Comments about ‘What others say: Surviving collapse’

We need way more regulation of lenders, especially housing lenders. Way too many people who own homes should never have been allowed to in the manner that they did. We, and our banks, need to be protected from our respective greed.

To "Hutterite" you are wrong. The banking industry is nearly equal to the Health Insurance industry as the most regulated industries in the US. You and your ilk fail to recognize the fact that the bad loans were made as a direct result of 80 years of regulations. You blame the banks for making loans that federal regulations told them they had to make.

Prior to the 1940's less than 6% of all home loans were "sub-Prime". By 2008 18.8% of home loans were sub-prime. When banks were less regulated and fully responsible for their loans, they made fewer risky loans. Once the government regulated them and guaranteed the loans, we had more risky loans.

Why make it harder to get loans when the solution is simple. Let banks be responsible for their own loans and let them decide the criteria for who gets a loan and who doesn't.

Good article. Nice articulation of the issues.

Nicely said. But the real crooks here are the ones who "tranched up" those mortgage securities and sold them for 10,000 times their face value. They created the biggest bubble in history. Every single one of those crooks should be in jail, and I mean Goldman Sachs and their ilk.