Subprime Mortgage Crisis
Maybe it’s interesting to look at the history?
The Observer collected some quality quotes in
Here are the highlights:
As one speaker called on “Wall Street to help out the main street,” a suited passerby shook his head and muttered, “Yeah, well, don’t buy something you can’t afford.”
“Obviously, there has to be a political solution [because] someone’s ox is going to be gored the question is who suffers and who wins out,” he said on the sidelines of the protest. “Everyone is culpable here. I feel for these people, but if they had no realistic hope of servicing the debt, they should pay. If they were duped, then the duper should pay. [President Bush’s plan] is arbitrary and doesn’t go far enough though.”
“I had clients cashing out $3,000 IRA accounts to put a down payment on a house they couldn’t afford and now someone has got to pay the piper,” he said in between drags of a cigarette outside the Bobby Van’s steakhouse at Broad and Exchange streets. “These people are not victims of predatory lending and this is not a racial thing. It’s like those guys on the street doing the card tricks–the deal looks too good to be true because it is. People went out and bought houses that they shouldn’t have bought, so eventually they are going to foreclose. The government getting involved is just forestalling the inevitable.”
“These Wall Street banks are behind a lot of the mortgage companies with abusive lending practices, so yeah I think they should have to pay more,” he said, before stubbing out his cigarette and walking into the Stock Exchange.
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