On Sep 25, 10:17*am, wrote:
On Sep 25, 10:54*am, RickH wrote:





On Sep 25, 9:14*am, wrote:

The old 20% down rule was a thing of the past.

Bingo! *People who cannot come up with 20 pct should not own THAT
home, period. *But they can own a home that represents 20 pct of what
they can come up with.

People can blame the banks and the investment firms as much as they
want, but the bottom line remains, and that is, that the regular folks
buying homes got greedy, denied their real abilities to uphold their
ends of the deals, and irresponsibly defaulted. *Many of those folks
were sub-prime and unworthy in the first place to be considered for a
loan, but the govt made the banks do the bad loans anyway. *I feel
most sorry for the investors who puchased the securities, because they
were buying lies that started with Mr. and Mrs. Smith on Main street.
And the shareholders are OUR retirement and savings.

So, you feel sorry for Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and AIG?
Interestingly, if you believe the concept that Wall Street did all
this out of greed and not stupidity, then why is it that BS, Lehman,
Merrill and a whole list of others wound up holding these mortgage
backed securities themselves? * *If they knew how things were going to
turn out, why didn't they just make sure to sell them all off?- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Bottom line remains that Mr and Mrs smith on Main street defaulted,
they signed things they should not have, and the bankers let them do
it. I feel sorry for the investors who bought the securities from BS,
LB, AIG, etc. because they are me (and probably you too if you have a
401K, SEP, IRA, or Keough plan), that is who I feel sorry for. Mr.
and Mrs. smith on Main street are just as culpable in the lie about
the quality of these securities as the bankers are. I feel sorry for
the investors because they are the only ones who didn't lie, but they
get burned because they took the risk in capital to back these
securites on unworthy homebuyers. Main street has plent of investors
too these days, its not all trillion dollar pension funds who look for
quality mortgage-backed securities to invest. The homebuyers and the
bankers all put pretty bows on these unreliable securites, in their
own ways.