Originally Posted by TheSquealer

Thank you for the well reasoned and well thought out rebuttal. It's certainly forced me to think and to see the entire financial system in a new light. I used to think those like you who managed to reduce a complex, multifaceted situation with mortgage backed securities, which was a global problem, not simply a US problem to a few "greedy banks". I used to think people like you had zero clue how mortgages actually worked, how they are packed and sold and how the actual terms and types of loans that are made are determined by market demand for those securities as a long term investment by institutional investors world wide.

I stand corrected.

At the end of the day, it was all very simple. Government creates feel good legislation to force banks to make loans to people that should never qualify for a loan... over time, they get better and better at it. The long term consequence was that banks got VERY good at making shitty loans, packaging them and selling them to investors. A lack of regulation wasn't what created banks to get great at making shitty loans selling them. It wasn't an Administration that was giving shitty mortgage backed securities AAA investment ratings. However, its quite clear that the entire system failed from the executive branch, to legislative branch, to regulation, to the financial markets, to investors, both domestically and globally.

The problem with the idea of blaming "greed" is that it over simplifies a very complex problem and an insane number of almost impossible circumstances that happened to align themselves, all to create a nearly impossible event.