Re: Robin Hood etc @codejunkey
Some people observed REAL raciam and classism in the housing system. For example, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution found in 1992 that when white and black people were given the exact same financial records, the blacks who showed up at the loan interviews were 20% less likely than the whites to get the loan. Some people noticed this and tried to take action. The fact that their actions may have been misguided does not disprove their observations.
And I'm not really even ready to give that ground. That banks engaged in what is called on the tech world "embrace, extend, extinguish." The gov extend concessions to the banks to offset the risk of loaning to the unproven. The banks "embraced" these concessions because they were cold hard cash. They then 'extended' these concessions by marketing to those who would never have been denied loans (they would have never applied on their own) and creating more insurance for themselves through MBS'. They then 'extinguished' the push for a more equitable system by robbing the people blind through insider bailouts and blaming the issue on the poor people (who are still poor, or poorer) and distracting the public from those who made billions on the poor decisions of the financially uneducated that were aggravated by professional salesman pitching can't-lose financial bets that the marks didn’t understand.
I'm and salesman (a waiter, actually). I was poor during the bubble. I recognized a scam when I saw it, but many people I know who are financially better off than me were taken. My father, who has been at least upper middle class since I was born, offered to give me the down-payment and to assume all the risk for me if I took an ARM mortgage in 2005. He was sure, on the advice of his financial advisors, etc, that owning property was the key to personal wealth, and wanted that for me. He was fooled, and I wasn't.
To be clear, my father is much smarter and capable of acquiring income than I am. The reason he was fooled and I wasn't was I DON'T TRUST BANKERS AND THEIR OBFUSCATED PSEUDO-SCIENCE OF ECONOMICS. They were trying to loan poor people (me) money. And since I know that banks are dyed-in-the-wool predators, despite what TV, the gov and bloggers tell me, I refused, and my dad is not on the hook for an upside down mortgage. My hypothesis was tested and shown to be correct. That's science, not the hindsight wisdom of 'economics' as it is practiced by our banking institutions and their Central Banking allies.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
