PR, Theoretically, even if banks are successful at getting permission from the federal government to take all the money they see, they won’t blow a bubble with a ponzi scheme in a non-recourse state and across the nation in order to take it. Lots of people should go to jail for creating a public nuisance if nothing else. I am not talking about the little fish who did take the fog a mirror get a loan policy the lenders aggressively and without duress promoted.
The idea that the banks or their enablers who are now fixing the problem deserve any empathy really rubs me the wrong way. Poor banky wanky. Not that I condone all of the of the particular things FB’s do but the banks get what the deserve. I mean, in theory they could.Possibly they could? Yeah right.[/quote]
I certainly don’t have much empathy for the bankers. As you point out, what many of them did should be a criminal offense (and might even be prosecutable, if the pols had enough spine to enforce the laws in that direction). I’d love to see the people who directed that crappy mortgages get AAA ratings go the slammer for 15 years. And the folks who ran the lenders that were shoveling liar loans to the investment community. Etc.
But just because all those people were doing bad things – really bad things – doesn’t give borrowers a free pass. Nor does it give voters a free pass. We aren’t exactly pounding down the doors of our Congressman to remove all the loan and price and tax and other supports for a bloated housing sector. In fact, we rather like those things. So when a few individuals end up doing our dirty work for us, we can blame them when things go wrong, but we are at least as much to blame. When everyone wanted to be able to buy, with almost none of their money, an asset that was virtually guaranteed to make them rich, they weren’t complaining about Angelo Mozilo. If he hadn’t done what what he did, someone else would have. We created the environment, and a few people came forward to serve up what we asked for.
Not all of us, but most….
And allowing borrowers to punish the banks now sounds like fun – just retribution and all. But the problem is that almost all banks are economically insolvent. All that’s holding them up is money from taxpayers, or the promise of money from taxpayers. So when we whack the banks, we’re not whacking the bankers, we’re whacking the taxpayers. That’s your neighbors.
