[lbo-talk] origins of the housing boom

Eric Beck ersatzdog at gmail.com
Mon Aug 29 13:25:09 PDT 2011


On Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 2:55 PM, Indian Jones <lburgindianjones at gmail.com> wrote:


> What is your point in this confusion? Deregulation and market fetish
> provoked financial exploitation.

No doubt the bubble created some exploitation (though you should really use another word) of consumers, but is that all that happened? How many people actually used deregulation to their advantage, by, say, getting teaser mortgages that were way cheaper than any regular mortgage or rent they could have found? What number of subprime mortgagees (aka black and brown people and women) were able to live in a style that their place in production would never finance? Yes, people were then kicked out of their houses, and yes that probably sucked, but I'd venture that to most in the subprime class, this wasn't a deal-breaker (as the saying goes); I'd tend to assume they knew this was a possibility, that it was part of their risk calculations, rather than that they were dupes of finance.

And if it all crashed, so fucking what. It sucked anyway.



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