Yeah, they've been floating this for a few days through the usual surrogates. Notice how nothing is ever the fault of the people in power, it's always the fault of the powerless? Just like the Reagan era welfare queens, who were gonna bankrupt the economy, no matter how much deficit spending, tax-cutting and bank-deregulating our leaders engaged in to try to stimulate it. Damn those poor people! It's bad enough that they choose to be poor, but then they've gotta drag down all us hardworking millionaires and billionaires too.

And hey, what a coincidence, the portrayal of black people as the source of all our economic woes just happens to perfectly dovetail with certain subtle subtexts related to the Presidential campaign. Purely unintentionally, I'm sure.

You're being ridiculous. Why are we in trouble? Because a bunch of assholes took out loans that they couldn't afford and then defaulted on them. And if you're going to say they weren't assholes, they were ignorant, then that's exactly what he means by credit not being a civil right. This crisis is not to be blamed on wall street.

oh, yes. Because political elites and wall street bankers generally act with social consciousness in mind. It just happened to be enormously profitable for them. But it is really the nggers' & spics' fault.

FOX News got this narrative started last night, with Neil Cavuto.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZi-C5Gsgnc

Minorities are 'risky folks.' According to the right wing.

What's interesting is that they're under the impression that banks were forced to lend to blacks or hispanics, instead of the truth, which is that they were forced not to discriminate by race. Believe me, the banks turned down plenty of loans for minorities.

What a bold pile of bullshit, this new conservative talking point.

Yes, don't blame the subprime/predatory lenders, blame the 'risky' minorities and poor for having been suckered into buying homes! What fools! They should have known better than to attempt to have a quality of life similar to us upper-middle class white folks.

Ahh, yes, 'a bunch of assholes took out loans they couldn't afford.'

Definitely not because lenders were giving out loans that couldn't be paid back according to the rate changes and stipulations placed upon the contracts.

Check out this term : "Credit Default Swaps"

If you're curious about how investors benefited because people couldn't pay off debt, there's a clue. Now shut your horrendously uninformed mouth.

Even if it were 'poor assholes' that got us into this, it's dumb fucks like you that will keep us there, Stephanie.

i heard this argument from a co-worker over a year ago. i'm not saying the internet is a race, i'm saying the race issue has been peddled for quite some time now.

and believed.

my co-worker insists lenders were forced to give loans to people -- minorities -- by law, and that the minorities could then not pay back the loans.

it would be great to have sound-byte clip with statistics i could quickly lob back when i hear such silly comments. it really caught me off-guard the first time i heard it.

Uncoupled from diversity (which is arguably coincidental if prevalent), its a salient point. There has been a huge push (by both Parties) to make credit readily available to everyone. Including people who might not really be able to afford it and particularly to purchase real estate. (That was the basic charter of Fanny and Freddie.) We can argue motives and whether its a good thing or not but...

The fact of the matter is that people borrowing money under terms they could not afford is what has caused this situation.

Blaming only the banking industry when the bill comes do for making available the credit that the public, and the government, demanded is a bit unfair.

Both the lender and the borrower enter into a transaction that has inherent risks (and thus is potentially mutually profitable). Banks should be allowed to fail if they mismanage their risk and home owners should be foreclosed on if they mismanage their risk. (Bankruptcy Court is there to liquidate debt and assets in either event.) But both, irresponsible borrowers and irresponsible lenders, should be pilloried equally.

... Its just not the populist thing to do... Stick it to The Man instead. It gets you more votes.

Here is an article about how the minority ownership talking point is bullshit:

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=did_liberals_cause_the_subprime_crisis

No, financial institutions lying about the values of their securities, coupled with a look-the-other-way regulartory environment, caused this problem.

One irresponsible minority is clearly to blame: the old white male bankers who spun these mortgages into the deeply nested derivative market.

As an individual who spent the last few years living within my means, yes I did get pissed off at people around me who took out big loans that were clearly (to anyone with common sense) a bad idea. However, there's no way in hell I'm letting Wall Street off the hook for this one - individual ignorance is one thing, but the collective hubris and bad judgment of the lending industry is just staggering.

And as a "minority", I can assure you that no lenders were forced to give me loans. So, to all the "blame the minorities" folks, I have just this to say: eat my fuck, you racist shitbags.

