I think there was some predatory lending but most people were just stupid and keeping up with their neighbors.

You don't buy a house you can barely afford at one interest rate only to have that rate be adjustable when there is no way you could afford it at the higher rate.

I started looking at buying a condo a few years ago - I was offered a mortgage amount based upon credit score alone and they said I could use stated income vs. actual income. Payments would have been "interest only" and I would have barely been able to afford it then. If I had actually gone through with it I would have been SoL now.

Read the fine print people.

The market is supposed to hit bottom around December of next year. Don't give up hope on buying Betty. You'll need 20% down or money for PMI and stellar credit to get a mortgage but housing isn't done dropping.

I think now is the perfect time to revive that plan to let people take the money they contribute to social security and invest it in the stock market and mutual funds.

:rolleyes:



In other news:


Swell, even Chavez is mocking us now.

That was great!

I still support allowing individuals to invest their social security contributions (within defined parameters for age targeting).

"It sickens me to see talk of how to limit the amount of money the people who made the horrible decisions walk away with when we should be talking about how much they're going to lose."

THIS!

What the hell?!

Deal said near on bailout.

:mad:

God I hate Congress. HATE. There seems to be the belief that asking aggressive questions is good enough opposition to things. Sit in front of the TV cameras, talk tough, and then go ahead and vote for whatever it is you were just railing against anyway.

There is no way that the bailout plan was fixed in a day with a few little compromises. It was lightyears away from something that isn't just throwing good money after bad. I know there was no way they were going to follow my advice (jerks didn't even ask) and just leave the dummies who lost their money to their fate, but I had hoped they'd stand by the outrage they showed publicly and not let themselves get bullied into some rush job by the President.

But here we go. Several hundred billion dollars being handed to people who've already gambled and lost, followed by countless foreclosed homes that the government's just going to hang onto to avoid depressing housing prices. Executives will have the chance to get multimillion dollar compensation packages and the financial industry will have learned the valuable lesson that they can play these ridiculous paper games, inflate bad investments, and the government will come charging in and clean up their mess.

I guess the only hope is that the analysts are right and that the restrictions on executive compensation will make most banks hesitant to take advantage of the dela and it just fizzles anyway.

Wasn't Bush just saying a few weeks ago that the economy was bascially sound? How can he go from that to OMG the sky is falling !11!!11!!!!

Because he's Chicken Little - LMFAOZOMGIGGLEZ

Because Bernanke just had a "Come to Jesus" meeting (behind closed doors, meaning the economy would suffer from hearing what he had to say) with Congress (and presumably POTUS) about the state of the economy and told them they have to take action immediately to avoid complete collapse.

Among the least-surprising news articles of recent times:

Students are turning away from careers in banking