When a contract is no longer a contract and you can just walk away from it, the economy suffers more than it already is suffering.
When people do this and add more homes to the list of homes that are for sale in a buyers market with no buyers, they only add to the problem of sinking house prices. The house price slump further reinforces itself due to contracts broken by those who choose to get out at someone else's expense.
This is not a victimless exercise...
Hogwash.
Being able to walk away from the contract is in the contract. If the banks weren’t happy with that, they shouldn’t have signed the contract or they should have required more collateral than the house and land.
The government shouldn’t have inflated a housing bubble. They shouldn’t have sold us a phony bill of goods for a decade. But they did. Now, we’re all going to be paying for it whether this guy keeps paying his inflated mortgage or not.
The banks want the house as a guarantee, they got exactly what was contracted.
Sinking house prices are a "problem" in the same way as one's body temperature "sinking" from 103.5 to 98.8 degrees is a "problem". It's a natural correction to an insanely overheated market.