Suckers think that you cure greed with money, addiction with substances, expert problems with experts, banking with bankers, economics with economists, and debt crises with debt spending
The CDO was, in effect, a credit laundering service for the residents of Lower Middle Class America. For Wall Street it was a machine that turned lead into gold.
In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $724,000.
"When you're a conservative Republican, you never think people are making money by ripping other people off," he said. His mind was now fully open to the possibility. "I now realized there was an entire industry, called consumer finance, that basically existed to rip people off."
What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they don't need to make smart decisions--if they can get rich making dumb decisions?
The one plentiful herds of magazine writers would continue to be culled - by the Internet, by the recession, by the American public, who would rather watch TV or play video games or electronically inform friends that, like, 'rain sucks!' But there's no app for a bourbon buzz on a warm day in a cool, dark bar. The world will always want a drink.
"Because the lenders sold many--though not all--of the loans they made to other investors, in the form of mortgage bonds, the industry was also fraught with moral hazard. "It was a fast-buck business," says Jacobs. "Any business where you can sell a product and make money without having to worry how the product performs is going to attract sleazy people."
"They had stumbled either upon a serious flaw in modern financial markets or into a great gambling run. Characteristically, they were not sure which it was. As Charlie pointed out, "It's really hard to know when you're lucky and when you're smart."
The creation of the mortgage bond market, a decade earlier, had extended Wall Street into a place it had never before been: the debts of ordinary Americans.
"The simple measure of sanity in housing prices, Zelman argued, was the ratio of median home price to income. Historically, in the United States, it ran around 3:1; by late 2004, it had risen nationally, to 4:1. "All these people were saying it was nearly as high in some other countries," says Zelman. "But the problem wasn't just that it was four to one. In Los Angeles it was ten to one and in Miami, eight-point-five to one."
You know what? We need a recession in this country, because that would finaly weed out al the subnormal, underdeveloped, stupefied, puerile people in this workforce.