Reply #259: I don't know about "dumb" [View All]

[The Green Manalishi]

But for a lot of folks, housing prices had been going up the entirety of their adult lives. Combined with allegedly reputable talking heads saying that the old paradigms were dead and seeing people getting rich quick in real estate- I don't think the guilt lays in any one place.
People believed the "mainstream media", the "authorities" that we were in a new type of economy.

*AND* their experience told them that for a big chunk of their lives property had been going up in value.

*AND* banks and other lending organizations were not doing anything resembling proper underwriting. - and the grain of truth that gives some credence to one charge of our opponents is that there were attempts to redress previous "redlining" that in retrospect allowed some people to get mortgages who shouldn't have been allowed to proceed (any more than I should be allowed to fly a jumbo jet; it doesn't mean anyone was evil or stupid, but in some cases not qualified, either by amount of stable income of knowing how to budget). So people were getting mortgages who wouldn't have qualified a couple of decades before. As a previous poster said, blame the banks *and* the politicians for creating the environment where such irresponsibility was not only possible but almost required in order to compete in some cases.

AND a bit of "greed", actually a completely rational and normal desire to partake of a larger piece of an apparently expanding pie for the most part with the usual percentage of fools who think only of "get rich quick" and the vastly smaller subset of those who actually do, through sheer blind luck. Odd, though, it's "entrepreneurial spirit", and "innovation" when the fat cats do it, "greed" when the middle and lower classes do it, IMHO.

On a similar note, having just been through a lay off; the wife and I saw this coming, and had been living really cheaply for the last 5-6 years; our co workers in their early to mid 20's had pretty much never seen a bum economy. Co workers going out and buying new cars and trucks and timeshares and clothes on credit and thinking us 50 somethings to be hopeless fuddy duddies because we saw a recession/depression coming.

So, that's my take; enough misfortune, miscalculation and bad luck to go around without the need to create any villians.