Forum Post: "Occupy" Your Home: Pay for it And You'll Have No Problem.
Posted 12 years ago on April 19, 2012, 6:51 p.m. EST by fleaparty
(-18)
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
Why is this hard? Default doesn't mean you simply get to keep what you bought with borrowed money. Honest, it doesn't. So, if you really want to "occupy" a home, try paying for it like normal people do. If you'd like to help, leave the sign at home, but do bring your checkbook to the next protest. Squatting doesn't create equity, but checks do.
The next time you line up behind the debtor, at least have the brains to ask why they're in debt and what they did with the money they borrowed. Time to grow up, folks.
It's amazing how even the slightest mention of personal responsibility so enrages OWS-types. Even with their signature clear as day on the bottom of the loan agreement, it's always and exclusively someone else's fault.
So, lever-up buttercup. Borrow yourself for perfection. Don't worry, because when something does go wrong and you blow up, it's someone else's fault and your bitterness and blame will keep you company.
The more debt you have, the less resilient you are. Another life-skills 101 fucking obvious point that OWS people will argue.
Really?
If a global recession was set off by the very banks that you owe money to, and you lose your job because of that recession THEY created, so that you can't (temporarily) keep up with payments, you really think it is fair for the banks, that caused the mess in the fist place, to take your home? Without even ATTEMPTING to work out a different solution? They get to keep EVERYTHING and you lose EVERYTHING, even though the situation is by THEIR hands? Under any and every circumstance, they win and you lose. You really don't see that as a rigged game? Really?
The housing scam was 100% rigged. Repeal Glass Steagall, create a credit bubble, push the loans and refinance, take out CDS insurance on it all, when it crashes collect on the CDS and then the Government will give you more of the nation's money in the name of crisis.
Probably one of the most elaborate and well played scame in the course of history. Took 9 years to pull off, and they are STILL consolidating the lesser banks.
Disgusting.
you forgot to mention that they started a war first to distract the stupid people from what the real plan was!
Yes, I did forget that. It is truly amazing when it all is broke down that ALL the politicians were in on it, the banks were masters of dealing with public opinion, and we fel for it hook line an d sinker
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What investment do you go into where you don't assume loss of cash flow. This is standard.
Your absolutely wrong, when the borrower defaults he just walks away from the liability. Most of these homes have no equity in them. The bank is stuck with property they can't move.
Maybe you shouldn't be able to own a home. We should pass a law saying that you have to pass a test before borrowing money.
wasnt that what was in the glass stegal act? but they repealed it so a homeless guy with no job could get a loan.. then the banks placed bets on the loss of revenue due to the guy not paying the loan and sold that loan for profit to the other bank to foreclose on. you should do some research before you start talking.
I think you are trying to talk about credit default swaps. I am not sure. It's ironic that you are telling me to do research when you don't even know what they are called. No, the banks had nothing to do with an individual taking out a loan, signing the papers that they will re-pay the loan. The banks didn't force the individual to take out the loan. No matter what you want to say, they didn't force people to accept the money.
yes they did. before there were laws that would have prevented the bank from offering the loan,, that the bank already knew would default and destroy lives and the economy, that is the banks responsibility to not offer loans when they know they will default.. thats what they cry now about making money.. its a responsibility to the stockholders. it sorta the same as serving poisoned food at a restaurant, no body made you eat it but you still want to sue the restaurant , you dont just say.. dang it , i shouldnt have done that, cause theres always the chance that theres something going to go wrong. no you would blame the restaurant for offering you poisoned food.
The banks did not force the people to take the loan. They also didn;t believe that those loans wold default.
According to you, we should have a rule that onlye the 1% should get a loan.
you need to do some reading. if you read the post.. you will see that indeed they did know the loans would default. but bonuses are based on the volume of loans.. not the return. soo they did indeed give out loans knowing they would default in order to increase the bonuses for the banks with complete disregard of wht it would do to the economy. they then knowingly sold these loans for "profit" there by inflating the stock prices as investments.. then trying to put that investment money into taxpayer backed depositories. !. READ. read the whistlblower story.
and yes.. if you only make 20k you should not be able to get a loan for more than 20k for a house. that should be law
God you're ignorant. Really, Glass Stegal changed so that homeless people could get loans? Really? What does it mean to place bets on the loss of revenue due to the guy not paying the loan and sold that loan for profit to the other bank to foreclose on? You've done the research, please, what does that mean? LOL
the glass seagal act made the following practices illegal. i of course was exaggerating the homeless guy part. i meant a guy making 20k could buy a house for 250k under the fraud being committed by the banks.
please actually read these links and become less ignorant than you are before you call others ignorant
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/why-did-banks-give-home-loans-people-who-they-knew-couldnt-pay
"The first two “ingredients” are related. Home lending is a mature, reasonably competitive industry. A lender cannot grow extremely rapidly by making good loans. If he tried, he’d have to cut his yield and his competitors would respond. His income would decline. But he can guarantee the ability to grow extremely rapidly by being indifferent to loan quality and charging weaker credit risks, or more naïve borrowers, a premium yield."'
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-16/citigroup-whistle-blower-says-bank-s-brute-force-hid-bad-loans.html
this was allowed to happen because the laws prohibiting this bank behaviour were removed. and greed , low life bankers , and worthless !% could get away with the destruction of the economy. and they did.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subprime_mortgage_crisis
The subprime issue was only a fraction of the problem. The major problem was the fact that mortgages of ALL sorts, sub-prime and regular, were bundled and leveraged to 40, 50, 60 times their value. So when the housing market contracted a tiny bit, the entire system collapsed as unsustainable markers were called in. The investments were insured beyond the total value of the assets, on casino bets that the value would keep rising indefinitely, and when the value of those assets fell, even by a fraction, a crisis was created because the insurers could not pay.
The sub-prime market did not cause the financial collapse. Unscrupulous financial institutions did.
http://politicalcorrection.org/factcheck/201110140001
thank you for the additional knowledge. hopefully that fleabag will learn something about the IIC(idiots in charge) :)
Zerohedge references always get points from me
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Well, there's a little difference. First of all, a home is not just an "investment"; second, when you assume a loss of cash flow, it usually doesn't mean a destroyed economy where an entire industry crashes. Yes, people have been irresponsible. Banks and motgage brokers have been irresponsible too. They, however, are not suffering any consequences until the borrowers run out of money and cannot make payments. It isn't a choice. The borrower loses 100% of his financial worth; the bank, not so much. And, maybe as an investment expert, you can answer a question: how is selling a mortgage at a discount to another bank different from writing down principal, and if it isn't different, then why is that option never offered to the borrower before the note is sold?
I'm not sure if there is a difference in tier ratios. A lot of the mortgages are sold to other buyers.
Bank is stuck with your home. After the gov backed insurance pays upto $250,000 of the mortgage. So they get any home under $250 for free. And the money they loaned in the first place was borrowed from the gov for less then prime. That is less then 1% for big banks.
The value of the home is declining and they can't liquidate.
Maybe the banks should not have crashed the economy. Maybe they shouldn't have been allowed to knowingly sell toxic paper and sell that paper short. Maybe derivatives should be made illegal. Maybe bankers should have gone to jail instead of receiving multimillion dollar bonuses as a reward for fraud and throwing millions of people out of work and into the street.
So why work at all then. Are you going to provide for me. If you are, pls call me.
Complete non-sequitur. Par the the course.
You are a real idiot, can't answer the question, Ha. Why do you liberals always read from the same playbook. Are you all this stupid.
You are a dissembling troll. What does objecting to criminal activity of the banks causing an economic crash second only the the Great Depression, flushing jobs down the toilet by the tens of millions, have to do with not wanting to work?
It is a non sequitur, and you are too stupid to see that.
You so full of bull shit you can't keep your own arguments straight. Dumbshit, learn about the fractional banking system. You are espousing that banks do nothing and don't lend.
You are espousing that the banks didn't fuck the whole economy up. That is delusional.
You are too much of knucklehead to know. You think regulation works. Just look at all of the money we have lost in the solar investments. Go back to your union job where you are stealing everybody's money.
Regulation has worked as long as regulation existed and was enforced. When Glass-Steagal was in effect, and when derivatives were regulated, you did have any Great Recession. It was the removal of regulation that permitted banks behavior that crashed the economy, in fact EXACTLY the behavior those regulations made illegal previously, regulations enacted to prevent EXACTLY the consequences that occurred.
Clear air regulations have worked. Clean water ones, too. Worker safety ones too. Child labor ones, too. How many of the thousands do I need to list that have worked before you will stop repeated your tired, inane, imbecilic, fact-starved idiocy?
It was DEREGULATION that led to the crash of the entire US economy. Even a monkey knows that at this point. Even the CEO of CitiBank has admitted it. So to solve the problem, you want MORE deregulation? If you don't treat cancer, it will be cured faster, too, huh?
Every time time you sit down, you compress your brian.
What happened in the 70's when Glass Steagal was in effect?
You have regulations right now, what happened to MF Global? Where were the regulators?
NIce barb, by the way, grow up you fat old man.
Glass-Steagal?
Open door for crime?
Watch Inside Job. Does a really nice job of showing where the bodies are buried and who put them there.
It's all any serious justice department should need to open and pursue investigation and charges.
BTW epa this reply was meant for anyone - WHO DOES NOT HAVE A CLUE - not you.
In the end, you can't protect people from themselves. If you're just stupid and can't comprehend even simple things like how being in debt creates risks, no government can protect you.
Borrowing money with no thought about the downside is just dumb. So, here we are with the downside and there you are crying in your corn flakes about how NONE of it is your fault and how you've never even heard of someone with culpability for their situation. Grow up.
Default and distress aren't random. Bizarre, I know, but the more debt you have, the more likely default and distress become. Wild, huh? LOL.
Borrowing money with no thought to the downside did not crash the economy, unless you are taking about the behavior of the BANKS.
Default and distress ARE random. look around you. People who paid their mortgages on time for 20 years and more found themselves without jobs available in their entire communities for the first time in their lives and even their parent's lives. The crash that the BANKS ALONE caused wiped out entire businesses sustaining or anchoring the employment in entire towns. The economic crash that the BANKS ALONE caused has not happened in 70 fucking years!
If it was irresponsible people alone that would have been effected, their would be no outcry. It is the RESPONSIBLE people who were destroyed. THAT'S THE WHOLE POINT.
WAKE UP.
I believe that a lot of the troll spew we get on this forum is an attempt by the guilty corrupt to put off any attempt that would make them be hauled into court and tried as the criminals that they are. As well as avoiding having their assets seized to pay restitution. Hell some of the trolls may well have volunteered their time because of their complicity.
Some may find this idea quite funny.
But people have killed for a lot less than a 100.00 and we are talking about trillions of dollars. As well as governmental collusion/corruption.
You're just so dumb. People in debt are worse off in the down turn than people not in debt.
Saying banks alone caused the downturn is just responsibility dodging propaganda. Being as dumb as you about debt BEFORE the downturn, sure, maybe I could accept that. But now? You learned nothing.
You are utterly, completely, hopelessly clueless.
