Subprime Loans: There's A Good Lesson To Be Learned From This

by capper

From today's MSJ, in the letters to the editor, from our own krshorewood:

SUBPRIME LOANS

There's a good lesson to be learned in this

Our economic ship is taking on water thanks to the subprime mortgage crisis. As usual, conservatives are throwing ordinary people overboard.

And, as usual, the blame goes beyond those affected by the failure of these loans. In between the folks who took the bad loans and Alan Greenspan - who as Federal Reserve chairman endorsed this wide-open, unregulated market - are the banks and mortgage companies that made these bad loans when they should have known better.

But they did. And these deals were repackaged and sold to other banks and investment firms. While hundreds of thousands of people will be losing their homes, the people who made these deals are making billions of dollars.

While many people took these NINJA - no income, no job and no assets - loans as a means of realizing the American dream, there were many others who could get good loans but were duped into subprime loans.

This brings us to the scheme on the part of conservatives to make health care "consumer-driven." With the complexity of medical decisions and, as we know now, a number of businesses ready to make a quick profit from people's ignorance, what's to stop this from happening with health care?

Keith R. Schmitz Shorewood