How were we supposed to know?

[flewellyn]

I keep seeing posts on the blagosphere, and hearing in the news, about people who are absolutely infuriated at the mere idea of using any bailout money to help people with failing mortgages directly. Give it to the wealthy corporations who leveraged those bad mortgages into oblivion and wrecked the economy? Sure, no problem. But give money to people who might otherwise lose their homes? Gasp, no! We can't have that! Those people were stupid and didn't do their homework! We can't be going around rewarding stupidity and failure! They should have KNOWN that this would happen!

Really?

Well, let's have a look at this clip from the Daily Show, which once again proves that the best news reporting in America is coming from comedians, of all places:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

CNBC Gives Financial Advice

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

So, really...who was stupid? Who was a loser? Who failed?

Comments

[mrz80.livejournal.com]

So, really...who was stupid? Who was a loser? Who failed?
Uhm, the Congress that passed legislation requiring banks to loosen up on their mortgage qualifications, the bankers who convinced people that, say, 40% of your gross income is a reasonably affordable mortgage (I had brokers tell me that 15 years ago when we were shopping for our first home and making oh, 1/3 to 1/2 what we're making now), the people who never learned or never just plain bothered to *budget* their income and figure out for *themselves* how much mortgage they really *could* afford rather than taking the word of the broker, and again, the Congress that decided the best way to fix the debt mess was to write a $10e12 mortgage against our grandchildrens' economic future in a bad-money-after-good bandaid to try to hide the melanoma on the body economic for another election cycle.

[flewellyn.livejournal.com]

Nope.

The real blame falls on the banks that leveraged bad loans 35 to 1.