Americans Suffer for Poor Decisions

[Freebird2007]

1) Cnn and the gloom and doom networks are just trying to sell a story. They make it seem like the economy is worse than it really is. They try and make it seem that everyone is losing their houses and that all mortgages are being foreclosed on. far from it

[jimboburnsy]

Originally Posted by Redrover

Every time I visit the CNN webpage and see yet another doom and gloom story about our economy, I am more and more aware that the average American is paying an extremly high price for the decisions of others. Very few of us had anything to do with the very stupid decisions made by mortgage lenders but when the house of cards came crashing down, we were the ones buried under the rubble. The greed of brokers like Bear Stearns and the impact of their defaults was huge and it is evidently happening across the board and even with Freddie and Fannie. Why must we Americans suffer because a small contingent of reckless and greedy people put our futures at risk for their own enrichment?

Stop right there. What on earth makes you think that we, the collective American end consumers, had nothing to do with the mortgage crisis?? I had an ARM proposed to me while I was house hunting. I had never bought a house before, never studied mortgages in school and had no particular prior knowledge of lending or home-buying. I knew that an ARM was a stupid, stupid option because I read the contract and did some research. It isn't like the information was difficult to come by. The sub-prime (which actually means "less than good") collapse was brought about because enormous numbers of people were not doing their homework. The fact that they were selling like hotcakes places at least an equal portion of the blame and greed on the people who signed on the dotted line. You and I are responsible for our own decisions and if you don't know what you can afford and can't tell sh*t from shinola, that's your problem and no one else's.

Originally Posted by Redrover

The greed of brokers like Bear Stearns and the impact of their defaults was huge and it is evidently happening across the board and even with Freddie and Fannie. Why must we Americans suffer because a small contingent of reckless and greedy people put our futures at risk for their own enrichment? In what real-life scenario if any of us were to totally mishandle and waste our money would we be handed another chunk to repeat the behavior?!

Every one of the large mortgage lenders was heavily invested in sub-primes because there was an enormous demand internationally for a secure, high-yield investment to replace government bonds. As it turned out, giving bad loans to people with bad credit wasn't so secure. These companies were able to sell packaged sub-prime mortgages like hotcakes and they certainly didn't do anything to prevent the eventual collapse, but the apparent insecurity of the packaged mortgages came down to the individual purchasers who took terrible loans with awful terms because they wanted that house that they couldn't afford. All angles of this equation are equally guilty of stupidity, laziness and greed. There are no innocents.



So yeah, you're exactly right about Americans suffering from poor decisions, but from their own.