Everybody becomes a hustler

[phantom power]

People who default strategically and lose their houses appear to understand the consequences of what they're doing. Piyush Tantia, an Oliver Wyman partner and a principal researcher on the study, said strategic defaulters "are clearly sophisticated," based on the patterns of selective payments observable in their credit files. For example, they tend not to default on home equity lines of credit until after they bail out on their main mortgages, sometimes to draw down more cash on the equity line.

Strategic defaulters may know that their credit scores will be severely depressed by their mortgage abandonment, Tantia said, but they appear to look at it as a business decision: "Well, I'm $200,000 in the hole on my house, and yes, I'll damage my credit," he said of defaulters. But they see it as the most practical solution under the circumstances.

http://www.latimes.com/classified/realestate/news/la-fi-harney20-2009sep20,0,2560658.story

I don't want to hear one conservative complaining about this. We are told incessantly that people should make such economic decisions. Indeed, much of modern economics has insisted that it's rational decisions like this that make free markets efficient.

Is it moral to default on their financial obligations unless they have no choice? I'm sure that people wouldn't have thought so once. But that hasn't been the ethos of the past few decades, by a long shot. And in a world where there are banks being bailed out by the trillions and CEOs are paid salaries and bonuses in the millions despite their epic failures, it's hard for me to see why the average "savvy" homeowner should be looked at askance for essentially doing the same thing. It's the natural result of a culture that averts its eyes when the leaders of its financial sector game the system for their own profit. Everybody becomes a hustler.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/rational-economic-decisions-by-digby-la.html

[w4rma]

1. And this is the underlying truth that our financial system currently works on.

Whether or not the PR game of the "Masters of the Universe" try to sell you otherwise.

[imdjh]

2. I have been listening to rightwing radio- the sponsors are ALL crash businesses and professions.

Gold investment companies.
Gold buying company.
Credit repair.
Debt consolidation , negotiation, or bankruptcy.
Divorce lawyers


Glen Beck is the spokesperson for one of the gold investment companies.
Dennis Prager and Michael Medved have "promotional codes" (their names) you can type in for some kind of special treatment at some of these places.


I love how the right wing would love for us to believe that they are the desirable demographic, the salt of the earth. Well nothing tells you what to think about an audience like the businesses that target them.

[patrice]

3. Some of us are working on more concrete value based economies. You can't eat gold.

Labor adds value.