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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (421155)	9/30/2008 7:35:34 PM
From: steve harris	2 Recommendations Respond to of 1574386

I think it was democrats buying more votes, in addition to a chicken in every pot, a house for everyone! It is that simple imo...

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (421155)	9/30/2008 8:31:18 PM
From: i-node	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1574386

Suffice to say that the whole issue over low income homeownership was not the cause. Instead, that was just politicians trying to get their constituents to hop onto the real estate boom. I'm not sure about "low income". But when a person can buy a house with no money down, it is a recipe for disaster. I saw it happen in the 80s -- such buyers have no financial commitment to the property, and the instant it drops a tad in value (or even fails to appreciate substantially), it creates a feeding frenzy. Fine, upstanding homeowners will walk away from a 300K loan when they realize they can buy their neighbor's house for 250K. The blame on mark-to-market is bullshit and those who want to reverse it are just pushing a desperate measure. Mark-to-market has been a sound accounting technique for decades (although, there could be details in the implementation that could be part of the problem). It really is a matter of allowing people to buy property without any skin in the game. When you do this, a minor market drop becomes a major market drop. Greenspan warned about it because he fully understood this. I do believe you can lay the entire problem at the feet of the Democrats.