It's no accident that so many of the foreclosures are ethnocentric. Shove a stack of papers that even lawyers have difficulty understanding at a janitor or assistant manager at Taco Bell with the assurance that "Housing prices always go up," or "If you have trouble later, you can always refinance - and take some cash out," and "You will never get wealthy paying rent - the majority of American's wealth is the value of their home."

"You'd better hurry - prices are going up so fast that if you wait, you'll be priced out of the market," and "They're not making more land," are also personal favorites of mine.

It was a Bush/Greenspan scam - a bubble intentionally created to rescue Bush from the recession Greenspan had created by repeatedly raising interest rates in an election year to throw the election to Bush. Unfortunately, the Clinton economy was too strong and the hikes bit Bush instead.

When that happened, Greenspan cranked up the printing press, crashed interest rates to insanely low levels and recommended (in sworn congressional testimony) that banks engage in "creative financing" to get people into homes while pushing aside any and all feeble attempts at regulation.

Thus Bush could claim a surging economy and an "ownership society" while the Wolves of Wall Street were running rampant. It got him re-elected, but God help the next president, who must get busy cleaning up the mess or preside over the end of America.

PS: Much more moral to get rich the Friedman way - marry a billionaire.

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The lenders and the lendees are both at fault and neither one wants to take responsibility for their actions.

Legally speaking however, lenders are not allowed to get IRS filings. If lendees tell them they make more money than they really do there isn't much the lender can do to verify that. So they mainly just look at credit score and trust the lendee to tell the truth.

Lendees are not children, they are adults. A major problem with this country is the fact that politicians would treat and already do treat adult citizens as children. That is a major reason why there are so many consensual crime laws and so many social programs that take so much of our paychecks.

This blaming the victim stuff is nonsense. How hard is it to determine what kind of mortgage you can afford and realize you should get a fixed rate mortgage so the payments won't go up?

Lenders aren't innocent in this mortgage fiasco but neither are lendees who this author would treat as children incapable of taking responsibility for their actions.

Personal Responsibility.


The real victims are people who knew they could not afford a house, did not have enough money saved up for a down payment, so they did not buy a house.

We sat back waiting to accumulate more money through saving and savings accounts only to see the government drop interest rates artificially low and bail out the mortgage companies and the mortgagers. This of course diluted the value of the dollar and decreased its purchasing power. This helped send the price of gasoline sky rocketing, send food prices sky rocketing, and increase prices on all other foreign made goods for ALL Americans.

The responsible Americans who didn't buy what they knew they couldn't afford are the one's who suffered unjustly in this whole mess.

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Now I don't agree with Friedman on anything, in fact I am ashamed that we are from the same state. Quite frankly, this man is paid far too much for what crap spews forth from his pen and mouth.

What I do have to say is Americans are lazy.

First of all just because one clocks more working hours does not make one more productive now does it. Have you ever seen what gets done in an office? How much time is spent not working?

Secondly, look at the size of the average American. I am apppalled when I travel back to the US and walk through an airport. You're HUGE! Now is that not a symptom of being lazy?

Thirdly, if you are only equating laziness with work then you are out of touch with reality. Americans do not exercise, they eat massive amounts of crappy food, watch hours and hours of mindless crappy television, spend massive amounts of money on things they cannot afford, and to top it off, they no very little about thier own history, knowledge of countries their military is occupying ... I could go on. I think you get the point.

Americans ARE lazy!

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The majority of the subprime loans did not go to first-time home buyers. They went to people who were refinancing their existing mortgage. The majority of the people refinancing stated they were in the midst of a severe financial burden, job loss or sickness in the family that drained their coffers. A good number of those people said they dealt with the very brokers who were involved in the initial home sales. People went back to people they thought they could trust and got f--ked. And it was all totally legal.

Now one could easily argue refinancing when you're broke is risky business, but so many people assumed their monetary burdens would pass -- and then didn't pass. The jobs didn't come because we're offshoring or inshoring all our jobs or they got a job for half the pay, or their health care bills began to multiply because those costs are skyrocketing, or they were some of those sad sacks who found their subprime rates were as high as 20-40% interest. We taxpayers just gave banker Bear Stearns a $30 billion loan because of its mortgage crisis problems. Seems like we could do something for these homeowners as well.

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There was a report yesterday the UBS has sold $22 billion worth of subprime to an American vulture for $15 billion, while staying on the hook should the said vultures make less than 15%. What this means that the average subprime mortgage of about $200,000 was sold for $140,000. In this way the big suckers have written off at least $100 billion.

