Want a pretty good primer on how the heck we ended up in this financial mess? Â Straight from the mouths of the horses involved?
Sit back. Â It’s a wild ride. Â If your jaw doesn’t drop at least once, you weren’t paying attention.
September 24th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
2 Responses to “And so. Here we are.”
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Ok so I listened I paid attention; my jaw did drop a couple of times. I weeded out the ‘human interest, tugging on the heart strings’ part, that NPR is so fond of.
Based on this, it appears that it boils down to, people (who knew better) got greedy and got burned now we are all paying for it. Everyone involved is to blame from the people who took out loans they knew they couldn’t pay, to the people who gave them loans that they knew wouldn’t be paid. – yes they should all be held responsible from the top to the bottom. But as much as it should happen, it is just not going to.
The guy who got the 540k loan for nothing, knowing he wasn’t going to pay it back, isn’t in any more trouble than the guy who gave it to him , knowing he wasn’t going to pay it back. They were both just as responsible for the situation. The rest of us are stuck fixing it. (Man I wish we had debtor’s prison system that worked – but alas that would get corrupted too)
– This was a great answer to how we got where we are.
– The question is how are we to fix the problem.
Yeah – isn’t this crazy? I listened to this awhile ago when it first aired, and was stunned. STUNNED.
It also renewed my love affair with This American Life.