Friday Late Night Open Thread
3 hours ago
An NFL football coach once said - "if you're gonna talk the talk, you better walk the walk." This blog is nothing more than the rantings of a proud military vet and pissed off liberal who's had enough of the right-wing bullshit that is tarnishing America's image not only at home but around the world. Time to fight back and tell the conservative assholes exactly where they can shove their plans for an un-democratic America!
There is no way to measure the number of people who took out mortgages they knew they couldn’t afford, of course, but for what it’s worth, a 2007 report by the Mortgage Bankers Association reports that the FBI estimates “80 percent of all reported fraud losses arise from fraud for profit schemes that involve industry insiders.” That means the lenders, not the borrowers.
Just imagine the flights of fancy that the theory of borrower malevolence and Wall Street victimization requires conservatives to take: All these no-account folks, you see, got together and forced investment banks to engineer subprime mortgages into highly leveraged securities. Then they tricked all manner of hedge funds and pension funds and financial institutions into buying these lousy products. Just for good measure, these struggling homeowners then persuaded bond-rating agencies to misrepresent the risk associated with these securities.
Now imagine what such a fantastic scheme, if true, would mean for capitalism itself. This economic system, glorified by all, dominates the globe today, bidding prices up and down, forcing entire nations to change their ways to better suit its needs, and yet it is so fragile that when challenged by the weakest members of society and a handful of community organizers it simply crumbles. Thank goodness the Soviets never figured this out.