You're right and your wrong at the same time.
you can not afford to spend more than you take in
that's true.
but who is more responsible...unsophisticated investors/home buyers who are notorious in a consumer culture for buying things they can't afford....or the market creators/sophisticated businessmen/finance gurus whose job it is to know better, not sell to people they don't check out thoroughly, and who create debt instruments that they know are risky?
Sure. The population itself is somewhat to blame...but not as much as the financial sector. You know this, deep down, in places you don't like to talk about at cocktail parties.
Vanquish...in the interest honesty...
You must look at it this way.
People did not simply buy more than they could afford as it pertained to the housing issue.
They FIRST had to lie on an affidavit about their income. The mortage application is an affidacvit that specificall ysays (paraphrased)
'I att4est to the validity of the above information to the best of my knowledge'
So the real question is this...
How can you defer ANY of the blame from people who knowingly and intentioanlly lied on a signed affidavit?
Furthermore, those wall street types would never have been able to LEGALLY (albeit unethically) capitalize on anything if people didnt first ILLEGALLY and UNETHICALLY lie on an affidavit.....that they not only sign when they apply....but they sign 4 more copies of it at closing.
I'm saying both are at fault, but one group more than the other. And yes, it's the sophisticated financial sector group.
I'm choosing the PROFESSIONALS over the NON-professionals. I can't put it more clearly than that. Ok. Both groups lied. Your argument is that the non-professionals lied first. But the professionals knew the rules better and had a higher duty to regulatory authorities.
And we have no idea how many times they lied when you think about all that paperwork. Ok. The non-professionals lied 4 times (let's say). How many times did the professionals use, copy, transmit, base agreements, offer in court, offer in settlement, ....etc etc etc those same documents?
And that's just with home mortgages. I'm also talking about exotic financial instruments that leveraged debt into higher rates that they solicited as a fair exchange for taking on riskier debts.
Or let's go back and talk about the now-infamous CDOs, or "collateralized debt obligations," which were a combination of both solid and risky mortgages squashed together into one instrument. They were sold as the "safest of all investments" thanks to their AAA rating, and then were rushed into the marketplace where unsuspecting investors bought them in droves.
Come on. You don't seriously want to hold non-professionals as responsible as professionals in ANY business situation, do you?
EDIT:
I really think, that in some conservatives' minds, if you don't put 100% of the blame on people, y'all think that they'll just escape blame at all. It IS possible to blame 2 groups at the same time. Same principle that my wife uses. She thinks that if I don't accept 100% of the responsibility...that I don't think I have a lesson to learn...or I evade all responsibility. Life isn't like that. It's possible to be wrong...but not 100% wrong. But conservatives are sooo afraid of letting someone off the hook....well, unless it's big business.