In article , J G Miller wrote:
The abilty for the people to pay or not isn't particularly relevant. The
root problem was that the underlying value of the asset wasn't enough to
cover the debt on it.

From which one can therefore conclude that the people buying the asset were

a) being ripped off by having to paying far more than the asset was worth

and/or

b) incredibly stupid

They were being ripped off by being persuaded to *promise* to pay. As they
didn't have the means to pay the money back, these were promises that would
never be kept. Effectively they were paying with non-existent money.

Some of them may or may not have been stupid as well (because some people
are) but most of us are not fully conversant with financial terminology, and
those who live by it don't usually go out of their way to make it easy to
understand, because then we'd all realise what they're up to. If I had
absolutely nothing in the world and somebody effectively offered me a house
for nothing, I'd probably take it, and so would you. The real villains in
this are the financial institutions who set up these empty promises and then
sold them on to others, because they knew exactly how it all worked and
exactly what they were doing. Now we're all paying the price, even those of
us who have worked for what we have, and had the foresight to save it.

Rod.
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