27 ms·

2008 didn't manage to rid people of that idea.

• underlipton 2y ago
  Because the institutional response was explicitly to backstop housing as an investment instead of as a basic need/resource. If they'd let the banks fail, nationalized the toxic assets that no one else wanted, and wrote off the mortgages as losses, no one in their right mind would have written a new one for years. Which sucks if you make your money off mortgages, but I'm unconvinced that it would have destroyed our ability to build houses.