Originally Posted by woj

in hindsight of course it's all so simple... the whole setup was a lot more complicated than just banks lending out money to some deadbeats, there were numerous different parties involved, everyone from mortgage brokers, to investors, to other bank, and of course the government had a hand in all this too... no one knew what the default rates would be, no one knew what the property prices would be, etc... the whole venture turned out to be a bit more risky than everyone thought...

lending money to people on craigslist isn't actually as stupid as you make it sound, it's not unlike lending money to a bunch of people with a pipe dream or sob story on prosper.com... some default, some pay it back, but at the end of the day you should end up with reasonable return on your investment... 1000s of people lend on there, and I actually considered doing the same myself...

so if I was to lose money by lending on prosper.com, you would consider me "fucking stupid"?