What Will It Take for Us to Get Back to Being a Decent Society?
POSTED BY: Niki2
UPDATED: Saturday, April 25, 2026 00:05
VIEWED: 18057
PAGE 7 of 22
Quote:
Originally posted by BYTEMITE:
In truth, the reality is somewhere in the middle. Housing for people who couldn't afford it led to the sub-prime mortgage crisis.
it was the lack of regulation that led to the collapse. Here's a point of interest, in Australia, which is much more regulated, your loan is yours, not attached the property. You can't just walk away. It means that people stay in their houses and pay their mortgages if they can, not walk when the house goes below the value of the mortgage. And it means less walk outs, and the market doesn't collapse. A north american friend of mine was critical of our system, that was before the GFC.
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Quote:
it was the lack of regulation that led to the collapse.
There's several sides to this story.
The first side is that the lending practices for these sub-prime mortgages were actually a legislated standard at the time through affordable housing policies.
But, as you say, deregulation allowed banks and loan sharks to pull all kinda of bullshit with low quality loans, then sell off or gamble on/invest with toxic assets. And in truth the sub-prime loans that were the big problem were actually NOT the loans that were mandated by government policy.
Ultimately the collapse of the market probably wouldn't have happened if the mortgages had been issued in good faith to people who could afford the mortgages, instead of pulling predatory horseshit on poor people with no intention of ever letting them pay off the debt (and often encouraging them to go deeper into debt).
Bailey Building and Loan lost money on helping people get into homes, but in the end the community as a whole was made more affluent, which is arguably what kept the business afloat and probably also what got them regular customers. The Sub-Prime Mortgage Crisis was about banks ripping people off.
But since it's a subtle nuance, I felt I had to point out the unfortunate implications and how easily the Bailey Building and Loan could have gone wrong.
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"Housing for people who couldn't afford it led to the sub-prime mortgage crisis."
Not where I live. Most people just wanted to ride the elevator going up. They knew that hard work and frugality weren't a path to security, and they needed to play speculative investments like the big boys do.
"the lending practices for these sub-prime mortgages were actually a legislated standard"
No, many of these loans were downright fraudulent.
Most telling as to WHERE the mess came from - at the time dumbya looked across the land and, lo, found that the only source of growth in the US economy was the real-estate bubble. (B4 that it was IPOs on computer/ internet businesses. The lack of real mfg and the rise of speculation as a source of income led to the writing of a book called The Bubble Economy.) But there were so many outright fraudulent loans being written by banks and places like Countrywide, that ALL 50 STATES ATTORNEY GENERALS got together to prosecute these loans writers. Dumbya, not wanting the music to stop, then had the OCC pronounce in 2003 that all such investigations/ potential prosecutions were unconstitutional. And all investigation that had been in the works stopped.
Spitzer said it in 2008 far better than I:
By Eliot Spitzer
Washington Post
Thursday, February 14, 2008
.
Several years ago, state attorneys general and others involved in consumer protection began to notice a marked increase in a range of predatory lending practices by mortgage lenders. Some were misrepresenting the terms of loans, making loans without regard to consumers’ ability to repay, making loans with deceptive “teaser” rates that later ballooned astronomically, packing loans with undisclosed charges and fees, or even paying illegal kickbacks. These and other practices, we noticed, were having a devastating effect on home buyers. In addition, the widespread nature of these practices, if left unchecked, threatened our financial markets.
Even though predatory lending was becoming a national problem, the Bush administration looked the other way and did nothing to protect American homeowners. In fact, the government chose instead to align itself with the banks that were victimizing consumers.
Predatory lending was widely understood to present a looming national crisis. This threat was so clear that as New York attorney general, I joined with colleagues in the other 49 states in attempting to fill the void left by the federal government. Individually, and together, state attorneys general of both parties brought litigation or entered into settlements with many subprime lenders that were engaged in predatory lending practices. Several state legislatures, including New York’s, enacted laws aimed at curbing such practices.
What did the Bush administration do in response? Did it reverse course and decide to take action to halt this burgeoning scourge? As Americans are now painfully aware, with hundreds of thousands of homeowners facing foreclosure and our markets reeling, the answer is a resounding no.
Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal government was turning a blind eye.
Let me explain: The administration accomplished this feat through an obscure federal agency called the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). The OCC has been in existence since the Civil War. Its mission is to ensure the fiscal soundness of national banks. For 140 years, the OCC examined the books of national banks to make sure they were balanced, an important but uncontroversial function. But a few years ago, for the first time in its history, the OCC was used as a tool against consumers.
In 2003, during the height of the predatory lending crisis, the OCC invoked a clause from the 1863 National Bank Act to issue formal opinions preempting all state predatory lending laws, thereby rendering them inoperative. The OCC also promu
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Quote:
No, many of these loans were downright fraudulent.
Yes they were. Doesn't mean that there WEREN'T standards for those loans. Just that the banks were shoveling a lot of bullshit at the time.
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hMMM ... I SEE WE AGREE BUT OUR COMMUNICATION WENT ASKEW ... I THINK. I think WE'RE SAYING THE SAME THINGS ? STANDARDS WERE LEGISLATED BUT BANKS/ LOAN COMPANIES VIOLATED THE LAWS? ARG. CAPS LOCK ON. TOO LAZY TO RETYPE.
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Yep. There were regulations, though many had been removed, but the existing regulations weren't being well enforced.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Magonsdaughter:
The world has cycles, some of which are impossible to stem or change.
Not sure I buy that, just call me Crazy Eddie.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mote_in_God%27s_Eye#Meet_Crazy_Eddie
Kiki
Finlands situation was a little more complicated than all that, for damn sure they didn't like them German bastards but they hated the Russians more - mostly they wanted to stay out of it but the Russians went and invaded em, so they took whatever aid they could get, cause at one point they were recieving assistance from BOTH "sides", one interesting facet of which was the composition of their air force, a mishmash of older British and American aircraft side by side with anything the Germans could spare, from Fokkers to Bf109's.
They particularly favored the Brewster F2A Buffalo, a plane mostly rejected by the Navy as underpowered and outdated, but it was fairly tough and operated well in subzero temperatures, allowing them to rack up a 32-to-1 kill ratio.
In the end, once the Russians were dealt with, they went and kicked them Nazi pricks out as well, because the only "side" Finland was ever really on, was that of Finland!
Quote:
Quite an image. I know someone who went through such a situation. They recall seeing people hung on lampposts, not to strangle, but the be cut by anyone with the urge. Rightly or wrongly, those men and women died the death of a thousand cuts. Under those circumstances, I can imagine that justice would be too slow for the movement. I'm sure many innocent people did and would die.
A horrific image, in all truth inhumane and vile - but generally the end result of a people pushed so far that justice falls by the wayside in pursuit of revenge, and while most of us in our heart of hearts might believe we'd have little sympathy for the big banksters and corporate robber barons in such a situation, generally this is untrue, humans are a lot more humane than they're often given credit for, and often as not that is the very thing which allows them fuckers to prosper, forgiveness only enables a sociopath, it never redeems them.
But as you say, in that kind of madness many innocents are harmed as well, but as every peaceful means of resolving the situation is brutally crushed by an ever more paranoid and authoritarian establishment, it becomes less a possibility and more of an inevitability, not an "if", but a "when".
Having seen, all my life at point-blank range the lives ruined and destroyed by the powers that be, I am simply fundamentally *incapable* of being sympathetic to them...
Because I know what that costs.
Also, Re: Spitzer - one might note that the "scandal" which more or less removed him from power was a direct result of him investigating the very things which crashed our economy, and had folks paid less attention to who he was fucking and more attention to the fact that the financial sector was fucking us all, things mighta gone a little differently.
With certain recent revelations about the degree of domestic surveillence, one might start putting a few facts together there and start to wonder, yanno ?
-Frem
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Thanks for your reply. It was informative.
I do sometimes wonder, what will it take for people to say 'enough!' Or will we be like the Easter Islanders - clinging to our ways even as we fall off the edge of survival.
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Quote:Bollocks. That is EXACTLY the province of governments. "Free trade" only comes into play when governments decide to create and sign "free trade" agreements; otherwise tariffs, import duties, and tax policies come into play. Please don't believe that ministers and presidents are helplessly wringing their hands about processes that are out of the control of governments... they are actively fostering these processes at your expense, because that's where their money is.
Some things are out of the control of governments. Manufacturing and other industries are moving from wealthy countries where labour costs are at a premium to labour rich - economically poor countries, where large rural workforces move to find work in urban areas when farming becomes less intensive work.
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Quote:And once gain, our very own wealth-begotten asshole demonstrates that you don't have to be smart to be rich.
You didn't build that! - Implies that all the effort you put forth wasn't of YOUR doing, but in reality, was a product of " The Collective ". With that sort of outlook on life, the West would have never been explored or tamed. The frontier may have never exceeded past the Mississippi valley. America would not be America were it not for far sighted, free thinking INDIVIDUALS. - rappy
...Well, since you suggested that we should be like the old west-signy
Nope. I never said nor implied any such thing.- rappy
RAPPY- Would you like a definition for the word "implied"?
In other words, son, you don't have an answer to the question What parts of government should continue and what parts should be eliminated?And, BTW- I was hoping that rappy would do the "big reveal" himself, but the reason why he's grumbling about taxes is because he's not reasonably well-off, or even comfortably well-off, but what we would think of as phenomenally well-off: HIS taxes went up when the Bush tax cuts expired because he's raking in $400,000+ per year. No wonder he feels so entitled!
And, folks, you're right: He's just a troll. Sorry it took me so long to see it.
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