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Where is Howard Beale when you need him. You may remember him from the movie "Network" as the fellow who told us all to stick our heads out the window and shout "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore."Well, that's pretty much where I am on this whole financial/housing meltdown: Mad as hell. How could "they" have been so stupid and irresponsible? How could "they" have let this happen.
The "they" includes delusional borrowers - and we are not just talking poor undereducated consumers here - who apparently really believed real estate would go up forever and that the whole mortgage thing would work out even though the payment was more than they earned. The "they" includes greedy middlemen who pocketed fees knowing full well that sooner or later it had to all come crashing down. The "they" includes risk assessors who failed in their primary duty to properly police the instruments that were created to bundle bad loans with good loans. The "they" includes the government, which thought that the free markets would regulate themselves more efficiently than government would or could.
You know, it's not like we didn't know how to do mortgages. When my wife and I bought our first house, we were subjected to rigorous scrutiny by the lenders. More importantly, we had our parents looking over our shoulders, parents who remembered the depression, parents who had caution embedded into their psyche. It looks as though we will have a whole new generation of parents scarred by economic devastation.
This whole mess was just so damn unnecessary. It's enough to make me mad as hell. It's more than enough to make me scared as hell.