Great. I guess that zero savings rate didn't happen. Where the fuck have you been? Leverage among households has steadily mounted for years. And if you're one of those dummies that borrowed not envisioning a downside, like you endorse, you're in worse shape than your neighbors that made choices to borrow less.
Please, don't give financial advice to kids. You'd tell them that there's no such thing as making yourself more vulnerable with debt. Downside is random and simply holds no relationship to debt levels. Smarten up.
And your blame game is also cold comfort to people dumb enough to take your advice. They're still fucked, even if they have someone to blame. Grow up.
I never owned a home, meathead. I never went into debt, meathead.
People NOT in debt were hit by the criminal banks the same as those who did. BOTH lost their homes. Both lost their jobs, and their health insurance along with it. And their homes along with it. Neither were allowed to sell those homes, because the BANKS wanted to foreclose on them. That's the whole point.
The economy was crashed by the banks. It took tens of millions of jobs down. It cost 1.2 million their homes. Sorry you missed it. You must have been busy spitting on some homeless people while advising they should have gotten a cardboard box to sleep in.
Heh, you're the one with the debt problem, not me. You're the one that can't figure out something as fucking simple as how the more debt you have, the more vulnerable you are. Smarten up and grow up. Adults are supposed to know this stuff.
You hate bankers, but then whine when you experience the consequences of being in debt. Yeah, you're not clueless. LOL.
I have a debt problem? Where did you get that? Making shit up as you go along, are you?
Asswipe, the debt problem that crashed the economy was the BANK'S, not the people's. Who got bailed out by the hundreds and hundreds of billion dollars because of their unsustainable debt? Regular people who are being thrown out of their homes, who were perfectly OK with their mortgages until the BANKS collapsed the economy, had no debt problem until the CRIMINALITY of the BANKS created the problem.
Even RENTERS lost their homes. Did THEY have a debt problem, too?
You are full of shit. You heap blame of the mugging victim and idolize the mugger. Probably because you want nothing more than to be a mugger yourself.
Never owned a house? Yeah, with your life skills, I can see that.
The banks were over-leveraged, but so were the people. And now, so is our government. It's pervasive indebtedness that's holding back growth. We're collectively in the hang-over mode. Every bank loan had a bank borrower.
This is a severe downturn. The more debt you have, the more quickly you fall if something goes wrong. Pissing and blaming doesn't undo the consequence of being a debtor. Debt reduces resilience. Tell another grown up, they'll explain it to you.
So, on the one hand you accuse me (falsely) of having too much debt. When you discover tat I don't, You accuse me of having no life skills.
What turd. All you are able to do is judge, regardless of what position is presented to you.
You would be very surprised about my life skills. Of, course, you would also find a way to dismiss them.
But it's good to see you admit (finally) that we are in a downturn. Only took about a dozen reminders, but at least you got there.
But we are not in a "collective hangover". We are recovering from an assault.
Now, it is certainly true that being indebted is worse than not. I have never said otherwise. But the implication that 1.2 million people lost there homes due to their being indebted beyond simply having a mortgage, that somehow a little bit of added resilience would have protected anyone from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, that it would have saved their homes beyond a few more months, is pure absurdity. And those neighborhoods that went bust: the neighbors who were frugal, who were responsible, lost value on their homes because the person to their right or left lost their job and defaulted or abandoned their property. Now the responsible one is under water due to ZERO fault of his own. There are about ONE MILLION stories of perfectly responsible homeowners with similar stories.
And of course there are the more than 14 million people who lost their jobs. Did their lack of frugality have anything to do with that? Did their saving for a rainy day help them for more than a short time? Nope. Jobs left entire communities hung out to dry. Should they have done the prudent thing, pull up stakes (even though their families had been there for generations) say goodbye to their lifelong fiends and way of life, sell their homes and start over? Sure. (No matter that you might be in your Sixties, perhaps and laid off tow years before you could collect you pension.) Who could they sell their underwater houses to? Who would come to a place where there are no jobs and the local economy has entirely collapsed? Even if they found such a dupe, the banks still wouldn't let the homeowner sell.
So talk all you want about personal responsibility and staying out of debt. It is generally good advice. But it has NO RELATIONSHIP to the reality we are talking about. It is a different subject altogether. NO AMOUNT of being debt-free had ANY bearing on whether or not one was foreclosed upon. None whatsoever.
Is that finally clear enough for you?
Your preaching about fiscal responsibility to the victims of the most massive white collar crime in living history is repellant. Do you enjoy kicking people who have fallen down - or rather, been shoved to the ground - in front of you? Do you also enjoy torturing cats?
Maybe people should borrow less. Wow, there's an idea!
You mean those people who had been paying their mortgages just fine for 20 years?
I wonder if fleadip watched Frontline tonight?
He probably doesn't have the attention span, and he surely wouldn't understand it if he did..
LOL
Seriously, someone should be appointed as your guardian. LOL.
Debt reduces resilience. The more you have, the more risk you've assumed. Funny, but you'll find a correlation between default and debt compared to income, other savings, and asset value. Honest, it isn't random.
With everyone leveraged to the max, there's no one left un-leveraged to take advantage of lower prices, so prices fall more. Most households are now trying, at last, to smarten up and cut debts.
Debt is NECESSARY to own a home for all but the wealthiest people.
The BANKS were leveraged to the max, and far beyond it. Yet they, the very ones who CAUSED this mess, not only got off scott free, but then turned around and bit the hand that saved them.
You are defending the indefensible.
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It's amazing how offended occutards can be at the mere mention of personal responsibility.
Yours is a really fucked up life plan that I hope you don't share with kids. Borrow yourself up to rafters, assume things will stay perfect, and when it blows up in your face, blame others and become bitter about life. Nice plan!
See, I live a little differently. I accept that things can go wrong. I know that debt reduces resilience, the more one has, the more vulnerable one becomes to unexpected situations. I also know that debt is a choice. I've now seen dopes like you that programed their lives for nothing going wrong. It ends in tears, and in your case blame and bitterness too. I know these things and my kids do too. Let's see who has a better life. Grow up and yours will get better too.
debt is not a choice. you must have credit score just to rent a home. just to rent.. you are forced to have been in debt before in order to have a basic necessity of life. do not pretend that debt is a choice.
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Its amazing how right wingers can completely ignore the obvious.
The BANKS caused the recession. Period, end of story.
Your inability to see that only shows your utter, completely willful, blindness.
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What's OBVIOUS is your signature on the bottom of the loan documents. Are you really this fucking stupid? Do you now think that being up to your neck in debt without consequences is a new entitlement program? Grow the fuck up.
Recessions happen for lots of reasons. Sickness happens. Companies fail. Divorces happen. The more debt you have, the less resilient you are to bad things. Honest to God, this is over your head? Who the fuck raised you?
What is OBVIOUS it that the BANKS were the ones who made it IMPOSSIBLE for millions of people to pay, since the BANKS CRASHED THE ECONOMY, and DESTROYED TENS OF MILLIONS OF JOBS, while the BANKS got BAILED OUT.
Recessions might happen for a variety of reason at different times (usually due to BANKS) but THIS recession was caused by THE BANKS, not individuals!
What a fucking moron.
If you are up to the challenge of tracing back to the origin of the financial meltdown, start with the financial world's breakthrough of Black–Scholes-Merton model and how that had created an incredible money-minting machine and eventually to the demise of Long-Term Capital Management (due to Russia defaulting on its sovereign debt -- one thing that was NOT programmed into that incredible machine) that subsequently caused Gramm-Leach-Bliley that undid Glass-Steagall.
Calm down a bit here. Not all banks crashed the economy. Those that stayed true to conservative principles were not culpable but you can say that they participated in tightening up credit after the crash had occurred but that is what banks have to do to protect their depositors and investors.
I would put all of the INVESTMENT banks in the guilty category although there are also NON-investment banks which are just as culpable if not more. They were the ones that were behind the botched bypass surgery on Glass-Steagall.
Not all banks? Sure, not every single individual trader on Wall Street, either. So what? Are we called Occupy A Selected Majority Of Banks and Certain Wall Street Firms? Or are we called, simply, Occupy Wall Street?
Almost all of the banks were guilty. Bank Of America was not an investment Banks. Nor was CitiBank. Nor was Wells Fargo. They all had a major hand in the debacle. Few were clean. The entire SYSTEM colluded.
There was enough blame to spread around all over U.S.A. and even beyond our borders. Bank of America took over the dead-crow cadaver of Merrill-Lynch thinking it as a most delicious morsel. Citi was the ancient pyramid model that truly inspired all of the too-big-to-fail entities. You certainly get it, the entire system had colluded and that is why there has been almost no prosecution. Whom do you prosecute and how do you apportion the blame? There were many opportunities to stop the whole thing but nobody did even though people saw and did nothing, people heard and did nothing, and people talked and did nothing! We have mostly just ended up being turned into nothing.
So why are you talking about ordinary working people at fault for the crisis because they weren't smarter than those who committed fraud, smarter than most economists who didn't predict the crash?
Main street did not cause the crash, The banks did. Anything else is misdirection.
I believe in being a realist standing on terra firma at the same time that I have my head in the clouds being an idealist. Things are not as clearcut as you stated but it is a good first approximation.
Things are EXACTLY as clear cut as I stated. You seem to have an investment in muddying the waters.
THE BANKS, not ordinary people, caused the crash and put people out work and out of their homes by the millions. Every single scrap of research shows exactly this.
In the REAL world, ordinary people, with steady jobs did not know that their jobs would be disappeared in the tens of millions by the banks that owned their homes. In the real world, they bought homes they could afford, and paid their mortgages on time for year after year, never knowing the they would be prevented from selling those homes by the banks, who insisted on foreclosing them. No ordinary person in the real world looked 15-20 into a crystal ball that told them the worse economic depression since 1930 would make then jobless and homeless. Your stating that theoretically they SHOULD have known, that there were mystic signs they could have read, comes from a world of fantastical theory, as grounded as a story about Frodo and Golumn or a school named Hogwarts, not Terra Firma. It is the divorced from reality nature of your assertions that I am objecting to, not your realism.
To top it off, even RENTERS by the hundreds of thousands were evicted from their homes when their landlords were foreclosed upon. Should they have had the mystical prescience to live in the streets?
Your version of terra firma is quicksand and your version of clarity is mud.
If the regular people did not default on their mortgage payments, the financial meltdown would not have happened. The reason that it did was due to the extreme inverted financial pyramid built on the assumption that there would be no U.S. national-level downturn in the housing sector. It was a bad assumption but we did not have people who had financial memories long enough to recall those events. We were a little bit like the Japanese at Fukushima whose ancestors had warned them of the tsunami.
Mud is what this world is truly made of. Terra firma was probably my misnomer. Try to free yourself from binary thinking because the world is really analog. For example, we often cannot really prove that our Congressional representatives had betrayed us but we can attain a preponderance of evidence. Its population thinking binary is how the U.S. got into such an "impotent and obsolete" state.
