Quote from trendy:
And obviously you weren't smart enough to see it. Apparently you subscribed to the theory that there would be a greater fool to come along and buy your home for more than you paid. Ya know, in the financial markets the idea is to buy low and sell high. Buying high and hoping to sell higher. Well, that doesn't always work out now does it?
Quote from walter4:
"Rick Santelli more or less told me everything that I needed to know when he said that he thought that a bunch of traders on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange were a "good representation of America". My favorite part was how one of them screamed "moral hazard" "moral hazard" when Santelli talked about how the money would go to bailing out people who bought more house than they could afford.
Now I'm an economics major and I know full well what a moral hazard is and why it is a problem. But because I don't have my head completely up my ass like these people, I also know that it's a lame excuse not to act.
Maybe my wife and I were exception to an unknown rule, but we bought a house knowing it could go down in value. The intangible benefits, though, helped offset the risk and the house only cost $30k. Whether the same possibility of loss makes sense for someone else would be likewise circumstance specific.Quote from trendy:
I don't. You wouldn't buy a home if you expected the value to decrease any more than you would buy a financial instrument.
Quote from QQQShort:
Maybe my wife and I were exception to an unknown rule, but we bought a house knowing it could go down in value. The intangible benefits, though, helped offset the risk and the house only cost $30k. Whether the same possibility of loss makes sense for someone else would be likewise circumstance specific.

Quote from QQQShort:
If we agree that my house price would now be lower without benefit of subsidies, then we must also agree it would have been lower when I bought it.
Quote from jamis359:
Look, dumbass, the market prices of homes over the last several years was distorted by what is perhaps the biggest financial fraud in history. The real estate bubble happened because mortgage lenders, derivative traders (like that bozo Santelli), investment banks pretty much raped and pillaged America's credit system while Bush's regulators were asleep at the switch. And you want me to take the hit for somebody's else's crime? That's right, crime. People in the mortgage and financial industry should be going to jail for what they've done to the nation. Sure, some homeowners got greedy because they wanted 5 bedrooms and a pool. But who created the whole expectation of trading up to $600,000 homes in the first place? The financial-mortgage complex did.
If the real estate market was a relatively transparent and free market and I make a dumb mistake, then I don't expect the government to bail me or anyone else out. The R.E. market, like I said, has been grossly distorted by fraudulent and opaque transactions since at least 2003. No way should the little guy get screwed by larger dishonest forces beyond their control.