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Ray, seriously?
Who was in office in 2008 that started our now 11 year run?
That was the year the damage created by President Cheney began to get fixed.

you have to stop listening to the con's revisionist history, Ray...

the Great Recession started in 2007, when the housing bubble burst and the unregulated financial industry melted down due to the sub-prime mortgage fiasco...by the end of 2007, the US govt, under POTUS GW Bush and VP D Cheney had to request help from Congress to use $700 Billion of taxpayer money to keep the financial sector afloat...the recession continued into 2008, as people who bought homes with encouragement from greedy unregulated financial institutions, who knowingly made bad loans using subprime mortgages, defaulted on their loans and millions of homes went into foreclosure...Bush was still POTUS and Cheney VP in 2008...

they did not leave office until early 2009, when Obama and Biden, who won election in November 2008, were inaugurated ...so a Dem POTUS Obama and Dem VP Biden had to rescue a free-falling US economy that they inherited from a GOP administration who left office after a disastrous war of choice and idly standing by as an unregulated financial industry nearly collapsed the world economy...

Even Bush said in the middle of his term during one of the state of the union addresses that the economy was going to crash. He said he would try to soften the blow and delay it as long as he could. Held true to his promise.

yes...and I am hoping that this doesn't happen again in 2020, where low voter turn-out helped to usher in a man who was clearly unfit for the job...

in his three+ years, he's proven to most everyone but his die-hard base that he's not competent for the office, so if large numbers of voters sit on the couch again in November 2020, we will deserve another 4 years...

^^Wasn't it Al Franken and the Dems who pushed that Fannie Mae / Freddie Mac gov't takeover?

Which purported that housing loans should be given to everyone? Or at least the bar lowered? Which CAUSED the whole gods damned housing market collapse?

Yeah... I seem to recall that's how it went. Fortunately for me, I bought my house in 1999 and the boom/bust/boom has been really good for me.

a huge amount of those devastated by these loans and the entire sections of inner cities where they lived had been illegally red lined for decades. A large part of Reagan's fake economic "recovery" had nothing to do with tangible products or goods but rather with unwise easing of credit...we may not have lost homes, but we still pay for his folly.

it's one thing to make purchasing, home improvement, and consolidation loans available to neighborhoods previously and shamefully not allowed to participate in what they, like other Americans, had worked hard to earn, but it's another to "fix" that inequity by removing all risk for lenders (that risk was transferred to the rest of us) and even allowing banks previously restricted from entering the residential loan arena to be all in. Greed was good for the country! All could now participate in the American Dream.

But there was no downside for lenders. Zero. NO RISK, NO DOWNSIDE! Trickle down mofo's. Take the money, lend it out, if they pay you win. If they don't pay you don't lose. Evict them and auction the property and we'll make up the difference or you may make a profit! If you were a lender, this was a wet dream. Find a way to say "yes", fark due diligence, just approve them!

We all got played.

Most Americans blame the victims..."no one made them do it". I actually get it. But it's an assumption based on superficial knowledge of what went on behind the scenes. It's not stupidity, it's lack of information of how the money industry worked while untethered and without oversight. It's why I want Warren to remain a senator and not move to the White House...she is the champion in this fight.

Ever gone decades without a chance to borrow a nickle and all of a sudden have someone use whiteout on your W-2 to "qualify" you? And worse? Yeah, most have no idea what I'm talking about. The applicants didn't create false income documents, the pros did and the applicants didn't even know it.

Oh, here's another one no one else knows about while they blame the victims...instead of the standard loan-to-value formulas in effect for years to regulate, control and prevent lenders from using predatory tactics...like not allowing mortgaging beyond 80% of residential value...The Reagan Administration allowed loans up to 110% of appraisals...and the appraisers were on the take! Still blaming the victims? Hang on...Property values WENT DOWN! They went down even more for those homes with fake appraisals. Can't Happen Here, borrowers were told, real estate ALWAYS goes up...until it doesn't.

Borrowers may have been naive but the banks/lenders fudged the numbers so severely that no average person could have known what all the values really should have been. Like buying a car but on steroids! Based on the appraisal of 100K you can borrow up to 110K, and have a payment for 1 year/3 years/5 years at a APR below market...until the loan is due in full. Oh, then you just convert it to a conventional mortgage...well yah most of your payments went to interest and now your appraisal is too low to support a new mortgage...you just lost your home, but the siding looks great!

