“The Untouchables”

This film gives me the same reaction every time I see it, and it is one of 3 layers that place blame equally on the banks, the government and the people. The first group that I have the reaction too is the banks because they willingly walked into the situation with dollar signs in their eyes. They did not have to shop “bad” loans to Wall Street to see what they could get away with. It is also not surprising that lower level, and perhaps mid-level bankers, originators, etc. were arrested and prosecuted, while Wall Streeters were not. These are the people who visibly got their hands dirty and made the decisions out in the open, and they were perfectly okay with it as they were seeing the money flow in. Wall Street covered itself and allowed the business villains from the loan companies to do the dirty work, and they have no one to blame but themselves. Wall Street is not a place for the human factor or much in the way of consequence, and we have a society that has made that perfectly acceptable. Wall Street is full of sharks, and the people who work there have a singular goal, to make as much money for themselves as possible. They need to be tempered and controlled by our government. These people we vote for, pay for and entrust with our safety, well-being and sanity. They let us down by being tied in so closely, that they cannot put any restrictions on them because they too gain a lot from being in bed with them, in terms of finance and support for campaigns, etc.

The third and biggest group that I find and fault are the people themselves. If someone told me that I could ski down the double black should I just get on the lift and attempt to go down based on their word? In actuality, I know my abilities, and I know that before I get to the bottom I will probably crash and get hurt, perhaps in a way in which I would never recover. These are the reckless, greedy and short-sighted individuals who in droves not only bought one house they knew they could not afford, but many of them bought 2-3 in hopes of making a profit off the “great” market - instead, we were lead into a Great Recession. No individual made them get these loans, or buy these houses. Just because you “fogged the mirrors” do you not actually realize that a monthly income of 3k should not have a monthly loan of 2.5k, or worse, have 2 loans? How could a responsible adult believe that having no assets, no steady income, no savings, and no investments could be a good time to buy a house, just because they can get a loan? Just because the loan companies and the underwriter did no-doc loans, or simply created ratio’s to get the loans to pass, does not mean as an adult you should have gone along with it willingly, and the people were just as much at fault as anybody else.