I’ve read the book that the film is based on (or was written during film production).
While I WAS dumbfounded by some of the behavior of the financial institutions (e.g. sending credit card offers to a woman who was currently being foreclosed on by the same bank) I did repeatedly see the same dumb behavior BY THE BORROWERS.
For instance, while it is stupid for the bank to be sending credit offers to a woman in foreclosure, how stupid is it for the woman to take advantage of those offers?
One of the points of the movie was that consumers increasingly see credit as a ‘badge of honor’. They figure (incorrectly) that the banks wouldn’t offer them credit if they can’t afford to make the payments.
All you have to do is look at people in the news to see that how well the movie captures this sentiment. People pulling money out of HELOC’s and putting it in a CD or Money Market account before the credit dries up. People who are near bankruptcy and foreclosure continuing to spend on vacations, cars, tv’s and maxing out their credit. People who refinanced and pulled out tens of thousands of dollars to pay off staggering credit card bills only to charge them back up.
Yes, companies are taking advantage of people. But many of those people are victims of their own stupidity and laziness as much as the financial institutions that people are villifying.
It’s like the woman I saw interviewed on consumerist.com the other day who was too lazy to walk a few blocks and use a bank to cash a check–she’d rather walk across the street and use a check cashing place and pay the fees. So, who is to blame, the check cashing place for charging the high fee or the stupid person paying the fee WILLINGLY?
