“but not anywhere near as much as the government.”
There is no doubt that before government intervention in 1977 with the original CRA banks were on a straight road of investment. However, in the early 1990’s, many banks, brokers, and other parties took advantage of the fact that Fannie and Freddie, et al, would take just about any mortgage in a portfolio, so they wrote mortgages for any breathing thing and even a few dead ones.
When we say “banks”, we tend to talk about the big dogs, yet, that isn’t where most of these bad mortgages came from. Places like Wachovia, Countrywide, Washington Mutual, Ameriquest, etc., cropped up to take advantage of the fact that the government wanted to see sub-prime loans.
I think everyone, all of us, are guilty in this situation. We voted in the creeps in congress and let them get away with the CRA and other bad banking laws, lax regulations, lax regulatory oversight, etc. We just stuck our heads into American Idol and said such banking things were just too complicated to understand so we just didn’t want to. We like those 6 seconds sound bites to tell us how to vote. We like thinking there are smarter people than us so let them run the financial institutions of our nation. We like to play dumb. Well, dumb is what happened and dumb hurts.
We liked those cheap loans. We like those no hassle loans. We liked buying anything we could rationalize, no matter the cost. We liked being told that property was an “investment” and “would only go up”. We liked that artificial prosperity. We loved it. We just want to bitch now that the entire system has collapsed and we, too, are caught short.
Congress, banking institutions, borrowers, voters, and anything or anyone remotely connected with mortgages and housing is to blame. How much blame for each isn’t important. We are all to blame. This didn’t happen in secret. It was in our faces, in our lives, every day, and we didn’t lift a finger to question what was happening. I bet, considering the negative consequences we face now, many would go right back to the ways of pre-2008 in a heartbeat.
The sad thing is this isn’t over, not by a long shot, and, yet, many are voting and demanding more things that will hurt us even more. We are just too stupid to live.