@DKAtoday: Fossil fuel addiction illustrates very well why a populace that does not think hard of causes and effects of various events has a really tough time figuring out how they got into such predicaments. Iran nationalized (i.e., confiscated) U.S. oil interests so we retaliated covertly by installing the Shah and he was a brutal dictator. Iran still keeps on acting up to acquire a nuclear weapon and delivery vehicles due to their inferiority complex after fighting Iraq for years in the 1980's. Yes, the U.S. was supporting Saddam Hussein but we should have woken up about Saddam's real motives after his fighter jets fired Exocet missiles and killed our people on our naval ship U.S.S. Stark in the Persian Gulf. The U.S. acted rather slowly but we can now all savor the photographs of Saddam's being hanged by his own people. Such is the lot of brutal dictators (recent example includes bloody videos of Libya's Moammer Ghadafi). Iran's acting up definitely contributed to the jump in oil prices so not resolving the simmering nuclear proliferation problem there is keeping the prices up and that has economic and political repercussions worldwide. Resolving tensions is beneficial to people (especially innocent CIVILIANS) if you remember how U.S.S. Vincennes shot down an Iranian civilian airliner. Knowing about Exocet missiles' killing naval personnel turned people trigger happy. Also the downing of the civilian airliner of KAL in Soviet Union's Far East was an incident of Cold War tensions. Almost everybody enjoyed the real-estate bubble while it was inflating and that had contributed to the great economic conditions leading to high oil prices before the real-estate crash began in Q4 2006. There were and are ways that people can afford to be indolent just like the rich -- it is all a matter of balancing the income and the outgo. By living simply without too many low-priority wants can achieve a balance even in the face of reduced income. This is akin to an indeterminate strike and if general can bring the rich, the powerful, and the elites down to actual size (which is really not much if you have seen them stripped down). People can be manipulated with money because their beliefs give away their power. Recognizing what money truly is and is not frees one from the trap of our present system of control.
@epa1nter: No matter what the leverage ratio is, no default means no devaluation of the myriad derivatives spun all around the world in a financial cobweb. It is the multiple-level securitization and sheer monetary volume of the derivatives that really scared investors. Europe for example has been managing whether credit default swaps will be worth anything. The sight was very scary with so many cooks in the kitchen but it had worked fairly well up to now.
You have the cart in front of the horse and everyone always fails to include the fossil fuel contribution. Oil unfettered speculation shot gasoline prices skyrocketing - this 1st severely weakened the economy and put business and family's in the squeeze box. Then the Stock-market had a fatal blowout on their junk instruments which blew a lot of capital right down the crapper for businesses and individuals this spurred massive layoffs and the closing of businesses and this caused family's to default on mortgage payments as unemployment insurance could not fill the gap for lost wages, all of this happened on top of the fact of underpaid workers to begin with - who had no savings and trying to pay for artificially inflated properties - businesses also had the problem of artificially inflated property. The Banks had also further contributed to the mess because they had placed their mortgages on the market for investors to buy into so they did not care who they loaned money to because they had no vested interest in the success or failure of the loan. So everything went straight to hell - FLUSH.
"f the regular people did not default on their mortgage payments, the financial meltdown would not have happened."
BULLSHIT!
A tiny fraction of people defaulted, and the financial industry was so over-leveraged - as much as 40 to 1 and even up to 100 to 1, betting the prices of housing would rise forever, that they failed, unable to cover their bets.
It was the result of legalized casino gambling in the hundreds of TRILLIONS of dollars that caused the crash, not the less than 5% reduction is housing prices or a FRACTION of homeowners defaulting on their mortgage payments.
The average homeowner had NOTHING, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with that.
I'm going to have to agree with fleaparty on this one. I don't think he's any kind of a right winger; he's just telling you how to fight the banks. Sure, we know the banks are evil bastards who are going to do their best to screw you and everybody else over, but the way to undermine their evil schemes is to GET OUT AND STAY OUT OF DEBT. If you don't owe the banks anything, they can't screw you....
And this idea that the evil banks got all these people to borrow money, and then brought the economy into recession thereby allowing them to foreclose on all these people who lost their jobs and can't make payments....;Well yeh, of course that's evil but what else should one expect from evil. Now say if these people didn't take out loans, and had prepared for the possibility of losing their jobs, etc. etc., instead of leveraging to the hilt, and tossing the dice...., then the banks would not have been able to cash in on their evil scheme.
Hosreshit.
People were OK paying their mortgages for 15, 20, 25 years who lost there jobs, their incomes and were foreclosed upon. They were put into that situation by the banks. Shold they not have bought houses in the first place? Did they have some sort of magic wand that would tell them 20 years down the line, they would be among tens of millions of unemployed and unemployable people? That they would not even be permitted by the banks to SELL there homes?
It is pure shit.
I don't know every individual case. I'm sure a lot of good hard working innocent people got hurt by the bank's misdeeds, but I also know of, and know of way too many, people who got hurt because they were leveraged way too much. These people probably should have bought smaller homes, and in all likelihood should not have bought that expensive car they put in the garage, or should not have took that vacation to Disney world. I hate to tell you, but there are a lot of people out there who do have a twenty year plan and look twenty and thirty years down the road, see things coming, and work on the presumption that banksters and quisling politicians are going to do something rotten. They work with the consideration that their good paying job might not be there for them ten years down the road. These are the folks who may not have their good paying jobs anymore, but are still living comfortably in their homes. I'm not saying the banks did not do some evil things. OWS should go out and challange these banksters and politicians. I'm 100% behind you on that. I'm just saying, like our friend Fleaparty is saying, that in order to do so, one needs to first and foremost buffer oneself against bankster misdeeds by being very financially conservative; now, and in the future as should have been done in the past. Let hindsight be 20/20 my friend.
There were very very very few people like the ones you described as being leveraged too much due to anything other than absolute necessity. That necessity was ALSO caused by the same system that gave the Banksters the power to crash the economy.
http://robertreich.org/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akVL7QY0S8A&hd=1
The overwhelming numbers of people who lost their homes were perfectly responsible, hard working folks. They didn't have 2 years os mortgages payments saved because they couldn't. Almost no one could. And most people, in case you haven't been reading for the last DECADE, were living paycheck to paycheck. They didn't go for lavish lifestyles. They had ordinary, modest homes that were within their modest budgets.
And no one, I mean absolutely no one, predicted that we would have a second near-Great Depression. Planning for one would have been considered paranoid; that's how outlandish and huge the crime by banskters was.
Hate to break it to you, but MOST people in this country are financially conservative. THey understand that a job might vanish, but there was no reason for them to assume ALL jobs would vanish. And they had no reason to assume that the option to downsize would vanish along with them, since the banks would NOT permit them to sell their underwater homes, there was no market for those home, and that there would be nowhere to go. It is absurd to expect that. It is the opposite of reasonable.
The bottom line remains: blaming THEM for losing their jobs, in many cases permanently is repulsive. Blaming THEM for the BANKS telling that in order to foreclose, they must first default, and THEN FORECLOSING BECAUSE OF THAT DEFAULT THEY THEMSELVES ORDERED, a practice that would have landed anyone else in any other industry in JAIL, is bizarre beyond words.
Blaming them, even a fraction of them, for not having the foresight to see a GREAT DEPRESSION coming, is cruel.
The banks gambled with money they didn't have. If you gambled and couldn't pay your losses at the table, what do you think would happen to you? A real good beating, at the very least, I'd say. But when the banks did it and were caught, who got beaten? Them? No, it was people who weren't even in the game, people who didn't even know a game was being played. people who not even in the same room. And they got the shit kicked out of them.
It was NO fault of their own. It was a drive-by mass mugging. To continue to insist that they simply weren't "financially conservative" enough, and should therefore reap what OTHERS have sown is nothing short of obscenity.
I predicted, I planned, I saw it coming... I got my home, I'm ok. Are you ok? I'm not blaming anybody for a situation, but I suppose it depends on what you call modest. Living paycheck to paycheck is not being modest. I am trying to help you out now........
Great, you predicted. Congratulations. Not everyone was as prescient as you. Most professional economists weren't. So goody for you.
But projecting that on to the masses as a requirement to avoid false moral censure is preposterous.
Living paycheck to paycheck is as good as the entire middle class and poor have been able to do for decades.
Did you go to the links I posted? I have a VERY strong feeling you didn't.
I checked out your links, but I didn't need them to tell me what I already know. Ok, so some bad folks are screwing you, me, and the rest of us bad. In that respect what your saying is exactly what I'm saying. We can agree on that. The only question is; what are you going to do about it?
"The only question is; what are you going to do about it?"
Several things.
First, I will refrain from blaming the victim, even indirectly.
Second, what I am doing now: supporting OWS. I do so not only here, but in as many discussion among freids and starngers as I can.
Third, I have been working against this very thing much of my life. For 20 years I organized workplaces to join the union. It was at times at the risk of my very life. (I am not exaggerating: Both the FBI and Interpol had to intervene at one point to stop a contract that had been put out on me.)
Fourth, I was a teacher for 15 years, trying to get the next generation to be able to think clearly and radically, not specifically in political terms, but in every single area of life. I had a 100% college placement record for my students the entire time I taught. I worked virtually without pay, had no benefits, no health plan and no pension. I did it because I believed in it. Maybe it is just vanity, but I like to tell myself that I made a difference.
I am currently partially disabled, and can't make it to GAs and demonstrations. I hope to recover enough mobility to be able to do so soon.
I will be as good a citizen as possible, voting in the upcoming election. I will do what i can as a voter to make sure the republicans have no opportunity to appoint another supreme court judge when Ginsburg retires.
In terms of the ongoing future, I'm not sure. Working to establish a viable left/progressive third party to make sure the two current parties don't continue to have a monopoly on our system is something I would like to get involved in.
What about you? What are you planning to do about it?
Never for a moment did I intend to make any moral censure, and do apologize if it came out that way. I'm only saying what it takes to survive, and yes what I'm saying is tough medicine.
I did take a quick look at the links. I heard it all before. Forget about what most economists say, and what the pundits say. They're hired to babble a party line,and the party line is there to snow you. Nobody in power is interested in an economy for the middle class. Our country unfortunately is no longer a democracy, and hasn't been for a long time. We're ruled by a group of oligarchs, and our politicians are but quislings. These oligarchs are busy trying to take over the world right now, and on top of that think the average guy in America is living too good. Regardless of what anybody says, not only is our middle class out paying for wars, but there is a conscious effort to ratchet down our living standard. Compound that with the situation of the world's population doubling every 35 years, but the resources we extract from our planet doesn't (and can't). So, even without any evil oligarchs, we are innately confronted with having to constantly cut our consumption, and if we can't do that efficiently, then we all must lower our living standards. I don't know how much you may have travelled overseas, but I often point to the Philippines for examples, as I go there a lot and live on the economy. The cost of living in the Philippines I estimate is about 80% of what it is here in the U.S. . However, the average trade worker there makes around ten dollars a day. With those ten dollars a breadwinner puts a roof over this family's head, feeds them, and sends his kids to school. I do not want to get into what a typical family goes through to achieve that, but you can imagine. That is where the U.S. is headed. (Fortunately for the Philippines, they are on their way back up.) I know that's no good news, but that is what is.
