Although I tend to agree, the fact is that the old "champaigne taste on a beer budget" used to get people in trouble. Now it can ruin them for life.
You can quickly get into so much more trouble than you could just a decade ago. It took serious incompetance and financial narcissism in the past to get into the kind of trouble you can pretty much just slide into today - with a lot of peoples blessing.
I wonder how much of the SEA RE market is speculator-driven?
I suspect a correction in the works...