Paul,
It's a bit of a stretch to say Krikorian blames the poor, blacks and Hispanics for the debacle on Wall Street. Even Paul Krugman believes that not everyone can afford or should buy a home. I don't own one. Perhaps credit isn't a right. I believe there were plenty of unscrupulous lenders as well as irresponsible debtors that "contributed" (emphasis on "contributed") not caused the collapse of some major firms and lenders on Wall Street. Financial irresponsibility has no color/cultural/class barrier. Sure, the wealthy will suffer less. But, that's usually the case.

Don't worry Dan. They'll drop this criticism soon because of Rick Davis' work for FMFM.

Take their argument at face value and they're blaming John McCain's campaign manager for this mess.

@9

That exacerbated the problem. But over leveraged borrowers caused it.

Typical conservative victimhood. Conservatives thrive on finding scapegoats for their own personal failures.

@7: You have the perfect screen name: you're kidding us, right? The problem isn't a bad loan or two, or even a thousand. Everyone knows what a bad loan is worth: The value of the property securing the loan minus the balance on the loan. The current crisis results from slicing and dicing those bad loans, mixing them in with good loans, slicing and dicing some more, writing leveraged derivatives contracts on the resulting puree, and spewing it throughout the global financial system. It is exactly the same thing that happens when hamburger is made out of the carcasses of a thousand cows. If even one cow is sick, you have to recall millions of tons of hamburger. The problem with the financial system is that if you recall all those securities (in essence, valuing them at zero), everything crashes. There have always been problem loans, just as there have always been sick cows. It is the new Wall Street slicer/dicer/puree/julienne machine (which generated billions in fees for everyone in the business and inflated the price of housing to unsustainable levels) that has turned this into a crisis.

This link does some debunking of the "It's the Community Reinvestment Act's fault" argument.

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2008/09/it-wasnt-the-co.html

There may be something there for infrequent @6.

After 40 years of stinkier and stinkier shit, I am now getting physically ill at the mention of Republicans. Will we ever catch a break? Ugh.

Ah yes, of course. The poor banks. They were just HELPLESS in the face of all of this LIBERAL PRESSURE to stop red-lining minority neighborhoods for credit, and once the loans existed they had NO CHOICE but to stuff the loans into derivative financial instruments, con/bribe Standard & Poors into slapping AAA ratings onto them, and leverage themselves 100X over the original debt. It was completely out of their hands the moment some hippie somewhere said that black people should maybe own property.

The poor dears. I wonder how they managed?

As for the "Banks are forced to lend to minorities" argument. It's not literally true but it is factually accurate.

Put simply:

1.) Banks are required to be able to show that a minimum % of their lending is to minority borrowers.

2.) That means that if a bank wants to make a loan to a well qualified borrower they must lend a corresponding amount to a qualified minority borrower.

3.) So Banks lower their standard of qualification to ensure that an adequate number of minority borrowers qualify and

4.) design loans that appeal to (and attract) these less qualified (minority or not) borrowers... frequently with low money down and payment pain deferred until later.

5.) These loans (like most other loans) are bundled and sold to other institutions in order to free the banks lending capital to make more loans.

It's later, and we are all feeling the pain now.

But to say that this situation is completely divorced from the Fairness in Lending Laws that require banks to carry a minimum % of minority loans is not true or accurate. This is partly an unintended consequence of that policy. A good question is "how much so and is it worth it?".

The simplest way through this specious argument is the classic "follow-the-money" path.

The financial crisis resulted from a typical, if huge, bursting of a bubble. Lenders approved risky adjustable-rate mortgages, often without considering whether borrowers could afford them, because the interest on those loans was huge. Families of all incomes took on those loans, and most borrowers, even the riskiest, took pains not to default. Investors bought the mortgages as securities, profits increased exponentially, and regulators, encouraged by the Republican administration, did nothing.

The worst offenders, the independent mortgage companies, were never subject to the "affirmative lending" laws that federally insured banks are subject to. It wasn't liberal laws that made them offer risky loans - it was lust for profit, pure and simple.

i'd like to point out that home ownership incentives/subsidies period were part of the problem, not that some group of people got them inordinately.

it takes two to sign a mortgage and if people want to put the blame on someone it shouldn't just be the ones offering a mortgage, underwriting, insuring, securitizing. it should also be the ones that signed their name on the line in the first place.

Ah yes, of course. The poor minority borrowers. They were just HELPLESS in the face of all of this CONSERVATIVE PRESSURE to borrow money and buy homes they couldn’t afford with no money down, and once they did they had NO CHOICE but to refinance those homes and use the equity to buy low riders, bigger TVs and more bling, and leverage themselves 100X over the original debt. It WAS completely out of their hands the moment some hippie somewhere said that black people should maybe own property.

