your appropriate blend of cynicism, historical fact and current events is a pleasure to read. I especially concur with your sentiments regarding each year’s return to the United States of Amnesia. I’ve gotten to the point where my friends and family will have to come visit me as the circus sideshows hustling to refill at Starbucks in their window-tinted Lexuses and Mazdas have become too much for this ex-pat to bear.

Keep the good stuff coming the reader’s way, harsh reality is entitled to a blind date with cynical analysis.

Cheers!

When the loans are quickly sold and resold as “investments,” there is no incentive to make sure the loans are good ones. High risk buyers, real estate professionals who defrauded buyers, and speculators who thought of houses as investmetns to flip for a profit, contributed to the mess. So did appraisers who artificially inflated values.

The problem was known and predicted YEARS ago. But the industry was too interested in the quick money to be made. The govt looked the other way so its industry pals could keep the sham going. Law enforcement didn’t care when consumers were being ripped off, but it got REAL interested when banks started whining.

Though I personally did not engage in any real estate purchases during the boom, I suspect that I, like everyone else, will end up paying through taxes, to bail out people and companies alike who were foolish, or corrupt. I DO feel sympathy for buyers who were ripped off. I don’t feel sympathy for buyers who were complicit in fraud or who threw away common sense.

But most of all, I do not feel sorry for any in the industry, as they knew EXACTLY what they were doing, and have no excuse not to know what chaos it could cause in the economy. NONE in the industry deserves ANY bailout whatsoever. I hope some of the industry people who created and promoted these toxic risky loans will end up in jail, or at least broke!