That doesn't hold any water. If your only choices were investing in $MY_COMPANY at a certain margin payment per month, or putting 80% of that amount of money th

That doesn't hold any water. If your only choices were investing in $MY_COMPANY at a certain margin payment per month, or putting 80% of that amount of money through a paper shredder, wouldn't it make a whole heck of a lot more sense? Your analogy just doesn't factor in that you have to pay for housing in some manner. Then the argument is rent vs buy, I'm currently on the rent side of that fence, but for plenty of people the rational, responsible, decision is to buy. You haven't actually addressed my original point, which is that blaming the people who got screwed in the housing market ignores any facts about how they got into forclosure. You had plenty of people that put 0 down and their income could never possibly pay for the loan they took out, those people are cupable. There were other people that had a mortgage they could pay for, a large amount of cash in the bank, and were trying to pay off the loan in good faith and got screwed by circumstances outside of their control. I don't blame the people who got screwed by a black swan event they didn't see coming. A lot of people whose job is to invest every day all day missed it coming.