The poor dears. I wonder how they managed?

Its the fucking hippie's fault!

Blaming people who took loans knowing they would be unable to afford them is a total non starter. The world is full of stupid, irresponsible people who will be willing to take out a loan they cannot pay, if the bank will give it to them. Its the BANK's job and responsibility to do the proper background checking and not make loans to people who are high risk. That is what financial analysts are paid for.

And no, they didn't reluctantly give these loans to high risk people out of pressure from liberals (HA HA HA!). They gave them because the loans made money as long as the housing market continued to go up, and they all KNEW that the market would go up forever and ever, because they are very smart highly paid analysts and they knew this market was completely different from the countless other speculation bubbles which have regularly inflated and collapsed since the beginning of modern capitalism.

YGTBKM, once again you prove you fail at life.

Please read 16&19. Then up on the actual crisis.

kthxbai!

PS. Why can't poor people stop being so...poor? GAWD! Don't they realize it's their fault for everything? /END SARCASM

Ultimately… If this meme has legs, its going to be because Pelosi & Reid and Dodd & Frank demanding that the bailout include assistance to homeowners in jeopardy will enable, if not necessitate, the argument that they are part of the problem too.

OM, you raise a good point; poor people are poor because they make poor decisions persistently.

@22 NAILS IT.

@27: Starting with the decision to be born to poor parents.

@ Bellevue: I thin we have had this argument before, but I'll rehash it.

Predatory lending was/is serious. Really, really serious. If you went to a doctor and the doctor and nurse told you were ok, all the tests were fine, would you believe him?

Lenders and Real Estate people worked together to convice people that everything was ok, mainly because they got commisions. It goes even deeper, since mortgage people have CPA's that will 'sign-off' on bad mortgages, knowing they are bad. This still happens, but was rampant before the end of the sub-prime business. I am not joking.

Then, you add to it the problems listed @16 & 19, and there you go. Most people didn't just go "yippie! I can lose my house in a couple years and go bankrupt! Awesome!"

Mortgage is complicated and these people, with the help of all those professionals, were totally duped.

@20: Banks are not required to be able to show that a minimum % of their lending is to minority borrowers--only if they want the federal government to insure their deposits. Why should taxpayers insure the deposits of institutions that engage in racial discrimination? Anyway, mortgage brokers and other institutions not subject to CRA, not banks, generated the vast majority of subprime loans.

Somehow we're not having a global financial crisis due to pawn shops, payday lenders and rent-to-own furniture stores who charge rapacious rates of interest. Why not? Because they didn't misrepresent the value of the assets being sold ("Triple AAA!") by burying them in complex financial instruments, then writing leveraged bets on them.

Ask yourself which is more likely, that banks with decades of experience lending suddenly stopped being able to figure out how much to charge for a risky loan, or that overpaid hotshots rushed onto an unregulated roller coaster that generated billions in fees with little thought for the long-term consequences?

Next I suppose you'll be arguing in retrospect that the CRA caused the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and the Dutch tulip mania of the 1630s.

And as to your post @23, you may wish to brush up on the tactics of predatory lenders--not pretty.

@22: Yes, those people will lose their homes. Punishment enough? How many Wall Street executives that we are supposed to bail out will lose a nickel of their own money?

YGBKM: your attempt at counter-snark would work better if one hundred dollars and one million dollars were the same amount of money. Sadly for you, they are not. Nice try though!

(Well, actually, no, more like "sad and pathetic." But there are forms to observe here.)

@kk: I am glad you are on this tread. It pisses me off to no end that people continally don't understand how this crisis happened, and then blame people who were completely preyed upon. So sad.

Also, YGTBKM and Bellevue: Have either of you tried to buy a house? Just curious.

@29, poor people that make financially wise decisions don't remain poor. Simply being born into a poor family won't make you poor for the rest of your life, unless you believe in financial determinism, which makes it kinda

OM, I've never liked Realtors aka Realtwhores but people that don't do due diligence on their part are going to be ripped off. Just because you see an ad by NAR on TV saying it's a great time to buy doesn't mean you should check your brain off. This entire predicament has a lot of facets but to claim mass ignorance/mass fraud as being excusable just doesn't cut it and doesn't hold those that need a base standard to any standard.

@33
Yes.
I own three homes.

