Honk Honk PUNCH!

I think that there probably not a person on this planet with radio/TV/Internet access that doesn’t know about the looming financial crisis that we as a country are facing.  The problem, at its very core, is a series of terrible investments that the entire world, and more specifically investment companies in this country, made in the mortgage “boom” of the last few years.  I cannot begin to sum up the whole situtation better than the people over at NPR did with their Giant Pool of Money podcast did, so go on over to iTunes, search for it, or see my previous post.  It’s worth the hour of your time and the 99 cents to download and listen.  Suffice it to say that investment companies were extremely greedy and started to make investments in mortages to people who could not, and should not, have them.  Fast forward a few years to now, and all those poor investments are falling apart.  Now we as a country seem poised to take the brunt of the burden of a fix in the form of a 700 BILLION dollar bailout.  Your tax dollars hard at work.  Bah!

You know what really frosts my ass about this whole thing?  It’s not really the fact that we will have to pay to fix the problem, or that CEO’s of failed companies seem poised to make their fortune and walk away, or that government is yet again putting us further into debt, or any of that.  It’s the fact that NO ONE is talking about the crux of the problem – the failure of us as a nation to take personal responsibility for the failed mortagages that many people took on.  Financially responsible people like you and me all knew better than to take on mortgages that we could not afford.  Everyone is bitching about the government and “predatory lending” but Jesus, take some personal effing responsibility!  If you can’t even figure out if you can’t afford that 500,000 dollar house on your 50K combined income, you probably should be shot in the head.  Now people like us have to deal with upside-down loans and more effing taxes to support those jackasses that couldn’t figure out $1+$1 does not equal $2000.  Even worse is that we are in the spot where if we don’t bail them out, we will just suffer more.  It’s just completely frustrating.  Yes, the mortgage industry and their investment backers effed up royally.  I blame them too, but seems like everyone is so focused on the mortgage failures that they don’t stop to think what idiots we are as a country.

To end on a good note – I walk the dog daily and see at least a half dozen nice homes that have been foreclosed upon.  They are not hard to spot – unkempt lawns, seizure notices in every window, driveways with grass growing in the cracks between the pavement, etc.  For the most part, they have sat vacant for weeks and months on end, with seemingly no realtor or buyer activity, but in the past few days, I have seen dozens of potential homeowners looking at them.  To me, this is a sign that maybe, at least locally, we have bottomed out and are at the very beginning stages of an upswing.  This gives me a glimmer of hope that the end might be in sight and that the panic to not buy is starting to fade.  That of course does me no personal good, since I know for a fact that if I were to try to sell right now, I would be competing with homes comparable to mine that would be selling for 30 to 70 thousand dollars less than what I paid a little over a year ago.  But it’s something.