On Sep 4, 9:23*am, Kurt Ullman wrote:
In article , "ChairMan"
wrote:

Ed Pawlowski wrote:
thats why I blame more people than the banks. Realtors, appraisers,
title companies all knew that things were wacky.
they all knew what they were selling wasn't worth the price. I
refinanced and had an appraiser ask me what amount I needed to get it
done.
They didn't care, they all got their money on the front end, screw the
guy at the back end

* * *And the buyers have their share of the blame, too. Had a bunch of
friends talk to me about how they knew they couldn't pay it back, but
they KNEW that the price was going to keep going up and they would make
plenty of money before the balloon payment, etc. You have to have the
buyers.
--
America is at that awkward stage. It's too late
to work within the system, but too early to shoot
the *******s."-- Claire Wolfe

And to the list I would add one very big one, the Federal Reserve.
They have God knows how many people monitoring various
aspects of the economy. You would surely think that with housing
prices doublind and tripling in some places, they woud recognize
that their low interest rates were financing a bubble. Yet, the
did nothing.

Saw on the news the other day a family in Las Vegas that bought
a house for $750K in 2007. It's now worth $340/k and they
are still paying the mortgage. Why, I don't know. Bankruptcy
would seem a viable option in that case. Besides the FED,
the buyer would have to be pretty stupid. Around here, NJ
shore, there isn't much new land left. In LV, they have hundreds
of miles of desert to build houses forever. That house would be
worth $750K here, but no way in hell in LV. But everyone gets
caught up in greed and it just becomes a vicous cycle.

Yet, all the Democrats want to do is pretend it's somehow all
Bush's fault, which of course is just nonsense. But it's dangerous
nonsense, because instead of anayzing what really went wrong,
what really lead up to it, etc, if you just rail against everything
that
Bush and the Republicans and say it's all bad, then you're
going to get a very, very bad result. You can see that happening
right now in the economy.

" wrote in
:

On Sep 4, 9:23*am, Kurt Ullman wrote:
In article , "ChairMan"
wrote:

Ed Pawlowski wrote:
thats why I blame more people than the banks. Realtors, appraisers,
title companies all knew that things were wacky.
they all knew what they were selling wasn't worth the price. I
refinanced and had an appraiser ask me what amount I needed to get
it done.
They didn't care, they all got their money on the front end, screw
the guy at the back end

* * *And the buyers have their share of the blame, too. Had a bunch
of
friends talk to me about how they knew they couldn't pay it back, but
they KNEW that the price was going to keep going up and they would
make plenty of money before the balloon payment, etc. You have to
have the buyers.
--
America is at that awkward stage. It's too late
to work within the system, but too early to shoot
the *******s."-- Claire Wolfe

And to the list I would add one very big one, the Federal Reserve.
They have God knows how many people monitoring various
aspects of the economy. You would surely think that with housing
prices doublind and tripling in some places, they woud recognize
that their low interest rates were financing a bubble. Yet, the
did nothing.

Saw on the news the other day a family in Las Vegas that bought
a house for $750K in 2007. It's now worth $340/k and they
are still paying the mortgage. Why, I don't know. Bankruptcy
would seem a viable option in that case. Besides the FED,
the buyer would have to be pretty stupid. Around here, NJ
shore, there isn't much new land left. In LV, they have hundreds
of miles of desert to build houses forever. That house would be
worth $750K here, but no way in hell in LV. But everyone gets
caught up in greed and it just becomes a vicous cycle.

Yet, all the Democrats want to do is pretend it's somehow all
Bush's fault, which of course is just nonsense. But it's dangerous
nonsense, because instead of anayzing what really went wrong,
what really lead up to it, etc, if you just rail against everything
that
Bush and the Republicans and say it's all bad, then you're
going to get a very, very bad result. You can see that happening
right now in the economy.

There is plenty of blame to go around for the housing bubble. I
certainly won't deny that. I just find it curious that people who say
they favor individual rights and responsibilities say it is all (or
almost all) the Feds fault. But that is behind. We have to fix it, and
as far as I can see the banks, mortgage brokers, flippers and appraisers
have had minimal punishment, and John Q. Public is left wiith the bill,
either individually or collectively. As I said before, the savings and
loan crisis was (IMO) similar, and it was solved, why can't we solve
this?

--
Best regards
Han
email address is invalid

In article ,
Han wrote:


There are those who say that Carter's and Clinton's emphasis on home
ownership by the underserving (my word) was the root cause of the whole
bubble, and some aspect may indeed be right. As I said before, in TX for
example the housing bubble was less, because of TX banking rules. Of
course, in LV it was speculation and gambling that caught up with people,
like someone I know there.



There is no root cause. Like most every major cataclysm there are many
parents. Greed all through the homebuilding mortgage process, repeal of
Glass Steagal (BTW; low double digit dissenters in the House and on a
freaking voice vote in the Senate. BTW2: If you look at the current
people on both sides piling on about GS repeal, Barney Frank is the ONLY
one (not Reid, not Pelosi, etc) who actually voted against it). There
were a couple of other major changes in the laws other people point to,
all passed by large bipartisan majorities.



Similar I said, not identical, and I don't know why the 2007 bubble
wasn't caught earlier. I have personally been lucky to buy my homes when
I did, 1980 and 1998.

The S&L came about in three waves. The first was when inflation took
off and S&L started closing because the law said they could only do long
term mortgages while getting short term money. So, when inflation hit,
they had to pay 10% or above for savings accounts while having a huge
percentage of their mortgages at 5% or less.
In order to address that situation Congress (Dem at the time),
decided to let S&Ls do more than just home loans and other things to
diversify their income streams. They also decided to do some messing
with the tax codes making "investment" in commercial real estate more
attractive.. at least from a tax standpoint...
So, this expanded the S&Ls and others into commercial real estate.
Wave two came about when the tax codes were changed to retroactively
take away these tax breaks. Many of the commercial buildings were put up
mainly for tax purposes so what little underpinning they had was taken
out when the tax laws were changed. This was also great timing on the
part of Congress as they did this about the time of a recession and the
collapse of the TX oil fields. (This change just hastened a bubble that
was gonna pop anyway).
To address this, the regulators got into a bunch of deals with
healthy S&Ls to take over the unhealthy ones. The healthy ones did not
want to become unhealthy because of an inflow of lousy debt to their
balance sheets, so they came up with the concept of regulatory goodwill,
which is way too intricate to get into here.
This went along well for quite awhile as bad S&Ls were folded into
good S&Ls with very little monetary input from the government. Then
Congress took umbrage at this and outlawed the concept of regulatory
goodwill. Quite literally overnight, a large number of perfectly solvent
S&Ls became insolvent and were taken over. This was the largest wave.
That this was illegal was shown over the next 5 or 6 years as the
S&Ls who relied on regulatory goodwill (part of the contracts with the
regulators) won case after after case getting damages of at least $10
billion for breach of contract from the Feds.
--
America is at that awkward stage. It's too late
to work within the system, but too early to shoot
the *******s."-- Claire Wolfe