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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (126897)	12/10/2009 7:52:49 PM
From: slacker711	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541791

Yes you have responsibilities to yourself, to your family, and to your community. You have no responsibility to live within your means? None at all? Like I said, you have an absolutely incomprehensible viewpoint to me. I view people as having some control over their own lives. You seem to see them as these dumb sheep who can only hope that institutions dont take advantage of them. If you are right, no amount of regulation is going to help. If it isnt the banks, somebody else will come along and "force" them into terrible financial decisions. They can not take borrowed money and use 40 to 1 leverage to make bets that they can not pay back when the bet goes sour. They can not make loans to people who can not pay them back. Neither can people. Slacker

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (126897)	12/10/2009 7:55:37 PM
From: Steve Lokness	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541791

Mary; Interesting comments on banks. You have this well thought out out even though I do not completely share your thoughts as to lack of responsibility for those taking out a loan. Lots of people for example just used their homes as a cash machine to buy toys. Do they share in responsibilty? Or how about those flipping homes. Buying - or building - one after another to sell at a profit? It was their home they didn't do anything wrong except maybe get caught up by the hype. To suggest that their greed didn't enter in for some responsibility is wrong in my mind. But - and here is where we really part company - BUT, why did the banks make all these crazy loans? Did bankers all of a sudden wake up one morning and become crazy or dishonest? Well maybe to some degree - but the real and big incentive was the cheap money floated by Greenspam/Bernanke. The bankers couldn't lend it fast enough because there was another helicopter right behind ready to dump more dollars. They called him "helicopter Ben" for a reason. AND this is when and where Austrians stepped in and warned what would happen. All that money ended up in inefficient hands of people without a clue as to what they were doing. And if you keep pushing money into the hands of people who can't pay it back we will never get out of this. That's what much of the stimulus is designed to do - make people borrow more to keep the economy going. Hmmmmm, should give us pause.