CNF2002 wrote:
Translation: A huge number of people cashed in their equity, raided their house like it was a piggy-bank, in the wake of the huge real estate boom we've been having. The market has turned, their risky loans are doing exactly what they are
supposed to do (ARMs adjust, interest-only starts tacking on principle payments, negative amortized loans readjust to pick up the slack of the earlier underpayments). Worse, these borrowers had poor credit to begin with (most likely from other debt and late payments) and should never have been given loans in the first place and...well, I just have a real hard time feeling sorry for them.
Am I a jerk?
No I wouldn't be so unkind to call you a jerk, CNF, not really (
) but on the evidence presented I would say you had bought into the prevailing social insanity and lost touch with your native powers of reasoning. I don't see awful, irresponsible people, here; I see people encouraged and sometimes forced unnecessarily to compete with each other by crazy forms of social organisation; I see bizarre and irrational institutions.
Case in point:
Darth Snootchie wrote: Congress can legislate against predatory loan practices, but it would be detrimental to credit markets as a whole. I heard rumours of this, but I hope it doesn't pass
Weirder and weirder!
Only the terminally indoctrinated could take something like this seriously.
Does your lack of sympathy extend to the children of the 1 million families thrown out "into the cold", to their families and friends and to everyone affected by the social dislocation that will result from this. Is one million displaced people a desirable social end? Does sneering at the families who may have made unwise gambles on the money markets when the opportunities presented themselves, solve the problem? I know it's hard (we are not taught to do it and it is rather more difficult than a withdrawal of sympathy) but try thinking systemically instead. Scapegoating individuals is just a tabloid indugence.
I look at a house and see a product of human effort and ingenuity, a simple item which (to the uncluttered mind) appears to have been carefully designed to satisfy a human need - an obvious and rational social undertaking, you might think. Shame then, that there is no room for anything quite so obvious or rational in our world. In the crazy universe of the commodity, real tangible houses designed for living in dissolve themselves into economic categories which then spin off into weird market orbits that have very little to do with human need at all, and everything to do with exploitation and sectional interest.
I suppose, though, that the system makes things sufficiently complex and woolly to justify the livings earned by those arch mystics: economists and accountants
. Keeps some people happy!
There is nothing in this whole damn universe more psychotic or sociopathic than capitalism in crisis. If it weren't so destructive, it would be hysterical.
An awful lot of people will suffer in this recession. Most of us will have little concept of what it is all about beyond the government propaganda that gets pumped into our homes via the media. When it is not lying, the media unquestioningly accepts what "is". Unfortunately, what "is" is not necessarily rational or desirable. Cover your ears mate, and start thinking for yourself.