Yup, some of you can't follow these terms, and you haven't gone 4 decades being excluded from borrowing even though you have good credit.

A large percentage of the loans that resulted in foreclosures (the banks didn't lose a penny) were balloon notes that were like time release disasters. I don't have the energy to explain that right now, but if you don't know what it means and how it worked, I'd like to come by after dinner and show you and the little woman how you can pay off your credit cards and your car loan, get your house covered in carefree vinyl siding, new windows and a free roof! while saving you hundreds a month...and I might be able to put a little cash in your pocket.

How's that sound? Great! I'll be back tonight at 7:00.

I'm not saying there was no predatory lending, redlining, balloon mortgages, etc. I'm saying the whole disaster was a combination of players that worked to a perfect storm. Greedy people on all sides.

I personally saw some of my friends gamble big time on funny mortgages they knew they had no way of paying because they intended to flip the houses for a big profit before they came due. Hell, prices were escalating at 30% a year in many places. These were not financially gullible, uneducated. They were college grads playing the system. Once the housing market tanked and they were under water enough, they threw the keys on the counter and walked away. Cost them a bad credit score for years but that is all that happened to them.

I have never heard Sanders or Warren once say anyone but the evil banks had any responsibility.

I know I quoted your post but really was not going after you specifically.

Greed is an interesting player. The secret to a successful con man is his ability to uncover and nurture greed in his target, enlist them in his special-for-them-but-only-good-tonight/don't tell others about this offer. So, yes, you are absolutely correct that it wasn't all one way, and Warren/Sanders are telling half the story...well, maybe a little more than half!

People who had money took shots on investment properties and did walk away with bruised credit, but owner occupied mortgages that were funny were the real shame and pain of that era.

Were your friends involved with Keating?

Keating was a personal friend of one of my best buddies. Az has a sordid history of speculation as many places do.

How do you make money disappear? Put it in a bank!

plenty of blame to go around but...

You are missing the power dynamics in this whole scenario that led to the finance collapse. If you operated any other business besides loaning money, say the grocery business, would you tell your employees to offer steep discounts on your prime produce to the poorest customers who walked through the doors? Would a demanding poor customer be given a bag of groceries he couldn't pay for?

Hells no...but that's what the mortgage lenders did, because someone invented a new way to profit from reselling those ridiculous loans...it was called mortgage backed securities...

the original lenders had no intention of hanging onto these knowingly bad loans and waiting to see if they would default...they knew they would, so why do the loans? because poor Mr. Smith lied about his income and begged to buy a house and needed the loan? no...they've been refusing lending to those peeps from the beginning of lending...

so why do them? because they planned to palm them off as gold to some other company, who would greedily buy them because they were fraudulently rated as A+ securities...companies like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns (those two giants of the industry collapsed and failed) and Deutsche Bank

sure, there were plenty of poor people who falsely said they had more income, and signed for loans they should've stayed away from...their greed let them be sold by the lender, who told them their income would go up and the house's equity would go up so that'll help pay the loan when the rate kicked in.... and.... you can also re-finance again and again...

so who was in the driver's seat and deserves more of the credit here?


https://www.investopedia.com/articles/07/subprime-blame.asp

cons are predictable in their defense of unscrupulous, even criminal, business practices by big corporations and willing to shift the blame for whatever catastrophes result on to the poor, uneducated and unsophisticated consumer...or worse, to the tax-payers as a whole

sure there's caveat emptor, but that generally applies when both the buyer and seller are in roughly equal positions...

as practiced today, the seller has such a huge advantage in knowledge and experience, it has become so easy to fool the average consumer that regulated capitalism has become the norm...the power of persuasion/marketing/advertising is very strong, giving the corporate seller a tremendous edge in any transaction...

couple that with a legal judicial system designed to protect corporations and a governmental process that allows them to write their own legislation and here we are

ummmm....depends on who you ask...

funny tho...cons say we should fear the big government...libs say we should fear big business....


don't look now, but they are more alike than different...

Wait... I thought big business selected and paid for the people who run the govmut. That's why they get such good tax breaks.

Colonel Sanders?

Biden is

No pedos or socialcraps

Just don't let him touch your children...

O yeah? you lying dog faced pony soldier!

don't you ever say I'm low!

Low low low low low