fancycwabs (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
fancycwabs) wrote2008-03-24 01:41 pm
fancycwabs) wrote2008-03-24 01:41 pm
A question.
Does the housing crisis strike anyone else as largely fictitious?
I mean, obviously people are losing their homes, and one major lending corporation seems to have suffered a collapse, but aren't the numbers driving the interest-rate increases arbitrary, designed to screw homeowners over based on the inability to refinance as their interest rates grew beyond their ability to pay?
Did Bear Stearns fail because it couldn't walk the fine line of screwing their customers just enough to get them to keep paying mortgages, but still enough to keep the investors from pulling their money out of Bear Stearns and investing it in a company who could screw its customers even better than Bear Stearns could?
After all the COFI hasn't really changed THAT much over the past few years--it certainly hasn't hit percentages I saw (7.5%) when I bought my own house seven years ago.
Are we, as a nation, going to wind up paying a lot of money to bail out real-estate speculators, instead of letting them suffer the consequences of their folly?
I mean, obviously people are losing their homes, and one major lending corporation seems to have suffered a collapse, but aren't the numbers driving the interest-rate increases arbitrary, designed to screw homeowners over based on the inability to refinance as their interest rates grew beyond their ability to pay?
Did Bear Stearns fail because it couldn't walk the fine line of screwing their customers just enough to get them to keep paying mortgages, but still enough to keep the investors from pulling their money out of Bear Stearns and investing it in a company who could screw its customers even better than Bear Stearns could?
After all the COFI hasn't really changed THAT much over the past few years--it certainly hasn't hit percentages I saw (7.5%) when I bought my own house seven years ago.
Are we, as a nation, going to wind up paying a lot of money to bail out real-estate speculators, instead of letting them suffer the consequences of their folly?
no subject
Anyway, you're operating under the assumption that poor people getting screwed is some kind of flaw. That's what the system is designed to do, enable the rich to skim off the poor. If a poor family loses their home because they can't keep up the repayments, this means a bank or a person with a lot of stable assets can buy that property for cheaps, rent it out and then make a profit by selling it on the upswing. This is not a "crisis" for the rich people who make the decisions, it's only a problem because working class white males in Cleveland may not vote Republican this year, and that would upset lots of people in pinstripes.
Don't for a second think that bankers are as upset about this as the poor buggers losing their homes.