This thread is remarkable in that most everyone who has posted is being misled by their ideological bias into seeing leftist culprits as the originators of the financial crisis.
The cause of the crisis as far as I can tell is a confluence of powerful and perverse financial incentives that motivated millions of people to do the wrong thing in pursuit of their own financial interests.
Namely:
Mortgage borrowers in pursuit of more cash than they ever dreamed they could get from their collateral.
Home buyers who bought two or three times as much house, in dollar terms, than they ever thought they could afford.
Rental owners who leveraged one or two properties into six or seven and built their real estate empires much faster than they ever dreamed they could.
Mortgage brokers who initiated crazy mortgages with crazy commissions for countless people in the above categories and made five times as much money per year as they ever dreamed possible.
Financial executives and traders who designed and sold collateralized debt obligations by the billions of dollars and made larger profit-based bonuses than they ever imagined they could.
I’m sure this list can be expanded upon. The point is, when so many people at so many different levels of society have a financial incentive to do the wrong thing, and those incentives are all aligned in the same direction, look out. Follow the money is right. And the money wound up in the hands of Democrats, Republicans and people who don’t give a crap about politics at all.
Partisan politics is not the way to model your view of reality, folks.
What do you think is the seed? High liquidity and low interest in the capital markets?
I tend to agree with the rest of your points BTW.
“Partisan politics is not the way to model your view of reality, folks.”
Please read the following linked articles. The first was written early in the first Clinton misAdministration, at the time it was happening:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is_n25_v45/ai_14779796
The second was this past July.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1965239/posts
These are interesting articles now that the prophecies of the 1993 article seem to be in play.
Hear hear. And by the way, the situation looks bad. Forget politics, I’m worried about bread and butter.
Good post. But the initial cause of the subprime crisis was government mandates that forced mortgage companies to make a certain percent of their loans to unqualified applicants. This happened during the Clinton Administration as part of the “Community Reinvestment Act” which had the objective of directing home loans to poor people.
Where I disagree is that with you is that what you eloquently describe as “a confluence of powerful and perverse financial incentives that motivated millions of people to do the wrong thing in pursuit of their own financial interests” was actually not the cause but the EFFECT of this government intrusion into the mortgage market. This is a spectacular example of the havoc wreaked by government “compassion for the poor” when is other people’s money that is at stake. So to force good companies that previously followed sound banking practices were FORCED into doing things that no reputable businessman would do under his own volition. In time the sleazeballs increasingly got into the mortgage business by baiting unsophisticated or impulsive people with Adjustable Rate Mortgages etc.
Partisan politics is not the way to model your view of reality, folks.
You want something which is "not the way to model your view of reality?" Look at your newspaper. Your newspaper projects the image of impartiality and will go into high dudgeon if you question its objectivity. And yet the financial (and psychological) incentives of journalism simply do not match up with the public interest, and journalists will actually use rules which are designed for their own self interest as "justification" for engaging in propaganda against the public interest. I've discussed that in some detail in this thread.The planted axiom in your objection to "partisan politics" is that you yourself are able to transcend partisanship. But what that boils down to in the case of "objective journalism" is that journalists go full bore at propagandizing for their own self interest, which they are able to do and claim with a straight face that they are "objective" for the simple reason that journalism is a monopoly. The Associated Press was found to be a monopoly back in 1945. And it had been a monopolistic enterprise from its foundations back in 1848. So if you are not taking that fact into consideration you cannot possibly be objective - and if you do take it into account then all of journalism and the Democratic Party which in 1972 stopped being anything other than the openly political wing of journalism will roundly condemn your "partisanship."
Once that happens, you have the choice of either holding on to your integrity and holding to the facts and logic as you see them, or you can cave a little. You can say, "the truth must lie in the middle." You can say that, but you can't prove it - for the simple reason that it simply isn't so. If a union-management dispute goes to arbitration, does the arbitrator simply take the average of the union proposal and the management proposal? Indeed he does not, for if he did then neither union and management have any incentive to make a reasonable offer, and have every reason to make extreme demands. Instead the arbitrator says to the two parties, "Make your fairest offer, and I will chose which one will be imposed on you both." Only then do the two parties have to take reality into account.
And in the same way, when the Democrats and the Republicans debate you ultimately choose one or the other, not half of each (unless you count arbitrarily splitting your ticket and voting for a Republican POTUS and a Democratic Congress, or vice versa). But with the reality that journalism promotes its own leftism as "objectivity" and promotes the self-same leftism in the Democratic Party as "progressive," what you normally face is not a situation where "the truth lies in the middle" but a case where the Democrats felt free to make unreasonable demands and the Republicans felt they had no choice but to shade toward the Democratic/journalism position. So your choice is normally between an absurd Democratic position and a Republican position which is compromised away from reality toward the Democratic position.
On the merits of the particular case, it is a given that people will fall prey to temptation to buy more than they can afford if they think that somebody else will bail them out. The Democrat's position is that the irresponsible should always be bailed out, and the Republican (and particularly the McCain) position is that because the tendentiousness of journalism is accepted by so much of the public, Republicans can't get elected if they don't go along at least part way.
And if you read that as extreme without checking it against the facts, you at least know that I didn't trim in order to please and appear "objective."