Tacitus is on my nightstand in my to-be-read pile. He just got moved way up the priority list.
Thanks to Jim Woosley for the link, and for my introduction to a weblog that is now added to my Recommended Reads: Fourmilog: None Dare Call It Reason
Wow. The Ancestor of the Mortgage Loan Bailout!
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3 responses to “Wow. The Ancestor of the Mortgage Loan Bailout!”
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We? This is not a “we” issue.
WE all get to pay the price. But WE do not all share the blame.
I rather think the people stupid enough to buy property without investigating the cost get to carry their own blame. As do the lenders who chose to ignore good risk in favor of bad risk, and to attempt to cash in on an “easy money” trend, while ignoring the truth that there is no such thing as easy money. There is either Pay Now, or Pay Later.
I’m not a “we” in this, and neither is anyone else who saw what was going on and didn’t try to make a fast buck off of it. I bought what I could afford—a nice doublewide in the country. I stayed in it and paid down my mortgage while everyone else was moving into bigger, fancier places that they couldn’t really afford, based on the idiot premise that property values could only ever rise—a premise which history has proven to the contrary over and over and over again.
People who actually MADE the mistakes get to carry the blame. It’s not something we all share.
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Without a doubt there were financial problems before and will be in the future. Ideally we should learn from mistakes of other generations, but it is not that simple.
Unfortunately, we are often unable to take into account someone’s mistakes.
“Experience is the name every one gives to their mistakes. (‘Lady Windemere’s Fan’ 1892.)
Mortgages are no different. As property prices were growing at phenomenal rate, many people were prepared to ignore the risk and take the plunge. We have to blame ourselves for being greedy. In the last few years we have seen people getting into property investment without any research or planning. As long as they could get a buy to let mortgage, which allowed them to purchase particular property, they were happy and didn’t think twice about the future. -
There is, indeed, nothing new under the sun.
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