Originally posted by: LegendKiller
Originally posted by: Vic
Originally posted by: senseamp
Hell yeah, I am shorting the housing market, and I am not ashamed of it, and it doesn't make me scum. I am not burning people's houses down, I am simply acting on what I believe the future value of their houses will be, and it won't be the current value. The scum are the people who offered loans to people who could not afford them, who fueled this bubble that made housing unaffordable for millions of families trying to buy their first home. All shorting REITs is doing is borrowing stock from people who want to lend theirs out for a fee, and selling it to people who want to buy it. Everyone involved knows and agrees to what they are doing, and it's honest transaction. Not to be confused with tricking people into getting ballooning loans that they can not afford to pay and perpetuating this pyramid scheme. That's where the real scum is at.
Entitlement rationalization with paranoid shadowy villainization in action right here. Where's your tinfoil beanie?
How does this market assessment of yours line up with the actual "When lenders compete, you win" reality of the market for mortgage lenders? You realize that Wall Street was buying up everything originated (including the lenders and brokers themselves when they couldn't get enough paper), therefore any turned-down mortgage applicant could just go to another lender who actually would do it in order to buy a house.
Or about the reality (which you don't know because you've never bought a home) of the literal mountain of disclosure that a buyer has to go through in order to buy a home? When you bought your last car, did you sign all the paperwork without looking at it or evaluating whether or not you could afford it? Now take that volume of documents you signed there, and times it by about 20 or more.
Displacement of irrational anger over people in your own life and yourself being in the industry that perpetuated the problem, not to mention an irrationally unrealistic belief that "longing" the market adds something.
Should I get a DSM and start looking up crap? I have an undergrad in psychology, we could trade this crap all day.
You can sell anything that has a steady cashflow to the Street, it's a simple matter of structuring it appropriately. I find it amusing that you think that liquidity aiding middle America is a good thing, yet the tool by which that liquidity flows is a bad thing. You sure cherry pick a lot of stuff.
Lets say that somebody builds a crappy car and somebody else builds a road for that crappy car to drive on. They attempt to limit the crappy car from going too fast, but in the end, it's still a crappy car. Is it the road builders fault for allowing the crappy car on the road?
I love how you think that adding rationality on the flip side of a market is the wrong thing to do. The market would go down either way and somebody always has to take the opposite position for it to do so. Denying that is to deny reality, which it seems like you are very good at.
Mortgage brokers and los were the first line and the most important line of defense in rationality. They were supposed to be in the trenches, guarding against fraud and unreal mortgages. The 'Street can't check every obligor to ensure they have a proper mortgage, that's what Representations and Warranties are for, it's the originator's obligation to ensure their borrowers were proper and their standards and practices adhered to all laws and proper underwriting techniques. The worst of the problem will be those loans which were approved inappropriately.
As far as lowering credit standards, proper enhancement was placed upon collateral, whether that collateral was incorrect is immaterial.