Just listened to this from “This American Life” and it explains the entire sub prime/credit mess to a TEE.
Its about an hour long, but worth the investment in time.
Let me know what you think.
Jay
Jay, thank you. I heard a little of this report on NPR and this link definitely filled in the holes. All very good information on the history of the mortgage crisis. Good to know what the history is but unfortuately it has created an ugly situation for alot of people. I hope we will start seeing positive change soon!!
Thanks again for the link
Glad you found it interesting.
I really thought this would generate more conversation. My take away from this is that there is always a giant pool of money looking to increase itself. The key is to figure out where its going… and short of that, recognize where it is in short order. I would say that right now its in commodities. The big question is where is it going next?
Jay
Some interesting history and other info there.
This has an emotional edge. I think a lot of people are being emotional right now. It does not make sense to analyze this information with our hearts. Numbers never lie. It is as if we are children standing in a library filled with books, in different languages, and we have no idea how these books are organized, or how to interpret the different languages, but we know that they are in order, and we know that the languages are not arbitrary nonsense.
Fine. So the numbers dictate that all of this hyperbole started in the early 2000s. So let’s use the lending guidelines that we all knew in 1999, let’s use the values of 1999, and let’s clean it up. But we can’t because there is more here than a monetary aberration, it is a generational and perhaps a cultural decision: We do not care.
The path to redemption is clear to me. When a bank asks for lending criteria, they need to care about what made lending sense in the last hundred and fifty years. When a borrower asks for a loan, they need to care about whether they have any realistic chance of paying that money back, and whether they have any intent of paying that money back.
It’s like a bride or groom standing at the end of the aisle, promising vows, with no intent or ability to care about those vows.
If we suffer calamity at the hands of the credit crisis or the subprime mortgage crisis, then we will suffer whatever ill consequence we deserve; and in the best of all worlds, other generations will learn from us as a good, bad example.