May I recommend a very good book titled "Noli me Tangerie" written by a man named Jose Rizal. The title is Latin, but the book is in English.
I don't think medicine, tough or otherwise, is appropriate when laying blame blame for the epidemic of foreclosures at the feet of the foreclosed. THey do not represent even 2% of the responsibility. Criminality in the tens, if not hundreds of triollions of dollars was perpetrated on this country. Decent homeowners and workers did none of that. What's more the crisis was world-wide. The European crisis was touched off by ours. What does a retired Spanish farmer, now living in poverty due to austerity measures banks are forcing upon his government, what did he do wrong? His current poverty is at least indirectly caused by OUR bankers. He did everything right in his life. He worked hard, he saved, he raised a family, he - like most people in the world - had no money left to invest in the stock market. But he is suffering there because of the world wide banking system.
Oligarchs and oligarchs alone did this to him, to American homeowners, to workers.
As to Americans increasingly dependent on debt, please go to those links I provided. They will make very clear how little choice they had.
Finally, you Philippine story. Sorry, but it doesn't compare. They are living under very different economic circumstances. When I was young, my father was a union truck mechanic making about $65.00 dollars a week. My mother was mostly a stay at home mom. We lived in a one family house in the suburbs, Yes, there were plenty of sacrifices. I had virtually no toys growing up, and never had a new shirt of pair of pants. I received NO allowance. I shoveled grass or mowed lawns for 50 cents a home if I wanted money. My father never had a new car. We got most of the meat on the table from his working a second part time job as a butcher's assistant in the local supermarket, and he could get meat at a discount. But we had a house and a yard, and it was a big, big deal.
Accounting for inflation, If I were was earning the equivalent wages my father did, I could NEVER buy that house. If I was married and my wife was ALSO making the equivalent, I could STILL not but that house. And there is no way I could also raise two kids on it.
Something happened to the way the economy works for ordinary people since the time I left my childhood home. Playing by the rules, working hard and sacrificing reasonably no longer guarantee the basic security of a home and stable, financially sound family. The system has been rigged against that happening.
Again, go to the links I provided. They make (some) sense of what happened, not in terms of the crash, but of what happened in the economy before it. . After you hear the Warren lecture, in particular, you will understand why I object so much to what you're saying. Your medicine should not have been necessary in the first place, and no amount of it could have made up for the most massive theft of personal wealth this country has ever seen.
Don't get into debt, and you will have more equity. Simple as that. I take it you do not feel much responsibility toward paying your bills, and your credit score is probably near zero. That means in our capitalist society your squat. and if your squat, your nothing but a waste of time. I bet you actually think parading around in a park with a sign will change this world. Ho, Ho, Ho,.....
Cheero,
However, I do wish you well. Peace be with you.
Simple as that? It most certainly is not.
As to me, I have always paid for everything up front in cash. The total lifetime purchases I have made with credit cards was under $100.00 dollars. That's total lifetime.
But we are not talking about me are we, despite you attempt to change the subject? We are talking about the hundreds of thousands of people who had GOOD credit scores. It did not prevent them from losing THEIR FUCKING JOBS DUE TO THE GREAT RECESSION THAT THE CRIMINAL BANKERS CAUSED!!!!! It was the destruction of jobs BY THE TENS OF MILLIONS that led to the foreclosures. It was NOT the homeowners bad credit scores you judgmental, ignorant asshole.
You have for the second or third time, refused to answer the question put to you. That leads to the conclusion that you have no answer. As far as you're concerned, there is no problem with the system, only with it's victims. Sorry to tell you this, but you are a complete and total idiot. I do NOT wish you peace. I wish the forcible openeing of your willfully blind eyes and the destruction of your judgmental attitude.
Good advice avoid more debt let me pitch it to my boss and see how he feels about paying me a living wage so that I don't have to borrow against my 401k to pay my charge card so I can buy some food. Don't know though he's a banker and really likes to see interest bearing accounts flourish. Ah what the hell surly he does not want to see me living in debt up to my eyeballs so that the interest flow turns into a flood.
Don't make things cost so much and we won't have to go in debt.
Gosh, you're one sided.
HO, HO, HO Hee, Hee, Hee.
I make myself as independent as possible from the banks and the other forces trying to control me . I make myself economically resilient. I suggest to others to do the same. That includes living lean, paying for things upfront, and not getting into debt (my parents were refuges from a war, and they taught me how to live on fumes. In that I know how, I no longer have to. ) That all has nothing to do with laying blame; its merely sound advice. I do my best to help out others who are in trouble. I don't judge. Finally, I go out and do the best I can to keep bad politicians from getting re-elected, and make bankster lives as miserable as I can (won't get into details.)
By the way, please do study the Philippine economy and history a little more closely; you may find it does have a lot of relevance to what is happening to us here in the States for what happened there is happening here. And as a teacher, you may find the book by Jose Rizal, and the author himself, of interest. Please do take moment to read..
What if you want a home? That can't be gotten without a mortgage.
Even renters were hurt by the hundreds of thousands because their landlords were foreclosed upon. What do you do to avoid that?
Your advice has very little bearing on how most people are forced to live here and now.
Most people hit hard by the recession were normal, reasonable, frugal people. Most weren't spendthrifts. Most had no lavish lifestyles. None could pay for a home in cash up front. Your advise is simply off-target.
What's more, why on earth SHOULD the citizens of this, the wealthiest country on the planet, be required to, as you put it, "live on fumes"? Why should that be a requirement when the top 400 people alone in this country own the same amount of wealth as the bottom 150,000,000???!!!! When one percent ONE SINGLE BLOODY PERCENT, of the people have an income equal to 47% of the entire population? Why SHOULD fully 50% of this entire rich country be living at of near the POVERTY LINE? It is not that people should be "smarter" about their economic resiliency. They were smart enough. The issue is the obscene income inequality, the obscene concentration of political power in the hands of a few to make two different sets of rules, one for themselves, and one for everyone else. The issue is that the suffering, the losses, the destruction of dignity for fully HALF the population is utterly unnecessary, utterly immoral, and absolutely must change.
Finally, I didn't ask you what you were doing to stay afloat. I asked what you were planning to do about helping make a more equitable world, one in which the wealthy would not have unbridled power to crash a nation's economy and put tens of millions of people out of work, hundreds of thousands out of their homes, get bailed out so they lose nothing themselves in the process, and rig laws to let them get away with it?
What are you going to do about it?
Yeah, look, some people can't be reached. That's you. So, go on making yourself vulnerable and then blaming whatever circumstance is made worse by your vulnerability. So, live out your life as a child that never did learn the basics. Douse yourself in gasoline and then blame the match. Maybe hold a protest at the match company's office. LOL. Just please, don't teach a kid to think like you.
All those loans went to borrowers. All those loans have someone's name at the bottom, presumably, an adult. The public borrowed to the ceiling and hit the wall.
I have no debt and I'm weathering things just fine. Sure, that would be a mystery to you, I get that.
Debt reduces resilience, the more debt, the less resilience. Nonsense, I know. LOL.
You haven't got a clue. The overwhelming number of people were paying their mortgages. The debt was not the problem. No one foresaw the criminal manipulation of the system that would crash the economy and to an extent second only the the Great Depression.
People have a right to own their own homes. Only the very rich can pay for them up front in cash. But you are blaming people who were responsible their entire lives, made their payments on time for decades, for getting shafted by Wall Street. It is disgusting.
Some people did foresee the criminal (except that it was NOT criminal according to the rules made by the puppet masters) manipulation of the system that crashed the economy. Real (inflation-and-work-your-spouse-adjusted) income of the vast majority of Americans stagnated for decades, yet the real estate market was taking off like a rocket with foreign money (not in the least of which came from the mythical dragon that rained down CASH), and virtually everyone was jumping onboard.
Something had to give when Bush-it wanted an "ownership society," Greens-pain pushed adjusted-rate-mortgages, Cons-on-grass tightened bankruptcy law, and Burn-a-key and Paw-some tried to patch up an unraveling system.
In the context of this thread, when trying to blame homeowners for criminal mass foreclosures committed by criminal banks, what relevance does that have? How did someone, the average working man or woman, know that getting a mortgage in 1995 or so. would mean losing his or her house in 2009?
Give me a break.
In the financial world (yes, houses are part of it, too), the devil take the hindmost. Between 1995 and 2009, there were ample opportunities for the perspicacious people to make a killing in real estate and get out very well off. The only problem is that there is also the NON-negotiable rule in the financial world that the overwhelming majority riding on the rocket to the moon will inevitably crash and burn before getting there. My advice is to be alert to what the connected and powerful people (such as those in my puns - if you have problems deciphering them, private-message me) are promulgating or doing and act accordingly in your own best interest or stay out of the fray. On Wall Street they have financial phasors to vaporize what you fancy as your machine guns. If you see bad signs, RUN first and ask questions later. Do not fall for the "investing for the long term" crap because in the long term all your money (even in the so-called sure thing as a house) will disappear as fees, expenses, devaluations, commissions, taxes, crashes, etc. Money was not yours to begin with. Take a really good look at it. Jesus asked whose likeness was on it (Mark 12:16). Cannot Caesar take it back? Nay, Caesar will issue galore more or redefine what is legitimate. Money will not be yours in the end. Act as the master of your money and use it as a means to your ends (I am sure that you can think of some worthwhile ones).
Oh, my God!
Who the fuck here is talking about investments?
We are talking about ordinary people buying and living in THEIR HOMES. We are talking about people having JOBS.
We are NOT talking about people making a killing in ANYTHING, but simply people tying to GET BY in their LIVES and having a ROOF OVER THEIR HEAD.
The system FUCKED THEM . Stop trying to blame regular working people for the CRIMES committed by BANKERS.
Homes, Jobs, Roofs over their heads are all investments by somebody or due to or started with some investments. I am not saying that everyone was buying houses as an investment. However, with so many people in our demos crazy having their eyes off of the ball, what can we really expect but to have our strings pulled by the puppet masters and thank them afterwards for giving us our coital bliss? There were crimes committed in my opinion but not in OUR system of justice sprung from the ruling elites.
I want to put across the idea that even a house should only be viewed as a transient investment as long as we have our present system.
The banks committed the fraud. Keep yourself focussed on THAT, and stop supporting those who put the blame in regular working people.
The fraud was committed in the names of the regular people so they cannot be totally exonerated. Yes, the mortgage companies, banks, insurance companies, rating agencies, government regulator agencies, the federal reserve, foreign banks, foreign government policies, multiple-level securitization, high leverage, etc. all have a hand in causing the financial meltdown with global effects.
Country Wide, investment banks, Citi, J.P. Morgan Chase are probably the most culpable but if only the regular working people had behaved as Canada did (there was the Anglo boom and the Anglo bust but Canada did just fine) or as the non-Anglo world did. The less the link to the Anglo-world, the better off the non-Anglo world fared in the financial meltdown. They did NOT believe as much in our very stupid Anglo-world's economic religion of laissez faire. Tighter regulations limited the upside but it also limited the downside. You are right that we cannot count on the regular working people too much to do the right thing, especially when faced with the huge number of pages of fine prints when signing a mortgage contract. Who aside from a real-estate attorney really read through and understood the contract terms before signing at a closing? Too few people.