A sensible solution would be to apply those write-offs to the mortgages concerned, this would mean they had sufficient equity in their houses to qualify for a mortgage that is more equitable, I suspect most would be able to hold on until things turned around. The problem with this solution is that this is not the American way. It does not allow the vultures to feast on the carcass of the dispossessed, it does not allow any windfall profits and worst of all, it might drive home the point that you can only screw your customer so much and no more.

The question of whose fault all this is very simple. It is that massive
phoney American dream that is pushed down everybody's throat by every MSM, church and politician.

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.. nevermind that Friedman-like economics got us to a place where subprime and other assorted ways of simply shifting money around to make a profit rather than actually producing a good or providing a service (something Adam Smith warned about) were so huge as to cause a crisis like this.

Friedman wants personal responsibility? Someone hand him a mirror.

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Friedman over-simplifies (imagine that!) when he blames the mortgage crisis on the loss of protestant work ethic, and oversimplifies when he attributes this loss to laziness.

There is no longer a delusion among the intelligent that hard work is rewarded (unless you mean rewarded with more hard work) Since labor is treated as a commodity, and wealth is the only generator of wealth, and the labor movement has become neutered and decimated, the workers respond with the only form of civil resistance available: slacking.

And for those of us who are advancing in age and say "Hey, I want to retire some day! Hey, I want to go on a long vacation to Europe! I want to send my kids to a nice school!" Who's example are they going to follow? Some hard working chump who has become the best durn homeless janitor he can be? Or Donald Trump??

Well, Donald Trump says work is for losers, real men buy real estate. And everyone else is doing it. And my cousin bought a 2 BR block house for 60K 4 years ago, and now its work 360K. So what if that seems a lot for a 2BR block house, if I can buy one now for 360K, according to Donald Trump, that will be worth a million dollars in 5 years!

You have to be a little smart to see the holes in this, especially when shrill voices on late night infomercials are saying you are an idiot for not jumping in RIGHT NOW. But I was smart enough to recognize it as a bubble, and I waited. Others who are as smart as I am did not wait because they were afraid of missing out, and forced themselves to believe. And others who were supposed to be smart provided the financing for this fiasco.

Nevertheless, you oversimplify when you blame overzealous lenders. Nobody forced them into buying a house. Nobody forced them to ignore their good senses and listen to an obnoxious jerk with a combover.

Sometimes bad credit is merited for people who make really bad decisions. If you can't afford a house, and you don't own it, than you can't live in it. If you said you could afford it, but you were wrong, and you don't want to sell it for a loss, and the bank takes it, then you get bad credit, and you have to move into an apartment (maybe next door to someone who made better decisions). I don't think that is a tragedy or a crisis, and if I lose my liberal badge for saying so, so be it.

And if you are a bank who lent out money to people who shouldn't have been given a loan, and you end up with some over-valued property that you might have to sell at a loss, oh well. That's no crisis or tragedy either. And if you are a wealthy capitalist flush with money (that you have bled from the hard workers) and you decide to spend that money buying up debt from people who can't afford it, and (surprise!) those loans default, well you lose (finally!)

This is a rare moment when the system is working. If you are worried about homeless people, they were forced to the streets by ballooning rent caused by ballooning housing values. Bailing ANYONE out would be VERY bad for them because it would preserve these ridiculous house prices which must either drop, or the value of the dollar must drop.

But besides what is good for the homeless people or what is good for the markets, bailing anyone out in profoundly unfair to me. I used my brains and waited, why should my taxes subsidize their bad decisions, when their really isn't a tragedy or crisis, and when it hurts me twice. Not only does it take my tax dollars away, but it prolongs the over-valued real estate market and defers my own more practical dreams of home ownership.

There is enough stupid to go around here. Friedman's stupid. Trump is stupid. Bears Sterns is stupid. People who buy 2 BR block homes for 360k are stupid. I'm stupid in my own ways, I don't need to foot the bill for all of the above.

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from someone who says "The earth is flat"?

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It takes two to tango. The lenders who knew that the borrowers couldn't really afford it; the borrowers who also knew but hoped that housing inflation would continue forever (which everyone knows is not possible). The problem is that the loses are real and will be paid for by an economic power struggle. The real problem is that our love of free enterprise has led to a casino economy. Risk-taking is important for economic growth, but excesssive risk-taking has always led to bubbles and busts. Meanwhile, our 8 cylinder economy is putting along on 4 and the real incomes of all are less than they could be. The old German saying applies: the fish stinks from the head.

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How did Thomas Friedman (aka Tommy Freedom) ever get labeled as a progressive? He is a true elitist (billionaire) and completely out of touch with the middle class! I have always found his writing arrogant and offensive. This piece is no exception!

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