OM, i'm not adequately qualified or informed to purchase a home and nor would I trust a real estate agent to help me with the purchase. I'm already one step ahead of those that thought they were.

further, to qualify everyone that got an option ARM, Balloon ARM, and any other non standard mortgage as being preyed upon, you'd have to ignore A. The fraud that many home buying people willing engaged in B. That many people engaged in it as a form of speculation C. Dan Savage is some sort of victim in need of help because of his mortgage choice.

Sure, some people are getting really hurt by the deception of others and the delusion of their own dreams and wants.

KK, perhaps we shouldnt bail out Wall Street execs and their failing companies? Perhaps we shouldn't bail out Wall Street at all? Perhaps we should have taxed them more from the start(an absolutely inarguable point)

Que OM to chime in with "BUT RECESSIONS HURT POOR PEOPLE MORE SO WE CAN'T LET ONE HAPPEN!" In a recession everyone suffers in an in a different and incomparable way.

When are we as society going to bite the bullet? When are we going to allow a recession that actual works out poorly performing business and ideas to take root? We can't keep borrowing our way out of a bust just because the majority of people can't sustain a financially inept way of life. god forbid we change as a society into a less debt accessing, more suspect society.

Bellevue Ave @34: I take your answer to mean that you have indeed never mortgaged a house. You might be surprised how complicated it is, particularly in a fast moving market, where it seems that if you don't buy today on the terms offered, prices will go up another 10% tomorrow, pricing you forever out of the American dream. I don't think those folks thought they were making financially stupid decisions. Also, you might put in a call to the King County Finance Director, who manages a portfolio of $4 billion in securities. As sophisticated as he is, the County lost some money on AAA-rated securities that suddenly became worthless earlier this year. And as for your claim that poor people who make financially wise decisions don't remain poor, I guess as long as neither they nor a loved one ever has an uninsured injury or sickness, or a layoff, or invest in those gosh-darn AAA-rated securities, well, then you're probably right.

And here's a heartwarming story from yesterday's paper about a delightful California couple who screwed over their family gardener, with help from WaMu.

"In a recession everyone suffers in an in a different and incomparable way." Spot On! The poor starve and the wealthy have to give up luxuries. Completely incomparable. Too bad you didn't factor that into the rest of your argument.

"I own three homes." Congratulations! And 1/2 a brain and 1/10th of a heart! You are a chilling beacon of hope in this financial crisis. I find it interesting that you even dare comment about this stuff, considering that you are incapable of understanding the world that the poor are facing.

Let me guess, since you don't rent, you're probably unaware that taking a loan for a home is the only way most people can get out of throwing 1/2 (or more) of their monthly income away while renting. And then the owners of the property use the rent to pay their own mortgages.

Oh, those peons, they deserve NOTHING!

kk, your first part speaks to an emotional plea of excusing conspicuous consumption because the least financially savy engage in it as a way of life. Anyone that believed the lie that they would be priced out forever was either ignorant of history or delusional about how credit bubbles work.

the second part speaks to rating agencies not doing their negligently and conflicts of interest that need to be reformed severely.

The last part speaks to hypothetical worst case scenarios that aren't the norm, unless you have some clumsy fuck family members who'd you be better off without.

And here's a little article from Politico explaining that concerned citizen You_Gotta_Be_Kidding_Me and baby eater Dick Cheney are on the same side of this thing. Must bring some warmth to your heart.

I kinda half wish we had let the Building Industry Association of Washington gut the Growth Management Act and carpet Skagit County with McMansions. Then they'd all have gone completely bankrupt in the housing crash and we would never have to hear from those assholes again. After a couple of years we could have repossessed all the tract homes, plowed them under and turned the land back over to be farmed. Instead we have to endure another season of Dino Rossi ads.

Yes of course, predatory lending and rampant speculation had nothing to do with this! It was because poor people and blacks got access to credit! It all makes sense now. Thanks National Review!

jay, philosophical question; should poor people really even have access to credit considering their risk and is it even worth pricing that risk into their rates if it causes them to default? is it wrong to deny poor people access to rich people things based on their ability to pay for them?

43: No of course not. But the reason lending institutions give away credit so freely is because of a lack of regulation and oversight, and their own instant gratification. If the federal government had laws against predatory lending and variable interest rates, private lenders wouldn't have gone on a spree of loaning money to people who couldn't afford to pay it back. The government and private lenders knew damn well what they were doing.

