Walking away from your mortgage

[gazhekwe]

It is not moral outrage. The whole economy is based upon people keeping their word and paying their debts. One's word equals their integrity. If it is becoming acceptable to go back on our word and not pay what we owe, then I think we can kiss the world as we know it goodbye.

I do espouse a view that the depredations of the crash should be shared by the debtor and lender, as the lender's bad investment is just as much a part of the picture as the borrower's.

Lenders and brokers routinely encouraged people to take out home equity loans during the bubble, to invest more in the market, to buy additional goods, to fix up their home or whatever. Home equity lines of credit were sold hard. So, people borrowed to much encouraged by lenders who lent too much. Shared responsibility.

[Lorax]

When the system purposely games the field to it's own advantage, whether it's selling and repackaging liar loans, or inflating the bubble in any number of ways to enrich the pockets of the already wealthy, then all bets are off as far as I'm concerned.

There is nothing moral about any of it- it's business. Pure and simple. The collateral is the house itself, which the lender will take if one defaults. If the value of that property is brought down by market manipulation, it's certainly not in the control of the borrower. If that borrower loses his/her job due to the collapse and they can't pay their mortgage, again, blaming the victim isn't the answer.

Like I mentioned above, the lenders are never going to lose, since most troubled loans were bought for pennies on the dollar from the FDIC. Add the insurance claims on the defaulted loans, the homes/condos would have to lose 90% of their value in most cases for the lender to break even at worst.

Instead of siding with the wealth interests, people need to realize how complete the fraud was from Wall Street, as evidenced by the bank bailouts, which was nothing more than the biggest bank heist in US history.