The Sub-Prime Irony
October 23rd, 2007 | by Omnipotent Poobah |Lots of people are losing their homes these days and everyone has a take on who’s at fault. Are home buyers feckless spendthrifts who took ill-advised dips into a shallow mortgage pool? Or, are Armani-suite d lenders a bunch of loan sharks who prey on “the little guy”.
Um, yes.
Certainly home buyers share the blame. They ignored common sense signals that their loans were headed for disaster before the ink dried on the closing papers. Thousands who already struggled to pay credit card bills, car payments, and monthly rent fell for ads extolling the virtues of home ownership on the cheap. Bad credit? No credit? No problem! Buyers listened to shyster lenders dressed in cheap suits and pencil-thin mustaches tell them, “I’d give the money away, but my wife won’t let me.”
Word to the indebted - you don’t get somethin’ fer nothin’. That should have been your first clue.
Handing Keys to the Cat Burglars
It’s true that many laid-off folks simply had an unlucky run of bad luck that prevented them from paying the bills, but many more were rubes who handed the keys to their new houses to known cat-burglars .
Economic literacy in this country is appalling. There are distressingl y few who can grapple with day-to-day finances. People routinely run up debt and pay it back in endless minimum payments. Hardly a day goes by without a newspaper story, local TV news series, or ads for debt counseling agencies telling them how stupid massive indebtedness is. Yet, they do it anyway. This sort of behavior isn’t financial illiteracy, it’s life illiteracy.
On the other hand, lenders seem to be OK with the idea that when you take a babe from the woods and feed it salsa you’re not to blame for the upset tummy. “Dumb-assed 14-month old should’ve known better than to eat salsa.”
Mercenary Dream Merchants
Despite the TV persona of kindly bankers who just want to help you realize your dreams, they’re really cold, hard bastards in search of a buck even if they have to sell their grandmother’ s kidneys to get it. These mercenary dream merchants couldn’t care less if you ever pay the money back. In fact, they’re more than happy to sell bigger and better dreams for no down payment and “reasonable” 21% credit card interest rates. Just look at the Amazon rain forest of credit card offers that overflows your paper-recycl ing bin for evidence.
But when they’ve climbed out on a limb alongside the rubes they suckered, they holler that it’s someone else’s fault. “We’ve got to make bankruptcy more difficult!” - and they did. “Deregulate us so we can loan money at 40% to make up our losses on the 21 percenters!” - they’re working on it.
Word to the indebters - nobody forced the rubes to fall for your line of guano, but no one forced you to loan money to people who clearly couldn’t pay it back either. You are a victim of your own success.
Please, feel free to enjoy the irony in your current situation.
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Tags: Contributors , BIO, Economics, Housing Market, capitalism, bringiton, economics, omnipotentpo obah, sub-prime
