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

To: Steve Lokness who wrote (150469)	11/17/2010 8:32:05 PM
From: Ron	Respond to of 542574

Indeed the housing boom did turn into a Ponzi scheme of sorts. It built momentum rapidly. I knew a lady who got into the mortgage broker business around 2004 who was telling everyone she knew to jump in, buy a couple of houses and flip them. She was in South Florida. Ahem. She worked with realtors who actively recruited folks to buy the houses, many of them Cubans who knew little English and certainly knew nothing about how variable rate mortgages work. Predatory lending. Of course the more mortgages she sold, the more money she made. And the Wall Street firms that bought all those mortgages and bundled them together, then made more money selling the bundles. The worst of it was when Goldman then started short selling their own mortgage bundles. I still think somebody needs to go to jail over that. The new documentary 'Inside Job' covers this fairly well, and also touches on the S&L debacle of the late 80's early 90's. Of course part of the problem was greedy people throwing caution to the wind, buying homes they couldn't afford. But much of it was stoked by realtors, mortgage brokers and investment banks going all out to reel in suckers.