While we’re all trying to figure out just how great our contempt should be for the fucktards who played their parts in the current collapse, it’s good to keep the following in mind, from this short article:
Resisting peer pressure isn’t pleasant. The banker who insisted on a 20% down payment for all mortgages got less business during the bubble and was seen by his colleagues as a burden on the bank and an obstacle to helping customers. The regulator who insisted on a 20% down payment for all mortgages was seen as denying the poor the good investments that were available to the rest of the country, and as an obstacle to home ownership [...]
I can imagine the caterwauling so vividly that it might as well have happened right in front of me: outraged liberals calling down the wrath of God on the evil, corrupt institutions that are keeping the poor from owning houses and getting their slices of the American Dream.
Now, my hands are clean on this crisis. I wasn’t borrowing in recent years, for mortgages or anything else. But I was absolutely just as much a fucktard during the great mass hysteria of the late 90s. Fortunately I came out ahead on that one, but if you eliminate the one big win I had, which was based on pure dumn luck and nothing more, then I just broke even.
I know a lot of fucktards. Most are not bad people, nor stupid. Maybe the guys running the universe are just like me and my friends, only richer.