You stupid shit, if that person who bought the house in 1995 didn't lose their house. It was recent purchases. You obviously have never owned a house.
You stupid shit, yes, he did. When his job was disappeared by the recession caused by the BANKS, and he could no longer make the payments on his 30 year mortgage, we was foreclosed upon.
Look around you, you myopic shit. EVERYONE was hit by the bank-caused crisis (except the wealthy.)
Don't look at the facts. The loans that are defaulting are primarily circa 05,06,07,08. Sorry Charlie, but keep it up.
http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2011/11/01/bloombergs-awful-comment-what-can-we-say-for-certain-regarding-the-gses/
http://politicalcorrection.org/factcheck/201110140001
Defaults did NOT cause the total meltdown of the economy.
Unregulated derivatives did, just as they did in 1929. That's a fact you can't seem to understand. I doubt if you even know what a derivative is, or what the effect is when the bet goes south. Do you even know the phrase "over leveraged"? How about "under-collateralized"? What do you suppose happens when as entire sector of the economy is leveraged 40 and even 100 to 1 and that sector shrinks shrinks by 3%?
The housing bubble bursting would have caused some problems. It would likely have meant a small recession and some painful market adjustments. But the enormity and severity and depth of crash was caused by the banks, and the banks alone. Those are the facts. You needn't bother trying to find out more about them, since it is doubtful your brain could understand it.
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I'm going to have to agree with fleaparty on this one. I don't think he's any kind of a right winger; he's just telling folks how to fight the banks. Sure, we know the banks are evil bastards who are going to do their best to screw everybody over, but the way to undermine their evil schemes is to GET OUT AND STAY OUT OF DEBT. If we don't owe the banks anything, they can't screw us....
And this idea that the evil banks got all these people to borrow money, and then brought the economy into recession thereby allowing them to foreclose on all these people who lost their jobs and can't make payments....;Well yeh, of course that's evil but what else should one expect from evil. Now say if these people didn't take out loans, and had prepared for the possibility of losing their jobs, etc. etc., instead of leveraging to the hilt, and tossing the dice...., then the banks would not have been able to cash in on their evil scheme.
Well put, except it isn't an "evil scheme". OWS' message is one of helplessness. Fuck us and we're just helpless nothings that will let you fuck us because we have no choice. So, fuck us and then we'll blame you for fucking us later.
Credit can dangerous, but only in the hands of non-grown ups. Credit is like anything. The guy doing the selling, sells. Restaurants want your business too. United Airlines wants you to fly more. Dairy Queen wants you to have a cone. GM would like you to buy a new car every month.
But that's where being a fucking grown up and exercising free will become important. Take care of yourself. Be responsible. Be a grown up and watch how you suddenly have fewer problems.
But OWS people reject any and all talk of personal responsibility taking, even though it's more likely to create a liberated life than bitterly walking around with some idiotic sign.
Foremost, you should count the investment banks in your list of NON-grown-ups who had access to the ridiculously great amount of credit and used that for maximizing profits and crashing things globally. It turned out that they were NO financial titans but idiotic greedy fools that had convinced our regulators that they would not poop in their pants, only to shoot it out globally with the force of fire hydrants. We might have been better off with watchdogs that could have pissed off on the cesspool-linked fire hydrants!
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You idiots reject any and all talk of the criminals liable for crashing the economy and want to blame it on individuals.
Person taking out a mortgage in 1995 had no possible way of knowing that criminals would collapse the economy and take his house in 2009.
And that describes most of the "personally irresponsible" homeowners. Nearly all of those who lost their homes had been gainfully employed, responsible, tax paying, mortgage paying, homeowners. The system screw them. But God forbid that you right wingers ever admit THAT. our specialty is to blame the victims, your fellow citizens and workers. Just disgusting.
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I find there is usually an once of truth under every mountain of bullshit. I feel OWS does have a fair point. There are some smart evil people out there who take advantage of irresponsible idiots, and they should not do that. I do support OWS' fundamental effort to challenge these evil people who are making life tougher for the rest of us. They are helping me out in doing so as I too feel the squeeze from above even though I'm financially sound, and still doing fine. But I really do hear ya. Challenging evil folk takes more than just whining with a sign in a park. From the reads of most of these responses you've been getting here on this post, it is clear that most of the folks here don't seem able to take good advice. I've been saying pretty much the same thing your saying for years, and been getting the same stupid response. So much for revolution I guess.......
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Funny who's calling who the moron. Sure, the really smart people borrowed so much money that they blew up in default because they couldn't envision hard times. The dumb bad people used little or no debt and are getting through. Yeah, there's the ones that the smallest breeze doesn't blow over. Hmmm.
One. More. Time. Slowly. So. You. Can . Understand.
A. Few. Defaults. Did. Not. Cause. The. Recession.
The. Banks. Did.
Then. The. Banks. Foreclosed. On. People. Who. Only. SUBSEQUENTLY. Defaulted. ONLY. Because. Of. The. Recession. Those. Banks. Created.
People. Who. Had. Been. Paying. Their. Mortgages. On. Time. For. As. Long. As. 20. Years.
Was that slow enough for even of cognitively challenged troll like you to understand? Asshole.
Shit happens. Grow the fuck up. The less debt you have, the better able you are to handle what comes your way. Anyone that borrows money assuming everything will always be rosy is an idiot, well, like you. Oh, did I get that wrong? Those are the smart people, right? LOL Sure, because when that bad thing comes along, it'll be someone else's fault. Again, this is the garbage you were taught? Did you idiot parents default too? LOL
People did too help cause the recession. They were over-indebted. Too much mortgage debt. Too many car payments. Too much on the credit card to finance lifestyles. Too much greed for things people couldn't really afford. Now we're in a period of cleaning up those personal balance sheets and that's restraining a rebound in demand. Next up for de-leveraging is our government which now too is overly indebted.
Funny, but I'm supposedly the one that's cognitively challenged, yet I'm debt free and won't be defaulting on anything. I'm managing the recession quite well. My life didn't explode at the first tick downward in the economy or the housing market. Yeah, what a dope, I know. LOL.
The recession was caused by one party and on party only: The banks. Public debt did not cause it. Period.
No one can reasonably plan for an unprecedented, unpredicted event. This recession was the biggest since 1930. Unemployment has actually lasted longer than during the Great Depression. No one CAN plan for being permanently unemployed AND prohibited from selling one's assets simultaneously completely ignores these two facts. To accuse the bulk of American citizens of irresponsibility, because of the banks massive, unprecedented criminal behavior is plain old sick.
Public debt has been a problem. (Though it did NOT cause the recession) It has been growing due the wealth being sucked from them by the 1%, while costs have gone up. Did you even bother to go to the links? Of course not. Your investment is not in learning anything, but in blaming the victim and letting the criminals off the hook because they have the money.
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You absolute idiot, the banks didn't cause the real estate bubble or for that matter, the tech bubble in 1999 or the commodity bubble or the current Treasury bubble. Do you actually believe this blather you spew.
The banks were either stupid, or complicit.
Remember that most of the big banks are traded on the boards and there's your WallStreet connection.
Most of the biggest WalStreet banks are on the board of the FED.
Yeah, the banks did it.
You are an absolute idiot. The housing bubble itself did NOT cause the meltdown. It was the banks multi TRILLION dollar leveraged casino gambling on housing that caused it. The played Russian Roulette with economy, only the gun was pointed at everyone but themselves.
In a report released 1/27/11, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission found that 'reckless' Wall Street firms, and 'weak' federal regulators caused the crisis. 'This financial crisis could have been avoided. Let us be clear,' chairman Phil Angelides said at the Washington press conference marking the official release of the report. 'The record is replete with evidence of failures. None of what happened was an act of God.' Former California treasurer Angelides confirmed that the bipartisan panel appointed by Congress to investigate the financial crisis concluded that several financial industry figures appear to have broken the law and has referred multiple cases to state or federal authorities for potential prosecution.
Do some fucking reading.
See this is the problem, stupid fucks like you read political garbage and believe it because you have no grounding in economics and don't know your history. Tell me, was that vote unanimous?
And this is the same Phil Angelides who has stewarded Calpers and all of the union contracts that are bankrupting California. He is a real pinnacle of integrity.
If you know your economics, which you clearly don't, when bubbles burst it causes the problems we are seeing. What causes bubbles, many factors but primarily accommodative money supply. Ah ha!!!
Banks could lend with because money was cheap. Home owners could borrow because money was cheap. The same cycle occurred in 1999.
You really are dumb. What's frightening is how appalling it is that so many of you on this site don't know the basics of how this works.
I'm changing my mind, maybe we should have a competency test to see who can get a loan, because you should not.
You really are a complete moron. UNions aren't bankrupting California, Prop 13 is. It has strangled any and all flexibility that state has had financially since the day it was passed. What is hurting ALL states is the loss of revenue, both from the state and from the federal government, because the tax base has shrunk due to a little something called the Great Recession. Who caused that recession? The unions? Got news for you, shit-for-brains, if was the BANKS.
Bubbles bursting do indeed cause problems. But THIS problem's enormity wasn't the usual problem. This problem was over ONE HUNDRED TRILLION dollars bigger than the bubble due to unregulated DERIVATIVES. Idiot.
The only one who doesn't know the basics is you, and the fucktard right wingers like you.
Look what I found!!!!!!
ALEC hard at work in California!!!
http://becauseican-2old2care.blogspot.com/2011/06/ca-assembly-best-alec-liars.html
You hit the nail on the head, my man.
I would hazard to guess that you don't live in NYC or Madison, WI.
Those banks had borrowers. Sorry to break it to you.
Here's something else that may come as a shock. It becomes fully your home when you've finished paying for it. No one that defaults on a home mortgage for the money THEY borrowed is shocked to be foreclosed for non-payment. If you'd like to change that convention, we can, just make sure both sides know it upfront. Be prepared for much higher down payments.
One more shocker: The more you borrow, the faster you sink if something goes wrong. It's fucking obvious, but maybe just not to you.
Sorry to break it to you, but those borrowers did not cause the recession, they were the victims of it. The banks leveraging those debts did when housing prices fell by a fraction. It was THEY who couldn't cover THEIR bets, who couldn't cover THEIR borrowing.
You don't find it the least bu=it disgusting that the banks caused the crisis, then foreclosed on home because ordinary people were impacted by the crisis they caused. You don't find it reprehensible that the banks got bailed out of THEIR debt, and then turned around and refused to help the very people - the taxpayers who had troubled mortgages due to the BANK'S hubris - who bailed them out.
You don't find it even MORE disgusting that the programs the government set up to help these homeowners were actively undermined by those same banks, illegally, in hundreds of thousands of cases, pushing even more homeowners into the streets, and reaping in more profit as a result.
No it was not the banks fault that people borrowed money. Where is the personal responsibility.
The banks should not have been bailed out. They should have gone reorganization.
