Posted By: evilconservative  on Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Oh please!  Can you say, "I bought more house than I could afford and now I want the government to bail me out."?

Posted By: evilconservative  on Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Not to mention that pesky INTEREST ONLY honey of a deal.  That is, until interest rates go up.

Posted By: Dauric  on Wednesday, June 18, 2008

The ones who went in to this intending to commit fraud or just flipping houses I completely agree with evilconservative, however there are the new home-owners that relied on the knowledge and expertise of the lenders to tell them how much they could afford and how the system worked.

Normally this is to the lender's advantage, if the borrowers can't make the loan payments the lender is out money.

Unfortunately a business in selling package deals of loans became profitable. At the time it was a winning situation, most borrowers paid back the loans with the interest, and only a few defaulted, the loss of their loan interest was more than absorbed by the remainder of the package. The selling of the combined loans became so in demand that the lenders needed more and more borrowers to meet the demand. Since they were selling the loans outright it divorced them from the risk of signing up risky borrowers. The larger the loans, the more they could sell the total package for, so they're looking for more and more people to take out loans and the larger the loan the better. A number of loan evaluators have gone on record as having been told to keep quiet about the risky loans by their superiors.

Grand upshot: Everyday Joes and Janes looking to buy a house without much more than a high-school knowledge of finance (Ie: Barely any) were told by people with college degrees in business and marketing how to fill out the forms. The Lenders, being in the position of authority, could tell the borrowers just about anything and be believed by the borrowers.

Again, If the borrower intended fraud then they can rot, but if they were misled by people who should have known better the fault and the culpability lies with the lenders.

$0.02

Posted By: C Holland  on Wednesday, June 18, 2008

This cartoon has a poor quality drawing, done by a person that I hope is in trouble with his own mortgage. Greedy banks and ignorant buyers

shouldn't blame any thing on Bush, they need to look in the mirror!

Posted By: Nathan  on Thursday, June 19, 2008

ok i hate to say it but i disagree with you all.  I have lived in the same house for 14 years and we have a 30 year loan. back 2 years ago there was a big ice storm in my area and we had a tree fall on our house. well because of this are house was taken by the fire department because it was not safe to live in. our insurance agent said that we were not fully covered in this  so we had to pay like $3000 out of our pocket. To most of you $3000 isnt that much but to someone who was already living paycheck to paycheck it was horrible. so now 2 years later we are about to loose our house because we cant afford our house payment and we are about to have our house foreclosed.  



so if you guys still think that email me at nathanreedracing@yahoo.com

Posted By: Individual  on Sunday, June 22, 2008

Each person is responsible for themselves. If predatory lenders take advantage of someone that's horrible, but ultimately the fault lies with the person who failed to research one of the biggest investments of their lives. The downfall of this country is coming from the idiots who blame the Government for not taking care of everyone when everyone should be taking care of themselves. If the Government took care of everything in our lives we would be Communists.



If you don't like companies that take advantage of people, then stop doing business with those companies. That's how Capitalism works.

Posted By: Dauric  on Monday, June 23, 2008

I have to disagree with Individual, the people thought that they -were- doing the research by coming to a professional. If I need to evaluate the structure of a building I don't research it on the internet and do it myself, I hire a structural engineer who's done more work and studied more aspects of that field than I could ever do. Traditionally lenders are served by taking on only qualified borrowers and you could at one point trust that a banker wouldn't give someone a loan unless they were professionally certain that the borrower could pay it back. The "Loan Bundling" practice changed that, and changed a transaction that few if any home buyers would even know to research. It was the job of the financial professionals to behave like professionals.

Espousing pure capitalism is to forget lessons of the past, like the book "The Jungle" about what happens in the meat-packing indust