While we’re at it, can we ban any bank that did the various no-doc loans from being allowed to lend for 10 years or longer? They were equally irresponsible and complicit in the housing bubble inflation and clearly their executives and employees placed short term personal financial gains far above the integrity of their company and the financial sector as a whole, and therefore should not be allowed any kind of fiduciary responsibilities from now on.

It took both sides, equally motivated by greed, for this bubble to occur. Blaming the owners – most of whom aren’t expected to be financial experts (unlike, say, the mortgage underwriters, investment bank and portfolio managers, etc) – for excercising a legal (in CA anyway) out of a contract that was written in arcane terms that most laymen would be unlikely to understand is hardly fair.

Yeah, the owners were partially at fault, and certainly they were trying to climb on the greed train. But most of them I doubt did so in bad faith – they were simply guilty of believing what they were told by people that they believed were much more knowledgable about the market than they were. It’s the ones who SHOULD have been more knowledgable about the market (ie – the guys above, the realtors, the market analysts, the portfolio managers, etc) that should lose their jobs and their cushy incomes for being so utterly wrong (intentionally or otherwise) about the state of housing in the US. Either malfeasance (if they ignored it due to greed) or incompetence (if they simply didn’t see it coming) as a reason for termination will do.