All the Bush admin. is doing is propping the whole mess up as high as they can in a final gasp, before they shove it all over to Obama’s plate.

We just have to accept that houses are worth no more than 3x the wages of the average citizen in most areas, GET PRICES BACK TO THESE LEVELS, so that people can actually afford houses and let’s move on!!

We just have to face the PAIN, and we are a very pain-averse society.
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David, you are the stupid one. This whole mortgage thing falls soley on the democrats and gay boy Barney Franks. Did you not watch the 5 minute YouTube clips where the Republicans were fighting for the people and the democrats were saying “nothing was wrong”?

You think our leadership would perform better than that and not torpedo the number one shopping day of the year. When all the cards are counted, I would not doubt that not funding the autos and getting them off the table does not in fact end up costing the economy in excess of the 25 billion the autos wanted in the first place.

So where are we now? The consumers are standing around looking at Wall Street saying “OMG, it IS worse than we thought!” We are now reduced to a downward spiral with the consumer and Wall Street feeding off of each other all the way down…. Nice move congress, hope you enjoyed your get tough stance while torpedoing consumer confidence. Happy Holidays… It boggles my mind that they did this, you would think they are working for Osama.

Yeah, I might be a little opinionated but that is how BertDilbert sees it.

Well that was pretty much what I was saying, the banking industry allowed DTI to expand well beyond reason and the bubble sucked in so many home buyers that the end result was a choking off of the economy even without the current crisis. In essence, banking had turned into a leach on the productive efforts of society, consuming all like a hungry lion that in the end would even eat their young.

One certainly has to ponder the worth of finance when the benefits provided are then totally erased and we lose decades of accumulated wealth in the process. Clearly banking is an item that needs to be kept on a short leash and as we have observed, other entities cannot exist that pressure banks into unsound loans.

With Japan being a recent example of banking gone bad, how was this allowed to happen? Somewhere lurking under the covers I suspect we will find that it was allowed due to an otherwise inability to show any growth in GDP via a straight economy.

You would think by now that congress would have straightjacketed banking back to it’s post depression cage….

It’s just common sense. Do your due diligence or else you face a higher chance of getting rocked.

Did the bank enable the home buyer or did the home buyer enable the bank? While the home buyer saw a house as their biggest investment, the banks saw fat profits. From this side of the fence, it looks like the banks were the ones that got into the big accident and totaled their cars while the homeowners just walked away…. Is it the home buyers fault that the banks were lousy drivers and did not understand their investment?

While the home buyer might have viewed their house as their biggest investment, zero, five and 10% down is not much of a vested interest, whereas the bank is putting up 90% or more of the money. Truth be told, it was the banks biggest investment regardless of what the home buyer thought.

“…allowing home owners to use…”. This is an example of enabling, and enablers cannot be the main cause; they require another participant to take action. A gun enables murder, it alone cannot commit one.

“over the past five years there was a fundamental shift of how people viewed their home – from ‘a place to live’ to their single ‘largest investment’.”
There is your main cause.