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I think the best answer was given by George Will today when he told George Stephanapolis--------"We the American people "
As other posters alluded to , George Will tracked the declining savings habit of Americans through decades and when that amount reached minus , the bubble broke.
When the BANKS stopped holding the crap the were creating,and pushed it on to Wall Street and the rest of the world as SAFE,SECURITIZED DEBT and bribed the Rating agencies to go along with it,thats when we went on the path to hell.YOU GUYS ARE THE MAIN CULPRITS! Many hardworking, honest people got duped by banks and mortgage brokers,no one reads the fine print when some slickster is blowing sunshine up their a**es.Spare me the fine distinctions of the financial world.Analyst,Broker/Dealer,Financial Advisor,Investment Banker,etc.You are all knee deep in sh**.Don't play the "its not my fault game" here. As far as the culture of responsibility,so far the banks are the only ones taking my money!
The whole point is everyong got theit cut fron the guy who made up income to the CEOs. I went to a presentation by one of the companies selling interest only loans in 2006. A friend of mine who understsnds how things really work ask a number of questions and after awhile he wouldn't answer them so not to tave ruined his spiel to the sheeple. We concluded that coming up was major bad news.
He is just as responsible as the sheeple who were so excited as was this boss and the agents who got their pieces. Everybody was winning until the music stopped. All of them should have known that it was just a dog and pony show.
We need a culture of responsibility badly. If we leard from this it might be a beacon for the future but so far all we hear is 'poor me' and see is finger pointing.
A citizen mailed an e-mail to CNN that I thought was pretty good.
His suggestion was that any citizen who lied on their mortgage application should be ruled ineligible to recieve bail out money for that mortgage.
Anyone who used their home as an ATM machine and took out equity to just spend should also be ineligible. On another thread I posted a letter I wrote to the local paper in which I think everyone is at fault.
Could not figure out how to put a link directly to it so bear with me if you have already read it. Here it is again.
"It is human nature to blame someone other than ourselves. This financial crisis is not the result of just lousy decisions by banks. It is also the result of borrowers overextending and spending more than they could afford. It is unscrupulous mortgage brokers and realtors for enabling borrowers and helping them overextend. It is the result of easy money and low interest rates by the Federal Reserve. It is the result of failed political policy which cajoled and forced lenders to make loans they should not have in order to meet goals of housing for everyone, especially to those who could not afford it. Therefore it is not just bank executives that should be made to pay the price with their jobs. The political policy makers should also lose their jobs as well as mortgage broker and real estate executives. For the borrowers who cannot make their payments they may lose their homes. The bottom line is if everyone who took out a loan continued to live up to the terms of that loan, there would be no financial crisis. This crisis is of everyone’s making and we all need to learn personal financial responsibility from it. If you cannot afford to pay for something then don’t buy it."
Anyone who used their home as an ATM machine and took out equity to just spend should also be ineligible. On another thread I posted a letter I wrote to the local paper in which I think everyone is at fault.
Could not figure out how to put a link directly to it so bear with me if you have already read it. Here it is again.
"It is human nature to blame someone other than ourselves. This financial crisis is not the result of just lousy decisions by banks. It is also the result of borrowers overextending and spending more than they could afford. It is unscrupulous mortgage brokers and realtors for enabling borrowers and helping them overextend. It is the result of easy money and low interest rates by the Federal Reserve. It is the result of failed political policy which cajoled and forced lenders to make loans they should not have in order to meet goals of housing for everyone, especially to those who could not afford it. Therefore it is not just bank executives that should be made to pay the price with their jobs. The political policy makers should also lose their jobs as well as mortgage broker and real estate executives. For the borrowers who cannot make their payments they may lose their homes. The bottom line is if everyone who took out a loan continued to live up to the terms of that loan, there would be no financial crisis. This crisis is of everyone’s making and we all need to learn personal financial responsibility from it. If you cannot afford to pay for something then don’t buy it."
So, what about those that can/could afford it, but are now caught up in the storm? Those millions of people unemployed? They're at fault too right?
Basically, the public trust to banks was violated and they lended and created money for those who shouldn't have received it in the first place in hopes of meeting investor greed.
Ultimately, it's not just this credit crisis, the problem has been brewing for a long, long time... the credit crisis just amplified it and broke the camels back. Middle class Americans have been losing wealth because of both monetary policy, government policies, and corporate business policies. If it wasn't for the substitution of credit for income because of the increasing divide between the wealthy and the rest (GINI Index)... Credit wouldn't of become a necessity for life.
Prowl the threads here, and you'll find a wealth of information.
Ultimately, it's not just this credit crisis, the problem has been brewing for a long, long time... the credit crisis just amplified it and broke the camels back. Middle class Americans have been losing wealth because of both monetary policy, government policies, and corporate business policies. If it wasn't for the substitution of credit for income because of the increasing divide between the wealthy and the rest (GINI Index)... Credit wouldn't of become a necessity for life.
Prowl the threads here, and you'll find a wealth of information.
-chuck22b
This is absolutely right.
There were a whole bunch of complex and interrelated factors which contributed to the current crisis. These include conflicting policy goals, a patchwork regulatory structure, spotty regulation, an extended period of low interest rates, excess liquidity, increasingly complex financial instruments, ineffective risk management and skewed financial incentives for both individuals and financial institutions. All of these factors, each individually manageable, came together over a number of years to create forces more volatile and damaging in the aggregate than any or all of the contributing factors alone.
Using a house as a short-term investment vehicle is the root cause of all of this. It spurred relentless greed and an unsustainable living arrangement, and it's finally caught up to us.
The root cause of the financial crisis is Republican voters. I stopped contributing to my 401K the month the Supreme Court chose Bush. It was obvious then that disaster was on its way. Even though Democrats are partly to blame, I'm confident that Gore or Kerry would not have ignored reports of janitors & fruit pickers buying $500K houses with option ARMs, and they certainly would not have encouraged such behavior like Bush did. Nor would they have started a war based on lies or borrowed & wasted $5 trillion in general.
The true cause is fiat based monetary system and lose credit markets. The elite can easily make credit easy make the economy boom and then make credit hard to get for a short period which drives asset prices to the floor. It even drives asset prices BELOW their true value because of fear discount and hard to get credit.
If we had gold and silver it would be significantly more difficult to engineer such collapses on a large scale (they would still occur due to herd mentality and misvaluation of risk).
Hi killer2021,
Add to that silver and gold is subject to hoarding. In the electronic age no one is going back to pure specie anyway so it will be electronic . You can be sure if we are put on a commodity standard it will be a fractional system and they will make a killing since they will be sure to be sitting on the commodity before they monetize it.
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Personal Responsibility