It was the banks that crashed the economy, throwing tens of millions of people out of work. It was the banks that made it impossible for them to pay their mortgages, since it was the banks that threw them out of work. And those people couldn't sell their houses (to whom could they sell them?) because they were underwater, and the banks would not allow the sale. It has NOTHING to to with personal responsibility unless you are talking about the personal responsibility of the BANKERS.
As to "reorganization" banks were leveraged between 40 and 100 times. No reorganization was possible. If those banks were not handed massive lines of credit, we would not have had a recession, but another Great Depression, exactly what we saw in 1930.
So you wanted the bailouts then what are you complaining about. You got what you wanted.
Who wanted the bailouts? No one wants surgery, either, but if it is in order to treat cancer, you have to do it.
It is the rigged system that made the bailouts necessary that is the real issue. But some people are simply too seduced by the false promises that system puts forward to see reality.
So were you and your henchmen held responsible for the corruption down at the Diplomat. How much pension money was lost when you marked up those wages. How much of the member's money was wasted in corruption Is there one set of rules for you and one set for others.
The economy was crashed by the fraud and greed of Wall Street banks. Period. But nice try attempting to change the subject.
Don't want any light shined on your fraud and greed huh?
I did not crash the economy, so you can fuck yourself with your false equivalences.
Don't worry I know the real story. Beautiful hotel though.
You don;' know the difference between your farts and your thoughts, let alone any real story.
Did the DOL visit you?
Tell it like it is - though you are likely to make him (?) stroke-out. Facts and factual truths are hard for some to take.
The borrowers bought a product they couldn't afford. People USED to have to put down 20% down to get a mortgage. Then the left came along with "fairness in housing" and relaxed all the rules.
Don't blame the banks. No one put a gun to a person's head to sign mortgage applications and loan terms and lie about their income.
What I find more disturbing is Obama spent almost $800 Billion on the stimulus, ENOUGH TO PAY OFF 90% of all residential mortgages in the country, and what do we have left for that money? NOTHING, except a big bill to the taxpayers for money that disappeared in to the coffers of ACORN, the UAW pension funds and Nancy Pelosi's study of the "Harvest Mouse". WTF is going on???
Shhh, nothing to see here, move along.
please. don't confuse them with facts, they have an agenda.
You're so full of shit is it leaking out of your keyboard. Most people were making their payments just fine until the they lost their jobs due to the BANKS causing the greatest economic meltdown since the Great Depression.
What you find more disturbing is really funny, since none of it is more than shit you are making up. Disturbed by your own lies? Good.
The public was over-leveraged. The shock of them suddenly going from saving nothing to saving about 5% in late '08 is part of what caused the downturn. It's because people remain over-extended and are at last beginning to live more responsibly that's preventing the economy from growing more sharply. It's the hang-over from years of bad decisions on a widespread scale.
Debt reduces resilience. The more debt you have, the more trouble you have enduring a downturn or misfortune. Honest, it isn't that hard. The more you borrow, the more you put yourself and your family at risk. Of course, that doesn't stop someone like from borrowing to the rafters, losing it all at the slightest bit of bad luck, and then having no idea what just happened.
Do you you just push the shit out of your ass and call it economic fact? The banks causes the recession. Lack of savings did not. Unemployment didn't go to 12% because individuals didn't save. Wall Street did that.
I thought corporations and landlords love foreclosure - gives them a cheap deal on price to which they can lay down cash and rent out at triple the rate of a mortgage. "Abolish home ownership, inflate prices, create scarcity - fuck the American dream - get wealthy off the new generation" - "Let them eat rent!!!" "Abolish Retirement!!!" "This land is our land, your home is our market!!"
Yes, turn the housing bubble machine back on! Sorry, housing appreciation isn't supposed to be an entitlement program.
how the fuck are people supposed to make hundreds of thousands of dollars when all the jobs have been outsourced and automated.
There's not enough jobs to support the population.
How do you expect someone to afford a house on minimum wage, with the cost of living so high.
well i bought a home, a year ago, but couldnt afford the taxes, so im one year behind on that, also, i noticed that when i make my 800 a month payment that 600 of it went to the bank in interest, I dont see why every american when they pay for a home, they have to buy an extra one for the bank. It seems that we should be able to cut cost here.
Oh and my daughters school is sending me to collections cause I didnt pay over a hundred dollars towards her books. Keep in mind my family hasnt owned a home for 3 generations, my grandmother still lives in a trailer park. And you ask, why is it so hard? I ask, why cant the school pay for my daughters books, they are building a billion dollar new school, I think its time government tries to live within the budget that we have too. I mean who starts a government run school and then sends out a bill to the parents to pay for the books, what were they thinking that the kids would just sit there all day like a babysitter? Im not giving them one dime.
The 500 dollar gas bill in january was pretty steep, as well as the 400 electric bill, granted this was two months, but still wow! where do they think money comes from , trees?
Does that line of thinking work for everybody (about the books, I mean)? I hope you're serious. Now, let me test you on that. What if the people buying extra books were people that had money? And let's say that not only do they have to buy extra books and pay extra for their kids to participate in school sponsored extracurriculars like choir, or basketball, but also, they had to send 50% of the tax revenue of their town to completely fund another school district in another part of the state? Welcome to Dallas, Texas, freewrite. You know, money grows on trees, right? If you have any money to loan, I'd like to borrow it from you because you seem to be a very nice lender. The laon process you decry is called amortization. You start off with a large loan and owe the interest rate on that amount, but every year the principal amount is reduced so the interest each year becomes less and less until the loan is fully paid off. If you don't understand the economics, then you shouldn't buy a home. If you didn't figure the total cost of ownership of the house (including property taxes) before you bought it, you shouldn't buy a home. The bank is making just the interest rate on your note, they're not somehow shafting you, unless you let them charge you exorbitant fees up front to make the loan, in which you didn't shop the loan very well, or simply don't have very good credit. They don't charge every borrower the same thing. They look at your history, how much you have in credit card debt, if you've been behind on your bills previously or completely stiffed a bank or credit card company, filed bankruptcy, etc. They use all this information, just as you would if I asked you for a loan, to decide the risk of the loan and the relative reward they want for making it. That's why it's good to have a very small amount of credit card debt (paid off monthly over time it shows you make timely payments), put as much down on a car or house if you're buying as reasonably possible with the cash flow that you have, and factor in all costs of ownership for each (insurance, repairs, utilities, taxes, etc.), and if you can, take 10% of every check you get and bury it in some type of savings account and forget about it. Pretend like you never got it. Also, please know that when you don't give them a dime, that someone else (like maybe the teacher) has to make up yours. If you want to get political and change the rules, be my guest, but until then, try and do your best to pay your fair share.
False demand and creating scarcity:
"Let them eat Rent !!!"
http://occupywallst.org/forum/real-estate-4-ransom-global-property-speculation-a/
http://occupywallst.org/forum/fiefdom-in-america-land-discounts-for-the-wealthy-/
Bank charges 200 percent interest (as they buy up all vacant property and let it sit empty while refusing to lend to anyone who is not rich.) =SCARCITY Government steps in creates Fannie Mae supposedly for first time credit worthy buyers though it's really designed to serve the banks being that Fannie Mae is a private company and the bank and they have a private contract that noone else is privy to or the terms to qualify (so mostly banks are still charging full price and even slapping on PMI - blatant fraud) also serves to allow private investors to throw down cash and get them dirt cheap backed by your money and taxes to rent at super high rates - so anyway ...you foreclose because you weren't aware you had a balloon payment never heard of such a thing (or you got laid off or got cancer and couldn't work and lost job or hospital forced sale of home...add another scenario here we can all think of one...) Fannie Mae now buys your house with government money from the bank and pays them off, NOW Wallstreet buys it back from them dirt cheap for a price you couldn't get and now you get to rent at triple the cost of a mortgage to live inside it - Wallstreet thanks you!! Thanks politicians for proving you are robbing people out in the open.
What do you do for a living? I'm dying to hear about all the "hard work" you do to "earn" your money.
This is courtesy of shadz:
A link to Les Leopold's interesting looking book :
In The Looting of America, Leopold debunks the prevailing media myths that blame low-income home buyers who got in over their heads, people who ran up too much credit-card debt, and government interference with free markets. Instead, readers will discover how Wall Street undermined itself and the rest of the economy by playing and losing at a highly lucrative and dangerous game of fantasy finance.
It is so obvious that all of a sudden people can not pay there mortgage.A world crisis. And never a shortage of flea bitten scabs around to protect there masters.
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The banks owe us money for the bail outs (paid for by money the government extorted from us)
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So you think that people that can afford to pay always do.
Well checks in the mail.
Not only was the mortgage default rigged but the forclosed properties that the banks refused to talk the owners are the profits to come. The banks are now becoming landlords to the people they stole the houses from.
What word would you use for people that kept houses they didn't pay for? Certainly not "stole", I'm sure. LOL.
Banks
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FRAUD!
http://occupyamerica.crooksandliars.com/node/54469/print
Crooks and Liars Wednesday February 8, 2012 09:55 pm $25 Billion Settlement for Victims of Mortgage Fraud By Diane Sweet
The New York Times reports:
Fannie and Freddie alone get a $150 billion bail-out, cash money, straight from your hard earned tax dollars. The victims of criminal actions on the part of the mortgage giants, millions of them, get $25 billion, sort of.
Note in the NYT's article, "It is part of a broad government settlement aimed at halting the housing market’s downward slide." The goal of this "settlement," such as it is, is to help the "market." It's anyone's guess whether or not this will actually help the precious market. But $2,000 isn't going to accomplish anything to ease the pain of a family after they've seen their lives destroyed by a bank that's raking in billions in profits every quarter. Don't forget now who it is that has the power in this country. Hint: It isn't you and me.
Conveniently, Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism has listed the top 12 reasons we should hate this mortgage settlement:
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Finally, someone with common sense. You hit the nose on the head
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Okay. So explain to me why the homeowner, who in most cases technically "owns" a much smaller portion of the home than the bank (who was paid to do research to ensure that the home was a good investment), has to take all of the loss on a house when it decreases in value? Why don't the banks share in the loss of equity? The homeowners sure didn't cause the crisis. The banks did.
And, do you have not one smidgeon of compassion in your little soul for the hardship some people are going through with unemployment and under-employment?
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the reason the "banks" which means the mass of depositors with funds held in that bank, and or shareholders in the bank equities, don't share in th loss of equity of the home is because they already provided the funds...up front, to the owner, for the purchase of the home....the bank has a larger stake in the value of the home than does the owner, if there is a loss.....
If I said to YOU, loan me $20 for something which had temporary collector value, like beanie babies in the late 90's, or any number of other items, then after the market disappeared said to you....there is little or no value left in what I purchased, YOU have to accept you part of the loss of value in MY purchase....what would YOU say...wouldn't you expect your $20 dollars back? or would you just say "OK you're right, you made a bad choice, and I will accept that and take the hit for your bad choice?
This is EXACTLY what he banks did, and they got the free-money bailout from the taxpayers! Well not exactly, they did not actually BUY the "beanie babies" they just speculated (bet!) on the prices and lost,. yet when they where required to pay for the bad bets and could not, they where not foreclosed on? Explain.
