The Glade 4.0

Can't increase the down payment requirement, because that would lead to - fewer defaults? Morons. Yep, don't take that medicine, just walk around spreading the sickness.

Gov't official warns on home down payment hikes





Lower than 580? Really? 580? Oh, dear Lord, help us!

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

I'm going to punch the next person I hear say the government didn't cause this **** storm.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

I'm working on a device to allow you to punch people through the internet.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

Even if the government is throwing out free money left and right, it's still your own fault if you bankrupt yourself trying to ride the obvious bubble to riches before it pops.

The government didn't cause this.

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Holy shitsnacks!

Let me ask you: What would have been the size and scope of this "obvious" bubble if the Gov't hadn't perpetuated this farce of "everyone should own a home regardless of their income level and credit worthiness"?

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

People, by and large, just want to get along. People, by and large, also don't understand the nature of our managed boom and bust cycle economy, largely inpart because the government tells them it doesn't work that way. Now, I'm not one to absolve people of their personal responsibility. It's how we learn not to put our fingers in the fire, but given that for generations people have been indoctrinated to trust the government, and as an economic certainty alway do what they are incentivized to do, the large share of the blame falls on the economic system we have in place.

It's akin to some **** rapist putting roofies in an unattended drink at a bar. Sure, the poor girl should have been more responsible and not left her drink while she went to the bathroom, but at the end of the day the rapist is more at fault.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

I'd say it's more along the lines of an investor who invests in Venezuelan assets and then blames Chavez when he gets ****. Sure, it's technically Chavez's fault, but the investor is still an idiot. Remember we're not talking about "people," here. We're talking about large financial institutions who really should know better. And the evidence shows that they all were perfectly aware that there was a giant bubble. They were just trying to get rich off it. Why else would they underwrite so many mortgages that were basically designed to result in foreclosure? They wanted to collect 1-2 years of pure interest payments and then take back the house so they could sell it to someone else for $50,000 more, essentially making double the income off both the interest and the appreciation of the house value.

If FHA hadn't existed there probably would have been no bubble. But FHA only created a small one, everyone else inflated it to massive proportions trying to exploit it and get rich quick. Also, it's really disingenuous to use the "the average person doesn't know better" defense when conservatives generally laugh at liberals trying to defend the people who bought ARMs with this logic.

Ummm... several reasons actually.

1) The way federal lenders ratings were caluculated was changed so that it reflected how many loans were given to those who couldn't afford them as a positive, the former rating system, which was based on the quality of the loan, was scrapped.

2) Saber rattling in Washington, and some actual legislation, made it impossible for them not to extend some of these loans.

3) Our economy is a boom/bust economy, and financers know this. It is, in fact, the only way they are able to make money in the system we have.

4) Given point 3, Fannie and Freddie were absorbing a significant share of the housing market, which was the bubble of the time. If those other lending houses didn't want to cripple themselves going forward, and in some cases be driven out of business, by sacrificing huge portions of bubble driven market share, they were forced to adapt to the government prescribed model.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

Obama actually was a lawyer in one of the cases where the government sued a lending institution for "discriminatory" lending practices because they were not creating mortgages for people below a certain credit level regardless of race.

They won and the institution was forced to lend to minorities below their previous credit floor.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Well, at least you partially answered my question.



You'll notice that they exploited it with very little risk to themselves, thanks to the knowledge that the Gov't was directly backing so many of the loans and used coercion to get the other houses to accept sub-prime clients. It all goes back to Rational irrationality. The gov't created the model and backed it, so the risk was not going to fall on the lenders.



I laugh at the people that locked themselves into 30 year fixed mortgages at anything above 4.5, hell my 5/1 ARM is at 3.125 with a 1% max annual adjust.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

No risk to themselves? Surely you've noticed the thousands of bank failures in the past few years?



The thing about minorities is there isn't many of them. That's why they're minorities. Even if they got preferential treatment, that only results in a small bubble. It had to be massive exacerbated by everyone else.

Of course all investment carries risk. The problem with perception which has been skewed by inflation, is that over the years, people have viewed personal real estate as an investment. It is not, just like owning a car is not an investment. Not in the sense of strict balancesheets, anyway. Of course, you gain utility by owning such items, but such items do not translate into line items very directly.

That said, yes, people must bear the responsibility for collapsing real estate prices because that's always a possibility.

However, your analogy is akin to saying a man who is forced to play Russian Roulette against himself is at fault for his own death. After all, he only had to keep spinning the cylinder to get empty chambers, no one forced him to choose the loaded one.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

Who said no risk?
"Thousands of bank failures"? I do believe you're off by oh, thousands; there have been 219 bank failures since 2000.
In any event, who lost out in those "thousands of bank failures"?

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Well I apologize for the thousands parts, I've been reading too many really negative posts about how bad of a depression we're in and assumed it was higher.

Not to say I'm a fan of what FHA did. You know I don't like affirmative action. But increasing mortgage lending to minorities just doesn't cause the economic collapse by itself. They're called minorities for a reason, there's not that many of them.



This is the same, "people are too stupid to know any better" argument that meets with such disdain. If housing is really not an investment, then it's their fault for not realizing that, not the government's. Even if the government actively pushes the view that housing is an investment, it's still their fault, the exact same way it's still your fault if your bank tries to dupe you into a shitty mortgage and you take it.

Dude, you're still thinking only about what is being directly presented to you. Minorities may have been the intended target of the coercion, but do you think that because they lowered the standards for minorities, those standards didn't apply to every credit risk out there regardless of color? What they intended doesn't matter after the coercion started, everyone with a sub-par credit rating, no down payment and tenuous employment had to be qualified, otherwise...

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

No, they're called minorities because they're not the majority. They're still a nontrivial portion of the populations.

Not only that but if you're forced to lend to minorities below a certain threshold it's really hard to not lend to everyone else below that threshold, and in any case, it only takes so many to render the lender's position untenable.

No, the government isn't the only one to bear blame in all this, but they are by far the most to blame.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Minority Population Tops 100 Million


That's 2006.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

The problem is cyclic. Those that are under educated tend to rely more on the government when it comes to regulations. However these regulations are not in their best interest, putting them in a poorer position which requires more relying on the government to get them out of it...

Education is the key, however hard work is never a lesson anyone want to learn when there's free stuff sitting right there.

Ayup.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Screeling's in trouble.

Source, please.

I believe Elmo is referencing FH-IL-0011.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

B I N G O

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville