On Sat, 10 Jan 2009 13:00:05 +0000, Tom Francis - SWSports wrote:

On Fri, 09 Jan 2009 21:28:33 -0600, wrote:

It was greed. Financial markets are run on the balance of greed/risk.
There's nothing wrong with that, but greed took over, and here we are.
A few fat cat "financiers" just brought the world's economy to a
standstill.

Um...it takes two to tango you know. The old saw "if it's too good to
be true, it probably is" had a big part in this.

In my view, politics besides the point, folks who purchased $300,000
homes with no documenation of their $100,000 income when they were
actually on welfare are just as guilty as those who wrote the mortgages.

Of course, they are just as guilty, and just as stupid, but it is still
greed over-balancing risk. There is enough blame to go around, but I
still say, those that were in the business should have known better.
It's also true, that if I speculated on three houses, the damage is
considerably less than if I were a broker that mortgaged thousands, and
chances are, I'd be in bankruptcy now, as opposed to getting money from
Washington.


And believe it or not, that's pretty much what happened. The dynamic of
buying a $300,000 home one year and selling it the next for $400,000 was
too good to be true. I saw it happen right here in Woodstock right down
the street from me.

There is a lot of blame to go around on this - it wasn't strictly a case
of financiers being greedy.

Also, I would posit that the base reason the economy tanked wasn't the
mortgage crisis - it was the rampant speculation on the crude oil market
that tanked the world's economy.

And I think I can prove it.

It sure didn't help, but I thought, IIRC, the sub-prime fiasco was
already ongoing well before the major oil increases. And again, it's a
handful of fat cat "financiers" that brought the world's economy to a
standstill. ;-)