When money is speech there really are a surprisingly few persons in the US and abroad who have any voice and say in these matters.
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You could try to burn their several multimillion dollar houses down.
You’d be a better job creator doing that than they ever were.
Rebuilding decadent, unnecessary palatial houses is expensive and takes a lot of human power.
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It’s a start!
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They would probably see it coming and double the houses worth with some extreme insurance 
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So if we have a smoking gun, shouldn’t we be throwing these cunts in the slammer?
I mean, FFS.
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Uh… so that’s a good thing?
No. It’s not a good thing. But it’s an inevitable part of a system where there is asynchronous information awareness.
It will always happen. But a better informed public, who rely on a greater number of people with less at stake as individuals to inform them, can assist in cushioning the blow.
A public that sits on its bum absorbing the easy fluff of modern day life isn’t going to do that.
I’m always two-pronged in these things. The evildoers should be reined in, and the mob of the populace should educate and keep an eye on things better.
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It’s a rigged economy, in symbiosis with a rigged political system.
And long overdue for a Bastille-storming.
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Hell, I saw it coming in 2005, when the “value” of my house had gone from $220,000 to $500,000 in three years, far more than I could afford to pay if I was buying it anew at my salary.
I put it on the market, in two weeks I got an offer at $480K, snapped it up. Lived in a rental for four years, then bought a lovely piece of semi-rural property where I live to this day.
I feel sorry for the poor saps who believed the myth that “housing will always go up” and bought overpriced housing or refinanced their family homes, using the proceeds to buy cars, boats, and vacations. But not a whole lot sorry. I’m no genius, and I managed to figure it out in time.
By 2007, everyone should have been wise to the con.
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Well, yeah, but if they wised up, then your house wouldn’t have doubled in value.
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All this blaming of the middle-class when the bankers were the ones privatizing profits based on shady mortgage deals then subsidizing the incredibly massive losses that followed. Underwriting should have prevented this, but standards were made to disappear long before your average flipper-douchenozzle was able to do what you claim.
Your outrage and disappointment is misplaced.
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In the same situation, would you have sold a property? It’s a simple enough deduction.
When asset prices accelerate suddenly, and you can’t see clear to the horizon that the new fertile world is real, then it’s time to think of dumping what you have.
I’d love to be in possession of the Ferrari Dino I oh-so-nearly robbed, lied and stole to get 20 years ago (in the end, I didn’t!) - but if I had it now, I would dump it like a poop-lolly. The values have rocketed, and the only possible thing holding them up is money-laundering and tax evasion (we found this out in the Panama Papers farrago) - and those people will move on quickl enough to something else.
The basic thing is - when values shoot up, think of getting out, because it’s unsustainable. Always.
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Yeah, I can’t understand how anything with a floating value and whose ownership imposes cumulatively large maintenance costs can be characterized as an asset.
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There were years of warnings as the truly worthless paper piled up. The assumption was the federal government, it was believed would take the worthless paper and make it “good” by buying it and issuing currency for the bonds. When Goldman Sachs was allowed to fall the writing was on the wall for these people. The only thing here is exact timing makes the act illegal.
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We were lucky. we sold off a big piece of property right before the crash, although much of the pension that I had been working towards for 18 years evaporated. I guess we should have seen the inevitability of a crash when the property appraisals doubled every two years until land that we paid $470 per acre was valued at $10K. We sold it, and it dropped right down to less than 1K. The buyer was not happy. We did not sell it because we were clever, but because the property taxes were killing us.
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The difference between your Ferrari and a house, is that nobody is making Dino’s any more, but there’s new houses being built all the time.
Ferrari: fixed supply, changing demand.
House: increasing supply, increasing demand.
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What would have ameliorated the “crisis” would be for Dubya to have said in 2005, “Any institution which accumulates a portfolio of mortgage backed securities does so at its own risk. The term “bailout” will be used in my administration only to refer to what my dad does on his birthday.”
Of course, he did not do so, and that’s not surprising. What is surprising is that after eight years of Obama, we still have legally designated TBTF banks, who can probably invest in Beanie Baby Bonds and still have the taxpayer cover their losses.
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Bubbles mate. It’s all bubbles.
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