2 ms·

> No one has been held to account for that mess and the Too Big To Fail mindset has become deeply entrenched People don’t actually want this. The problem in 20

> No one has been held to account for that mess and the Too Big To Fail mindset has become deeply entrenched People don’t actually want this. The problem in 2008 wasn’t bankers or any other boogieman. The problem is that people want housing to be affordable/accessible, but they also want it to be an investment/retirement plan. If you subsidise housing to make it affordable (a market distortion in itself), and you encourage appreciation in said market (another distortion) you get bubbles. We stopped this bubble from popping so that boomers didn’t have to take a retirement hit. But Wall St’s role in all of this is insanely small. They played the role of the dealer at a card table. The players are the average Joes and the casino is the Fed.

pessimizer 5y ago
> If you subsidise housing to make it affordable (a market distortion in itself) This didn't happen. What happened was an extreme lowering of the barriers to entering into a mortgage contract, such as minuscule down payments (which are back), NINJAs, and floating the extremely high-interest rates on those mortgages to volatile and completely gamed numbers like LIBOR. After collecting these mortgages into a bundle, they paid someone to declare them as safe as US treasuries, and immediately sold them on/started borrowing against them. You can absolutely do this with crypto, except it would be even easier.