Um, 'scapegoats' suggests people who are taking a big fall for limited involvement. Sending senior executives of major financial companies to jail may constitute a big fall, but it wouldn't be for limited involvement.
There are plenty of people involved in the financial collapse that are not "high profile". If anything, there are more mid-level people that were involved in directly damaging the economy.
Ridiculous. How can a realtor possibly be as culpable as say, the people who were bundling the mortgages and selling them off as securities that were just known time-bombs?
You just jumped on the OP's use of everyone, baited them with your realtors comment and somehow conclude that "he only wanted to punish a few high profile scapegoats" which is exactly what happens all the time anyways (remember Bernie Madoff?)
Please watch "Inside Job" it shows how no one responsible for the financial disaster has been punished or even pursued. It's ridiculous. We just had the biggest financial crisis and everyone responsible got away with it. What is truly annoying is you're more concerned with the OP's use of "everyone" instead of focusing on the more important issues.
The realtor is encouraging people to make a long bet on housing in hopes of making a few middleman dollars. A mortgage bundler is doing the exact same thing. The only real difference is that the realtor markets their products to unsophisticated speculators, while the mortgage bundler markets his products to gigantic financial institutions, hedge funds and the like.
We had a financial crisis because everyone thought housing would only go up placed huge bets on that hypothesis. Although there were bad actors involved in various places (realtors and mortgage brokers facilitating fraud, homebuyers committing fraud, bankers papering over crappy loans, etc), the bad actors didn't cause the crisis.
The crisis was caused by people at all steps of the chain believing that housing will only go up. If anyone decided not to buy into the hype, the bubble would not have occurred. The only people who are truly innocent in creating the crisis are renters and a small number of investors who shorted the market (Burry, Paulson, etc).
So you think it's the realtors job to tell people what is or isn't in their best interest? Please. You're holding realtors to a higher standard than any other profession, they're not your real estate adviser, they're realtors, the average home buyer knows the realtor's interests do not align with the buyers.
|We had a financial crisis because everyone thought housing would only go up placed huge bets on that hypothesis.
I blame regulators and financial institutions for not doing their jobs, not the average home buyer or realtor.
|The crisis was caused by people at all steps of the chain believing that housing will only go up.
And yet no one has gone to jail or been prosecuted in any meaningful way.
So you think it's the realtors job to tell people what is or isn't in their best interest?
No. Similarly, I don't think it's the job of a mortgage packager to do anything other than package mortgages and move them on.
Keep in mind, I'm not the one advocating sending assorted politically unpopular middlemen to jail.
And yet no one has gone to jail or been prosecuted in any meaningful way.
That's because the housing bubble was not the result of a crime. A few crimes were committed, sure - it's hard for trillions of dollars to move around without a few people stealing some of it. But the main culprits of the bubble didn't do anything criminally wrong. They just collectively made bad bets in the same direction.
Sorry, but there just isn't a villain behind every bad event.
[edit: added emphasis in second to last paragraph. Apparently some people are not seeing that sentence.]
