Bye Bye Banks and Wall Street

[Disneyphile]

To me, success and wealth are measured by the quality of the people in our lives and how we spend our time, not by what objects we own.

I know of many very successful people who rent their home, and I also know some much less successful people who own theirs. A home is what we make it, whether it be rented, made, or purchased.

[BarTopDancer]

What happened to the saying "when something is to good to be true it probably is?"

[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by BarTopDancer

What happened to the saying "when something is to good to be true it probably is?"

What happened to it is that it's a nice little platitude, but reality is not platitudes. It's just a wee bit more complex than Bartlet's Book of Quotations.

Look what's happening. "Our economy is basically soun......what? It's the BANKS that are losing money?! Oh sh*t, open the coffers!!"

I can't possibly say this any more clearly - I do not want consumers who made poor decisions off the hook any more than I want the sheisters with the money off.

But the reality is, we're dug in deep and we're going to need to do some backfilling, to use a mediocre analogy. It'd be nice if they backfill and get the playing field back to even instead of digging the dirt from the low side onto the high side. Because as long as someone in a two sided deal has absolutely nothing to risk, people are going to get taken advantage of, putting the value of MY home at risk.

[BarTopDancer]

Originally Posted by Ghoulish Delight

What happened to it is that it's a nice little platitude, but reality is not platitudes. It's just a wee bit more complex than Bartlet's Book of Quotations.

Thanks (and thanks to Alex and Moonie too). I am trying to understand this in the scope that it is. I get why it's happening, trying to understand the different thoughts of fixing it.

[The Lovely Mrs. tod]

Originally Posted by BarTopDancer

What happened to the saying "when something is to good to be true it probably is?"

No one makes a decision knowing it's the wrong one. Alex nailed the lenders' sales pitch perfectly. I can understand consumers feeling abused and resentful of the mere fact that the government is even considering bailing out the banks. Or home owners. But I doubt most of these people intended to default. Lenders refused to negotiate, they refused to modify, some lenders simply sold property without telling the homeowners until the sale was complete.

Had these lenders taken some responsibility for their part in this mess when it started to simmer instead of putting it on the back burner and pretending it wouldn't explode there's a distinct possibility that there would be no need for a bail out. This one was a bad deal, but, I think, it's inevitable that one will be necessary down the line.

[wendybeth]

Another problem adding fuel to the mortgage fire is the 2005 BAPCPA law, which severely limited a person's ability to file Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Credit card companies, etc, can garnish wages -which they do, leaving the debtor with little choice but to stop paying other things, like mortgages. It doesn't take much to find yourself in financial straits, especially not these days. Most people are a paycheck away from the poorhouse. Illness, layoffs.....anything can happen to any one of us here that would be our financial undoing, yet we are left twisting in the wind while the government takes our tax dollars and bails out the big boys. No wonder people are so pissed off.

[Morrigoon]

iSm: it becomes your problem when your HOA can't afford to maintain your building because nobody's paying HOA dues on the foreclosed condos.

That's what's happening in our neighborhood. So many defaulting homeowners have simply stopped bothering to pay up their dues that our HOA is strapped for cash right when we have a major termite tenting/painting project going on (one that is LONG overdue and can no longer be postponed).

However you may feel about bailing out the banks, or the defaulting homeowners, etc, the reason that the government is getting involved is that it's not just the wrongdoers or the foolish who will pay the price.

There were lots of people in the 20's who didn't buy stocks on margin, but when unemployment hit 23.6% IT WAS EVERYBODY'S PROBLEM. So you can sit back on your heels and laugh at all the people who are not like you and did things you didn't do getting taken down by their actions. But they're taking you down with them, your head just hasn't gone below water yet. And if you wait till then, it'll be too late. Oops, it probably already is.

[PanTheMan]

Well... Bush needed the icing on his cluterf*ck of a presidency.

Mission Accomplished!

[innerSpaceman]

Geebus, Goonie, stop exaggerating my position. I'm not sitting back and laughing.

I'm not even that much less concerned than most. I just don't favor the bailout plan because I don't think it would work. The current version is soundly unfair, but I also think the concept is tragically flawed.


So I think we're screwed either way. And I know I'm not coming out of this unscathed, and I'm not "laughing" at folks who will be coming out of this far worse ... or not coming out of this at all.

[BarTopDancer]

The government should take money from the golden parachutes of the CEOs and Presidents of the failed businesses to get their bailout money. While I don0t' support a cap on what a person can earn, I do have a huge problem with someone getting 11 million dollars for a weeks worth of work. I also have a huge problem for someone getting millions for running a company into the ground. Why do they get so much money and their employees get what they can from unemployment.