And yes, it would be nice if poor people smartened up and didn't take out loans they can't repay. But the poor and undereducated are obviously more vulnerable to these kinds of scams. The people who took out risky loans are partly to blame, but that doesn't mean that predatory lending practices are okay or that Wall Street and inattentive regulators opening the door for this kind of shit are somehow excused. It’s weird you seem to think it’s ok for the rich to play games with other peoples’ lives but it’s not ok for the poor to engage in similarly risky behavior. Both sides had a hand in the crisis; the difference is that financiers and regulators are supposed to know what they’re doing. I expect the poor to be stupid.

Sorry, I didn't mean to write all that with such an abrasive tone.

@44 - Bad answer.

Our entire society is based on debt and credit. Bellevue Ave may have three houses, but he sure as hell doesn't have the resources to pay for all of them. Rather, someone decided that he is a "good risk," and loaned him something like a million bucks. I imagine that if he lost his job, or if his trust fund was stripped bare by unscrupulous money managers, and all of his loans were called in, he'd be just as screwed as any other poor person.

The system we live in demands that people have a certain amount of money flowing through their hands. For almost everybody, that means living on a certain amount of credit or carrying a certain amount of debt. If we expect every human being around us to have access to food and shelter, then we need to extend some of the poor among among us a modicum of credit. If we want them to have access to any opportunities to better themselves or rise above their circumstances, such as attending school or buying a home, then we need to have some mechanism by which they are afforded debt. You can argue that the capitalist system in unjust, but you can't express your belief in our economy and then refuse to extend credit to people worse off than yourself. It's logically inconsistent, not to mention inhumane.

Of course, you may be the kid of asshole who believes that only wealthy people deserve to eat and that society exists to satisfy the rich alone. Everyone else can eat cake. But then you have no moral ground to stand on at all - you're simply a fiend.

If it's not clear, I'm not calling @44 a fiend. He and I seem to mostly agree with each other. I'm reserving that term for Bellevue Ave.

@38

1.) Possibly because I only have half a brain I was once poor, and had to scrimp and save to pay rent.

2.) I earned every penny I have with just half a brain and no advantages.

3.) With only half a brain I was smart enough to ALWAYS save AT LEAST 15% of ANYTHING I earned.

4.) Even with half a brain I was smart enough to rent until I could AFFORD to buy.

5.) Even with half a brain I was smart enough to not buy something I could not AFFORD.

6.) Even with half a brain I was smart enough to do a fixed rate and put at least 20% down each time I did buy.

7.) Even with half a brain I was smart enough to read ALL of my loan documents and NEVER sign anything I did not understand 100%.

Any one who is not capable of the same must, by your definition, have LESS than half a brain. Including you I suspect.

Jay, I agree with a lot with you but what I'm currently seeing in a lot of forums I visit, people are solely blaming Wall Street for this. Not the people that signed mortgages, not the government for subsidizing mortgages or giving an implicit guarantee on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, not the rating agencies that wouldn't know bad debt from their ass.

Theres a specific point I have a problem with; When poor people screw up it's cause they are victims of a bigger machine, but when a rich person screws up it's cause they
did something fool hearty and wrong headed. Why aren't poor people capable of making poor decisions?

As for the specific portion considering doling out credit I think we can look at three very specific things that went wrong in this regard;

1. too much cheap money
2. lack of credit default risk for creditors. The bankruptcy law reform act of 2005 was an absolute disgrace to prudent governance and took away the catastrophic risk of lending to people.
3. The ability to resell this credit wholly and not have to retain a portion of it on your balance sheet.

poor people that make financially wise decisions don't remain poor.

Ah yes, there it is: the myth of the meritocracy. The belief that, at root, people get what they deserve. If one look at the current leadership of this country didn't immediately put to rest this chimera, you might want to ask yourself why parental income is a so much better predictor of income than, say, IQ. That is to say, why is the simpleton son of a millionaire so much more likely to grow up to be a millionaire than the genius daughter of a poor person? Oh, what's that you say, it's all about "wise financial decisions?" Well, it's a good thing they teach things like investment management in the public schools in Rural West Virginia coal mining towns and East St Louis slums! Otherwise it might not be the perfectly level playing field it is today.

Rich, lucky people as a rule like to tell themselves that wealth is earned or is a sign of God's love or Providence or some similar bullshit. It's the rare rich person who thinks their wealth is the result of dumb luck.

And con men have employed the rationalization "never give a sucker an even break" to explain away their predatory behavior since Three Card Monte was invented. When in doubt, blame the mark. That's exactly what this argument is at its heart, by the way. This is the creators of a Ponzi scheme blaming the suckers who bought their worthless scrip for the inevitable collapse. And it's not just to shift blame away from themselves, it's being employed as an argument against regulating the market to prevent their next round of Ponzi schemes.

