 19th. He said one economist calculated that without home equity liberated from remortgaging, our economy from 2000 to 2006 would have had three down years and three years of less than one percent growth. Clearly there's waaaaaay too much consumer debt and people need to learn to live within their means. http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=1039864092&play=1 I personally resent bailing out the fraudsters and the irresponsible but the bigger evil is rewarding bad behavior. A strong sense of personal responsibility used to be a virtue but now it seems to be an anachronism. Some of these peoploe need to be put in jail, not given others' money. Even worse, we're doing this at the expense of our children and grandchildren.
The government and the fraudsters/irresponsible borrowers are more to blame than the lenders. Clinton repealed Glass-Steagall which enabled lenders to underwrite and trade mortgage backed securities. This let them legally put the risk off on others which is why they didn't scrutinize loans as they had in the past. The government also relentlessly pressed lenders to finance loans for even for the highest risk borrowers. Then millions of fraudsters and greedy incompetents lied about their incomes and/or signed legally binding contracts they either hadn't bothered to read or knew they wouldn't be able to pay back. Then they used their houses as ATMs. Reality check: who now is NOT living up to their end of the contracts? Hint: NOT the lenders.
I think you got history messed up here little man. It was irresponsible borrowers who could not get their mouthes full enough out of pure greed. And from the way you point fingers you seem to be one of them. Point is a lot of people got into house investments that they simply could not afford themselves. They were the ultimate decision makers. Nobody pressured them into a deal. They were the ones who ULTIMATELY had to decide whether to sign the paper or not. Responsible borrowers would have considered whether they can make future mortgage payments COMPLETELY INDEPENDENTLY of the future value of their asset. Someone who failed to do that deserves to be in such mess. That Wall Street took advantage of that should come as no surprise to anyone, since when has W.S. not taken advantage to maximize profit? That is what corporate America is all about that is why people still work hard to come up with innovative soltions in all ranks of business, because it pays to do so. Is that what you are criticising??? Stop with your ridiculous derivatives blame...you sound like Warran Buffet who told everyone he would stay light years away from derivatives......how come this is the single biggest investment that now threatens his empire??? People chose to do things its not that they got forced into some deals they knew nothing about.
YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Simple and plain but the ABSOLUTE TRUTH!!! Stop wining around, you bought an overvalued asset, what do you care that the value of your asset went down in the intermediate. If you calculated correctly then you can afford your payments no matter what your house value is gonna be. Then it should not matter how many of your neighbords default. Unless..................you cant afford your mortgage payments in the first place......then your ass deserves to be kicked out of your home and you back into a rental. Simple as that......
oh really? Enlighten us why this is so? Homes are holy, other financial assets are not? Come on.....;-)
I have a simple answer for you. Maybe its because someone who acted responsibly and makes a decent living for himself and his family does not want to end up being on the hook for some irresponsible and reckless dudes who in their limitless greed did not include in their considerations that their house value could ever go down. And those very same people suddenly seem to know how to make a big difference between the investment in a financial asset and a real estate asset. Funny.....but I guess that is what gets a lot of people going and rightly so. This is a country and culture (at least as I have come to known it in my few years I lived there) that is built on the principle that everyone writes his/her own future. Equal opportunities (despite the fact that this is not 100% true) but with equal opportunities also come equal responsibilities, meaning, when you make a bad decision then you are to take the hit and not everyone else around you, too. This differentiates a free market economy from a stand-still and paralized social welfare system such as France where everyone expects hand holding and bailout for whatever....
You obviously have never heard of the $65 Trillion Dollars of credit default swaps out there that have completely "trashed" the balance sheets of our banking system, among others . . . not too mention where the de-regulatory legislation came from ( and by who ) 8 years ago. No clearing house, no regulatory oversight by the SEC or CFTC, never traded on an exchange; just OTC "under the desk" side-bets that were outlawed after the Crash of 1907, but brought back into the financial industry in December of 2000. To not even acknowledge these derivatives as having a HUGE impact on what is currently going on right now is highly naive in my opinion. But if you wish to be "blind" to this, by all means continue right on posting.
LOL, I heard about it.....so...wait....I just fail to understand how you now link CDS markets up with the current problem that we have, which is consumers who lived beyond their means and people who should have known they get into trouble when their assets will lose in value, something that SHOULD HAVE BEEN taken into consideration. And please as a side-note, it could be that some others may know a lot more about certain interest rate and credit derivatives than you do. So you may want to argue carefully rather than throwing everything into the same pot.