Well that's just a little off. The bank gets the money from the gov at less then prime then marks it up prime plus. Then if you don't pay then the gov backed insurance pays upto $250,000 toward the balance. The bank now owns a $250,000 home for free.
So let's see. They get paid no matter what.
Now the gov is backing the bank to let the home owner rent their own home after forecloser so the bank rents you your house they got for free.
Then the gov gives the banks unlimited amounts of funds to lend for home loans. Instead the banks drop everybody's credit rating and puts the money in the stock market. The banks make records amounts without loaning money.
But the banks approve the loans, they appraise the house and assess it's value. And, the homeowner, too, provided funds up front to purchase the home, does that not count? The bank is getting interest on the money lent.
Yes, the bank is getting interest for the risk it takes if you default. Approval is sometimes guaranteed if the gubment mandates it. Who was backing the loan? Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac...aka the taxpayer.
Why should I be on the hook for home loans? What do I get out of the whole transaction? A big fat tax increase if you default. The whole system of giving people stuff for nothing in return is ridiculous.
It's gotten way out of hand and created people like OWS who expect and demand stuff because they believe they are entitled. How do we, the taxpayers owe you anything???
So, let's return to a feudal society. You know, we'll have the lords of the land and the tenants. That's where we're headed if these banks can't share in the burden that the GFC has caused.
NO, let's return to sanity by not giving people the idea that they can get stuff for free. You want the house or cell phone or car, you work for it and pay for it like everyone does. See how simple that is?
Who said anyone wanted anything for free? Huh? How about risk being fairly divided? How about profits being fairly divided by paying people ENOUGH MONEY so they can actually afford these things. Because if corporations don't start ponying up we will return to a feudal society, or worse, a third world society. Is that the America you want?
Trust fund babies want it all free, if they're so fired up about nobody rides for free, then 100% inheritance tax!!
Great idea!
If we turn third world, it will be because of bad policies like dividing the wealth. It didn't work in Russia, Cuba, Tin Horn dictatorships in Africa, the Iron Curtain countries or anywhere it's been tried.
Socialism is the worst of the worst because it takes away the individual's drive to be independent and support themselves.
"Fair" is always the same with you guys... "I don't have enough, gimme some of yours".
Your world view is ridiculous. You state "Who said anyone wanted anything for free?" and then you state "don't start ponying up" in the same post. Do you realize what you're writing?
People WORK for their wages. What do you not understand about that? They have the RIGHT to a fair wage.
Where do they have this right? Where is it written? If they donm't like the wage, quit and move on. Get a job somewhere else. You have no rights to demand anything. You are not "owed" by anyone.
If you want to define a fair wage, do it in black and white terms. You can't even define a fair wage in monetary terms.
They have this right as written in the preamble of the Constitution where it states that the government exists to promote the general welfare of the American people. The capitalist system currently in place is failing the majority of Americans. Since the Constitution does not anywhere say that we must have a capitalist economic system with wages set by supply and demand, wages must be more fairly set by valuing labor differently, perhaps through a living wage.
King G3 was once stripping the people of their wealth, and now corporations are doing it. Remember what happened to the king ! the same will happen to Corporations.. people will revolt and it will be the end of the free back-ride for them.
That's right. Greed always backfires.
Of course the constitution doesn't state that. The constitution LIMITS the powers of the government. It doesn't GRANT anything.
"We must" is BS. You are not owed anything.
If you want to argue the general welfare clause, at least learn what it means fer chrissake! Read Federalist Paper # 41 by Madison.
For goodness sake, no where in the Constitution does it say that greedy corporations and the wealthy get to rip off the American people. And, it never calls for your beloved capitalist economic system that enables it.
bw, does the constitution prohibit government from owning and conducting commerce and trade ?
No.
Where did I say it did?
Do you read what's written or do you read what you want to read?
You asked me where it was written that workers have the right to a fair wage. I just bring up the point that it isn't written that we have to have a capitalist system that favors the wealthy and corporations. I never said you said it.
It doesn't really matter what it said. We wrote it and we will rewrite if necessary. 200 years ago was a different time and a different place.
Get ready for the new constitution.
Nice try. Rewrite it and you'll rue the day that there's a Republican House, Senate, and Presidency.
You suddenly won't like what will happen. Think twice. There are two sides to a coin.
We don't have to rewrite it though .. because as beautifulworld told you, it's right there in the preamble.. promote general welfar.. the whole purpose behind the constitution.. and that welfare has been subjugated by the greedy.
actually banks don't appraise property, independent companies do that....at least in my state they do...
The banks have to okay the deal and you know it.
Correct, they agree to the loan and if you stop paying, you lose the collateral as is should be.
If people actually were required to have "skin in the game" and put down a sizable chunk, they wouldn't have the mentality of buying beyond their means, because part of their savings would be at stake. The whole idea that you are owed a house and don't have to scrimp and save for it is screwy.
Gee. It'd be nice if Americans earned enough money to actually save up that sizable down payment you speak of. Face reality. Watch the video I sent you. American wages have been declining for 40 years. House prices increasing, healthcare costs increasing, college costs increasing. People can't save money that doesn't exist!
Of course prices are going up!
Because the left keeps printing more and more money for its "great plans". The more money you print out of thin air, the less value it has and the less things you can buy. Stop creating inflation through runaway gubment printing and more and more social welfare spending. There's no end to the welfare state you keep growing.
That's total crap. It is not just liberals who are printing money. They all print money. And Bush is the real culprit in recent years with his wars and tax breaks for the rich. Good grief. The U.S. went off the gold standard in 1971 under Nixon, a Republican.
1) BS
2) The wars are paid for. The social welfare state isn't.
3) The cost of the wars are much less than all the entitlements PROMISED.
4) I heard all these years how Republicans were too "mean spirited, don't care about people and didn't want entitlements like social security and medicare." And how these entitlements were passed by well meaning Democrats without Republicans. Now that the entitlements are collapsing, suddenly it's Republicans fault for promising what can never be delivered? How?
5) The wars are MINOR compared to entitlement spending. Look at the official gubment figures for yourself: http://www.usdebtclock.org
The wars are paid for, how so? Because they have been made a priority over the general welfare of the American people? Are you kidding? The entitlements are collapsing because of the cost of the wars and the tax breaks to the rich. Without those two things entitlements would be just fine. And, btw, the only entitled ones in this country are the wealthy and the corporations that suck the blood of the rest of the American people.
Because that's what the federal gubment is for. Read what the founders said.
Defend the country, protect the borders, meet out justice, sign treaty's with other countries and other than that, get the hell out the way. The founding fathers never envisioned all this other crap the left wants the gubment to foist on us.
"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them." - Thomas Jefferson
We'll never agree. It can easily be argued that no recent wars, even in the last 50 years or so, were to defend our country or protect our borders. And, the general welfare clause applies to today's society in maybe a different way than when they wrote it, but they left it broad for a reason. I think they would say that declining wages over the past 40 years is a really big issue that we need to deal with.
No, the Constitution doesn't change over time because you want it to.
Bottom line, your mentality that someone owes you something means something must be confiscated from someone else against their will to give you what you want. No such thing exists. No one owes you anything. PERIOD.
"The farmer (should) see his government supported, his children educated, and the face of this country made a paradise by the (tax) contributions of the RICH ALONE, without his being called on to spend a cent from his earnings."
-- Thomas Jefferson, 1811
The American people work for their wages and they have a right to be fairly compensated. And, an economic system should work for the benefit of the people and not vice versa.
King G3 thought everything he took was rightfully his too.. boy was he wrong !
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And yet somehow the democrats are better.
Because it isn't owned jointly: one has the equity position, the other the debt. Equity is the first loss, but also owns the upside. "Owns" is different than owns. If you don't think banks have taken losses, I don't know where you've been.
Homeowners didn't cause the crisis? They were certainly part of it. Millions of people put their names on documents out of greed, ignorance, and irresponsibility. Absolving them is simply ridiculous.
It isn't about compassion. People borrow money under terms. They buy stuff knowing full well what happens when they stop paying for it. Foreclosure wasn't invented and then sprung on people. To not get this is a slap in the face to the millions upon millions that actually pay for the place they live.
No. The banks are continuing to earn interest on the debt, on the money people are struggling to pay back when the investment has gone to pot. So, why all the risk to the homeowner and no risk to the bank? Makes no sense. In a situation like we have today the banks should be lowering mortgages across the board by some fair percentage. The American people are bearing too much of the burden. So, if the average American home has dropped 20% in value, then maybe the banks should shave off 10% of the mortgages of all mortgagees, across the board, or do it by region. Something to help real human beings get on with their lives.
And, people didn't sign on to their mortgages thinking that not only would the housing market crash, but that the job market would as well. Please.
No risk to the bank? Huh? Without risk, where do suppose those losses have been coming from?
People are free to stop paying on their houses. The can evaluate the situation, carefully considering the consequences, and then decide. No one is stopping anyone from making that decision. If you default, you'll likely lose the property and perhaps even face bank claims for a deficiency depending on the specific state and circumstances. But all that was clearly spelled out UP FRONT when they borrowed the money. None of it is a surprise.
I know people didn't envision a recession and a fall in property values. Tough shit, it's called being a grown up. Don't play grown up games if you're not prepared to be a grown up. Of course, these same people were plenty grown up to enjoy the appreciation part while that worked.
We can run the mortgage market all sorts of ways. Just be sure that both sides know the rules up front. If lenders have to accept haircuts just because prices fall, that's fine, but get ready for them to demand larger down payments and perhaps higher rates in return for the greater chance of loss. But then, of course, we'll hear the crying about the "unfairness" of needing real money to buy a house.
flea party you make a lot of good, common sense arguments here..They will shut you out soon. They only want whiny finger pointing at greedy wall street,,,,,blah, blah..OWS only exists as a group, to get O back in in Nov.
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The Global Financial Crisis was not spelled out UP FRONT when they borrowed the money. That was a surprise.
But, your last paragraph is reasonable.
Hurricanes, tornado's, rises in neighborhood crime, closing of businesses in the area, and many factors are not spelled out up-front either......everyone is taking a calculated risk, but the banks are the ones paying the funds out up-front...the banks cannot go back to the seller and say that the market changed and they want their money back.......the banks simply want the money they gave the homebuyer returned with interest......that is the deal agreed upon before the papers are finalized.....it's the buyers responsibility to consider whether they can live up to the terms or not.....and decline to accept the funds if they cannot......
Home buyers ran up the prices of homes into artificial levels because they thought the rise would never end, and they purchased beyond their means to pay back based on that assumption.....that's bad, and foolish business......those who made reasonable choices had less trouble that those who overextended.....I bought my house with the consideration of being able to pay the mortgage even if I was unemployed......yeah, I got a smaller house and payment than I COULD have qualified for....but I am safe if I temporarily lose my job.....more people should have made such considerations...
