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So you think 2008 could have happened without housing being involved?
I made my thoughts clear when I noted earlier that housing was not fundamentally involved in the problems. The misbehavior and abnormalities that drove the crises were rather in the unchecked financial sectors. Reagan was similarly not fundamentally involved in the breakup of the Soviet Union. Big changes occurred in both instances, but the proximate causes of them did not include housing or The Gipper.
There is no point in trying to erase history, and there was no realistic way for housing markets to have been in "a lull" given the interest rate declines of 2000-2003. And the vast majority of "new homeowners" -- many of whom were actually not new at all, but rather already existing homeowners doing heloc's and refi's in order to improve their cash-flow situations -- did indeed have no problems servicing their new loans. The original wave of defaults (2005-2007) was primarily due to interest-rate effects on notes that had been written and sold-to-fail on rising rates by unscrupulous private brokers and bankers whose interests ran to little more than their own profits and bonuses. They should have stopped creating and selling off new loans as supplies of qualified borrowers dwindled. But they couldn't bring themselves to do that.
Consider on an only slightly different plane that blame for the collapse of the original Ponzi scheme lay with Charles Ponzi, not with the regimes of international postal reply coupons he had claimed to be making profits from. Very much the same sort of situation was in play 80+ years later. The fault lay then as well with the villains. Not with the toys they had been playing with.
One of my local credit unions has been advertising 100% financing plus they pay up to $5000 in closing costs. No idea of the terms but it seems frothy
Money to lend has long been in the system. Confidence in consumers has picked up lately however. Perhaps it's time for lenders to start attracting borrowers again rather than pushing them away.
I'd add to that list the concept of property rights which can be enforced through the legal system.
Yes. but not really"modern" so much. Just "the rule of law" would have covered most of it, though matters surrounding intellectual property rights may still be at issue today.
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