"Capt. JG" wrote in message
easolutions...

No one wants people borrowing money they can't repay, and it was certainly
part (but not all) of the problem. Another part of the problem was
bundling these unstable loans and reselling them over and over. That
magnified the problem. There was little or no regulation, and despite
Dave's assertions to the contrary, a big part of that problem was lack of
regulation and/or lack of enforcement (e.g., Madoff is a great example of
the latter).

I think you believe that the relm of "freeing up credit" is reserved for
individual consumers, especially those who don't have money. This is not
the case. It's a much bigger problem for those who have decent credit and
want to buy a car, say from GM or from the RV company in the town Obama
visited recently, and it's even a bigger problem for small businesses who
can't get the credit they need to run their business.

Banks don't want to make loans... to anyone. This is a huge part of the
problem.

--
"j" ganz @@
www.sailnow.com

We used to have an "export based" economy, with high tariffs for imports. We
actually created things of value which we bought ourselves and/or exported
to other countries, and imported mostly luxury items that we could easily do
without. We then moved to an "import based" economy with low tariffs (if
any) for imports, little domestic production of "consumer" (god, how I hate
that term) products, and little to export except for raw materials. Finally,
we moved to a "debt based" economy with nothing of value to export except
our trash, in which we all decided we could get rich selling each other
stocks, oil futures contracts and houses. When the stocks tanked, and the
houses weren't selling, we decided to sell insurance-that-really-wasn't
called "Credit Default Swaps," totally unregulated of course, in which a
mortgage worth $200,000 could be sliced-up into chunks and resold in
packages at 30 times its actual value, but with less than the actual
mortgage value backing it up Meanwhile, the folks buying and selling oil
futures contracts drove the price of gasoline up to $4.50 a gallon or so,
even while supply was increasing and demand was decreasing. As with all such
ponzi schemes, this too came crashing down.

And people wonder what the blazes is wrong with our economy.

"Let's borrow our way to prosperity!"