Well, I know you are perfect, slammers. I just think it's a cop out and that it is not facing reality to place all the blame on individuals and their behavior when, in fact, our economic system is set up in such a way that it encouraged greed and bad behavior by banks, decreasing wages, increasing health care and college costs etc. etc. The American people have been squeezed out of being able to live a decent life. The dream has become a nightmare for many.
that's the problem with liberal philosophy....it NEVER wants to blame the individual, so it advocates and expands the poor behavior......of course individuals are responsible for their own actions.....and should be!
That's the problem with you right wing morons: you never want to blame the bankers. THEY crashed the economy, THEY threw people out of work by the tens of millions, making it impossible for people to pay their mortgages, or even sell their homes. THEY engaged in fraud and deceptive lending, and leveraging KNOWN toxic paper, THEY had to be bailed out.
And who bailed them out? The people, millions of whom were thrown out onto the streets as their reward. But you continue to blame THEM for the economic crash and its consequences, instead of the BANKS that caused it. The poor behavior you idiots give a pass to is on the part of the BANKS, on the rigged system that puts all of the profits on their side and all of the losses on the shoulders of individuals. Blaming the victim is the right wing specialty, as is making heroes of gangsters and thieves.
And, the problem with conservative philosophy: Profits over people every time. Never blame the economic system, always use the blame and shame game on the majority of individuals so the few can profit.
You're right. See, to me that approach is lacking in compassion. It just leads to more misery with hapless people not being able to identify the real source of their ongoing pain.
Liberals don't want to do the hard work to solve problems and teach solutions to people...they want the problem to disappear, or to become someone else's problem....
and they eschew judgement, because that is "mean"...but it is much more "mean" and heartless to let people continue to fail and live lives below their capabilities, and to support people in those marginal lives than it is to allow them to fail and learn the lessons of failure....
we are now seeing the results of the advocation of the permissive support society....the war on poverty advocated and supported the behaviors that create poverty, and caused it's expansion......the safety net became a gilded cage where people were kept and told it wasn't their fault, and then they were given excuses and other people to blame for their situations......
Meanwhile, those who demonstrated opposite (correct) behaviors did well, and achieved much more comfortable lives......and the excuse makers started with the line of "fairness"......"how come you have all those things, and these people have nothing....it's not FAIR"
the answer is simply because we busted our asses and worked for them, but the excuse makers wouldn't accept that, and continued to lobby for the institutional theft of justly earned rewards for transfer to their "pets" in the gilded cages.......so they could feel good about themselves and pretend they were "helping" those poor people whose lives they destroyed.....
Most liberals, deep down, are spiteful, hateful, angry people....just look at the difference in OWS and the Tea Party.......one was polite, clean, had no trouble with law enforcement, or communities...the other vandalized communities, attacked and confronted law enforcement, shut down commerce, "occupied" public space and prevented others from using it peacefully, etc, etc.....
Liberals are hateful and angry people.....period!
agreed.....
It was greed, at the personal level. Too many are simply not willing to own up to this basic fact.
it's funny...I know some people in the mortgage industry.....and if OWS was blaming customer level mortgage brokers, and the collusion with inspectors, appraisers, real estate agents......many of who were also property owners and flippers......I might have some agreement with their accusations.....
BUT, to blame "banks" and "bankers" way up the chain, for controlling and hedging their risks seems disingenuous to me, it's OK to blame the guy in the office hundreds of miles away from the transactions and not the baseline people who colluded to "get it done"....often with the blessing of the buyers and sellers, many of whom entered into ownership with NO stake in the property at all, with low/no downpayment loans, ARM's, and other financial posturing, to have as little as possible equity in the property as possible...so when prices adjusted (and that is all they really did...they went back to reasonable levels of value) those "owners" (and I use parenthesis because they actually had little or no ownership) owed more than the house was worth.......because it wasn't worth what they paid, when they paid it, and they had no equity "cushion"
and, I also fault those who saw their equity as some sort of "fun money" account to be drawn on for luxuries beyond their means......too many people turned their equaity back into debt so they could live too far beyond their means in the short term, and are paying a terrible lesson for that mistake.....hopefully they learned something...
It was a broad-based debt bubble. Behavior of institutions AND individuals was emboldened by the stability we had. People walked up their debts and, despite what the responsibility dodging occutards say, every loan has a signature. Many of those borrowers lied like crazy to get more debt and more of the "good life" they thought it promised. Debt funded their greed.
Your last point is the most important: Learn something. But, again, the occutards point fingers everywhere except at themselves. They're the ones learning nothing. They're the ones that fail to pass on the lesson about limiting debt and why. They just bitch about bankers missing entirely the real lessons.
Shit happens. That's something earlier generations understood. That lesson was lost over the years as people forgot about what bad times could bring. Yep, they mistakenly felt comfortable walking up their debts and risks and mostly just because the downside left the common experience as the years passed.
Being in debt made a long transition from being understood as dangerous and even a moral failing in, say 1934, to something that made life wonderful by 2006. One's ability to go into debt was protected by Congress and even seen as a civil rights issues. People walked up credit cards, home equity lines, car loans, student loans, and mortgages. Wanna go on a cruise? Do you "deserve" it? Borrow for it! Then we hit a problem and the downside was fueled in part because so many common people had already tapped themselves out. Part of the jar to our economy was a fast move from a zero savings rate to something near 5% as dopey non-savers had their "holy shit" moments.
It's amazing how many people would take issue with something even as simple and as obvious as the following: Debt reduces resilience. We can all be surprised by something like a financial crisis, but your personal downside is tied to the decisions YOU MADE AS AN INDIVIDUAL before the crisis. But that's being a grown up.
You mention compassion. Compassion isn't just taking something you didn't pay for, compassion is conveying understanding. It's teaching people responsibility and the potential consequences of their actions. It's helping them understand that debt isn't always a party and someone else's fault when the party stops. It's compassionate to be a grown up.
Tell that to the the banksters, who leveraged their paper at 40 to 1, even 100 to 1 bets. When the housing bubble burst, it was THEIR debt that had to be bailed out. And the homeowner and the taxpayer were forced to lend THEM money to make THEM whole again. And the reward to the homeowners and taxpayers? The banks foreclosed on their homes. Funny how your morality is applied so selectively.
Homes become yours when you pay for them. Sorry if this upsets you. No is surprised to be foreclosed on for non-payment. The less borrowed, the more manageable are the tough times. Is this first time in life you're hearing such a concept? LOL. Who the fuck raised you?
It is the BANKS that robbed them of their ability to pay. How mind-numbingly simple does it have to get before your understand that?
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Tell it to home "owners", especially those with NOTHING down or those that did cash-out refinancings or that drew on home equity lines to finance lifestyle choices. Every loan has a name at the bottom and free will, honest, continued to exist. Grow up and take a little responsibility.
It's easy to say what you say, but you can't blame an entire citizenry for their indebtedness. There was more going on here as wages have been declining while property values also declined and property taxes increased. Many factors contributed and not just greedy consumerism which I agree is a problem. How about the cost of higher education and healthcare. These have increased astronomically while wages have been decreasing. Can't just blame regular people.
Yeah, I can blame people for their debts. You find their names on the bottom of everything they borrowed. Honest, you will. Declining wages is MORE reason to be watchful of debt, not less. Many factors did contribute, but leaving out individual greed (and ignorance) is a mistake. Funny that you mention education. Tuition increases have been fueled by indiscriminate borrowed money, much like housing. The borrowing helped CAUSE the inflation.
I don't limit my blame to ordinary people, but I surely don't exclude them. Institutions too walked up their risk taking in reaction to the long period of stability. Downturns are good at times as they clip bad behavior and re-teach lessons. While stability was great with us not having a serious downturn since the earlier 80's, it fed risk taking and carried a lurking downside. Banks walked up risks because they didn't seem like risks and John Doe in his life had never seen anyone get their car towed away.
I'm lucky. I had Depression era grandparents and, while I got sick of their stories as a kid, I never forgot their stories. I'm lived debt free for years, including my home. That was all learning and then choices.
The most compassionate thing now is to teach. Promise to tell a young person how debt can blow your face off. Make sure they know that debt isn't random, that it's their choice. Show them by example. That's compassion, not re-writing the rules and blaming others like your 12.
You are a fast typist. Easy to blame individual behavior which, btw, provides an easy talking point for the wealthy. "If you're poor or unemployed, blame yourself." I'm not buying it. It is the economic system and the way labor is valued and the way the tax structure is set up and many other very complicated matters that contributed to all of this far more than individual lacking.
Wealthy people had losses too. But losses are magnified by borrowed money, whatever you economic level. That's why it's called "leverage". Many people simply don't get the magnification part when things are going well. But when things don't go well and the magnification part accentuates the downside just the same, they don't know what hit them.
Like I said, if I were to blame one single thing, it would be stability itself. Stability provided the environment where it seemed OK to walk up risks. We gradually lost memory, people and institutions, of how debt can bash your head in. When things went down, everyone had too much debt already to step in as buyers. It isn't as sinister as OWS imagines.
Also like I said, teach younger people about debt. If you want to teach them to hate banks, fine, but tell them that the best way to express it is to limit their borrowing. If anything good is to come from this pain, it can be the social scar that acts as a lesson that'll protect us from taking on too much debt for maybe the next 75 years. If a thrift generation is born out of this, that'll be the most liberating and compassionate outcome I can think of. Of course, that sadly is the furthest from the typical occupy-peron's mind.
Americans borrow because they cannot afford to live on their wages! Are you aware that half of the jobs in this country now pay less than $26,000 per year? Try living in my town on that. Can't be done.
Borrowing makes you worse off, not better off. It just takes a little while of borrowing before that becomes obvious. Because before too long, you can't borrow more and the interest bill is now deducted from that $26k. Having a low income is reason AGAINST going into debt, not a justification.
You think too simplistic about that income number. Many making low incomes are teens, older people, and those supplement another in the household that also has a job. For those truly making that amount and trying to get by, ask yourself why. Name me three things in our society that serve to increase the numbers of people in that labor pool. Let's see how you do.
So, your idea is a cycle of borrow and default. Nice.
Do me a favor and watch this video. In the first 5 or so minutes Richard Wolf explains why Americans are in so much debt, but worth watching the whole thing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQ0q4rUd5Do&feature=related
Screw compassion. We're giving away cell phones and cash for clunkers to third generation welfare cases. Enough is enough. The purchaser takes the loss because he gets the product. When a car depreciates in value, why the hell would the seller be responsible for the depreciation? The seller gets cash, the buyer gets a product. Cash doesn't depreciate (or debase) as fast as a product. Any idea other than that is ridiculous. Why would any trade be done if the seller was responsible for a depreciating product after the sale? The whole notion is ridiculous.
Start seeing the world as it is, not as you want it to be.
"Screw compassion." Very nice. "Screw profit." How about that?
Watch this video and learn about why Americans are in so much debt in the first place:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQ0q4rUd5Do&feature=related
The real problem is, people took out the equity in their houses to buy ATV's, boats, f350 super duty diesel trucks that get 2 mpg and 30" rims for them. Then when the market crashed.. UH OH how am I gonna pay my 2 mortgages? OH NOES! IT"S NOT MY FAULT!
ya right.
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Well put, fleaparty. It really is a flea party, isn't it?
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