@45
You might have a point if you could show how a mortgage is something that a poor person can inherently afford or should be able to afford and that the denial of such is equivalent to depriving a poor person of food stamps and clothes from good will.

further, I think that poor people should be afforded credit but not in absolute and any terms. You seem to equate home ownership with securing or advancement but I'd like you to reconcile that with evidence. You've bought the lie of the American Dream wholly if you think home ownership is advancement. I'd love to start a credit co-op for poor people to give them real alternatives to banks in south dakota and pay day lenders. would any of you help me? probably not because your own money would be at stake.

@50, calvinism's ideals were bunk from the start and prosperity protestantism is too.

Unless I'm generalizing here, your entire point is wealthy people are A. Lucky or B. a result of prior wealth.

I aknowledge that smart people won't always be rich. In fact many of the smartest people in the world won't ever be rich because they are intelligent in fields that don't command money. Golob is extremely intelligent and scarily so, but is he rich? Were his parents of better than average means? The point is not everyone that is smart is financially wise, or knows a con when it happens.

and being smart is not the same as being wise. there are plenty of book smart and street smart people that can get conned easily.

if it all comes down to luck why are you still playing the game of life? Obviously Warren Buffet, Andy Grove, George Soros, and countless other billionaires. Obviously my Dad doesn't earn his 6 figure salary by working, he simply finds wads of money on the ground. I don't make my sub median income by earning it do i?

And the alternative to the last paragraph is; never play 3 card monte once you know what it is and never play it before you know what it is.

follow up; whats wrong with not being rich? I certainly don't want to be making 200k a year because everyone I know who does doesn't enjoy their life.

@52,

Then why do you endorse Calvinism and Prosperity Protestantism? That is what you just did by blaming poor people for being poor. If making wise financial choices is all it takes to get out of poverty, why don't more people do it?

because what is financially wise isn't a clear cut thing that everyone can do based on their abilities and may shift over time.
I don't think people are predestined to be poor. pointing out that poor people are poor based on the path they take in life certainly isn't predestination.

It takes a lot to get out of poverty but I don't think we're talking about the same beast here; why are people in poverty so unaware of their financial position that they would think they could buy a home? Explain how a poor person deciding they are qualified to buy a home isn't poor decision making or being gullible?

Poor people aren't necessarily predisposed to poor action making, but a lot of your situation in life is a result of previous action and intended action you wish to undertake.

and more to the point, what does poor actually mean? I make less than median income and I'm not poor. who is this myth of a man that is poor, gullible, along for the ride, and not responsible for their actions no matter how obvious it is when their decisions impact their life.

4% of people make over 200k shows it isn't easy to be rich, but a median income of 40k shows it isn't hard to avoid being stupid.

You people disgust me.

Bellevue: My point is neither that luck is the only cause of wealth or that not being wealthy means life is not worth living.

My point is that blaming poor people and poor minority members in particular for the problems in our economy, besides being unconscionable race-baiting bullshit, is neither accurate nor helpful. The way to regulate usury is to regulate lenders. In case you've forgotten, the recent changes in personal bankruptcy laws were supposed to address the issue of irresponsible borrowers by preventing them from declaring bankruptcy to get out of paying their debts. Did that prevent the mortgage crisis or the credit crunch? No? Hmmm.

In the meantime, the usurists and the speculators are doing exactly that, welshing on their debts on a grand scale, and now some of them are pushing that tired old "lazy, shiftless" button to distract attention from that fact, pretending that the problem here was caused by people who were stupid enough to believe they could actually afford to own homes.

I've lived through decades of this crap and I know it when I see it. Blaming the poor for the problems caused by the money games played by the rich never results in anything but ever more capacious buckets of shit to be poured upon the heads of the poor. If people are really interested in reform, they would follow the money.

I'm all for more responsible behavior with regards to money and credit, but it needs to start at the top, where most of the money is concentrated.

blaming the poor and especially minorities for this entire mess is ludicrous, obviously. the racial part is appalling for the obvious transparent scape-goating.
but many poor people have a paw in the pie so to speak because they chose to do something imprudent. and it was imprudent either because they didn't conduct due dilligence, they were lost in the american dream, or they were defrauded.

and unless you're ignoring parts of my post wholesale, you missed the part where i pointed out how bad the bankruptcy reform act was in precipitating a situation where not given the option to default, the risk of lending to people was made unimportant. @51.

part of the problem is that all legislation has unintended consequences and the act was just another enabler of incentives to make bad decisions.