Posted by moy23 on 9/9/2011 11:38:00 AM (view original):
Posted by jiml60 on 9/9/2011 10:28:00 AM (view original):
Its actually infuriating you guys absolve borrowers from any kind of fiscal responsibility ..... its horrifying.
Fiscal responsibility, no, borrowers don't get off the hook for that but for equally sharing the blame with lenders, bankers, legislators, etc...; no, the blame lies solely on the part of our political representatives for deregulation allowing the financial institutions, bankers, Wall Street to exploit the new laws and create this mess we are in.
You can post your elitist bullshit all you want but what it comes down to is banks and other lending institutions became predatory lenders and the borrowers the prey. Ultimately, the lending institutions had final say on whether loans by high-risk borrowers should go through - fiscal responsibility goes both ways.
The blame for our financial mess lies in Washington and Wall Street.
totally agree - lenders were not fiscally responsible.
You are full of **** though if you don't think borrowers were not enjoying 'the game' as well. Everyone was running around talking about 'flipping properties' and plenty of people went out and put $200k down on one property just to take out a 100% inflated LTV HELOC to get the down payment for the next property they wanted to flip. The talk of the town "Invest in real estate - you can't lose". People STILL 'knowingly' inflate their income and the value of their homes when asked those questions for credit cards and loans. Oh, people were in on the game too... it was the cool thing to do 'at the time'.
Elitist Bullshit? I work at a bank (and I'm blaming them as well) --- I can tell you from experience that all we had to do was put a mortgage product out there and the borrower was more than happy to take it, no arm twisting involved. Never once did I witness 'preditory lending'. I bet its the same for anyone else in lending at the time. Don't act like the banks were FORCING people to take money.
I worked at a bank too, so I know there are auditors, internally and externally, that should be watching how loans are approved. Banks may not have been forcing people to take money but they obviously were not following sound lending practices because Washington opened the floodgates with deregulation.
So yeah I feel the majority of the blame lies with our legislators, the banks, Wall Street, etc... As for the borrowers, we are constantly bombarded with advertising that entices us to get deeper and deeper in debt and buy things we can't afford and throw common financial sense out the window. No, it doesn't let them off the hook but let's place the majority of blame where it's due.