Calm down, it ain't gonna happen. Deliquent borrowers make up a tiny tiny fraction of all borrowers, and most people are against a bailout. About 98% of borrowers are not deliquent, so do you think they have much sympathy for those who are? The White House is against a bailout. Do you think Congress can convince the overwhelming majority of people to favor something they currently don't favor?
Hi Pr0crast, I do not think it is a valid comparison. In case of a rape, a woman is being attacked and this has nothing to do with doing something on her free will, whether she has mace or not. The subprime loan is being taken on peopleâs free will. They are stupid enough to realize that some properties are not for them. Why should we feel sorry? I remember reading a story about some fruit picker on yahoo or cnn, where he bought 700K house and his familyâs income is around 40K. Now he is crying that he will lose his house. Should we feel sorry for someone like him? We all are working very hard to excel in trading, thus enabling us to acquire nicer things should we wish to do it. People should not buy luxury if they can not afford it, and if they do, they should be the ones dealing with consequences. Regards, redduke
Duke, We can agree that people with 40k incomes buying 700k homes exist at such an extreme end of the stupidity spectrum that natural selection is simply making its due course. I'm fairly certain that these types of cases make up a very small percentage of subprime activity, with most of it being simply targeted at those individuals who want a reasonable home within their means and cannot get approved for a prime loan because of credit rating problems. Often times they are not smart/aware enough to grasp the intricacies of interest rates and mortgage schedules, and the subprime loan officers present the info to them very, very deceptively. If they had gotten a prime loan for the same home they would be doing just fine, but with the structure of the subprime loans, it can be enough to bankrupt someone. What is going on here is an entire industry is specifically targeting a vulnerable group of people to utterly take advantage of them. Point taken regarding free will, however the core of my argument remains the same. Just because someone doesn't have as much street smarts as you or I doesn't mean that they should have to suffer. To say that any one group of people "deserves" financial ruin for an innocent mistake suggests a very strange animosity that I can't explain rationally. I'm not suggesting anything about "bailing them out," but noting how bizarre it is to see people here shifting 100% of the blame from the predator to the victim. I suspect that many posters misunderstand the greater problem here. Regards, Pr0crast