But it made them money, and they found customers. In layman’s terms there were millions (my estimate) of homeowners who engaged in liar loans, accepted subprime loans, and generally engaged in the very things that helped bring the system down. Those “complex financial instruments” included mortgage backed securities which suffered fatal wounds from these soured loans. The people of the United States participated in this; they fed the wealthy who got rich off these complex financial instruments. Yes, we had corporations who scheistered America… but America walked into that trap. When you are given a contract for an alt-A or subprime loan you should sit down and really look at it and think it over. That’s your responsibility. A lot of Americans failed that basic responsibility. That’s what got them in this mess.
Think about my logic this way. If a drug dealer gives you a free sample of cocaine (and we assume this is legal), you can look it up on the web and see what this white powder could do to you. You can look up how drug dealers operate: they give you a free sample and when you get hooked they charge you for it. If you sniff this crap and fail to do your homework to find out what you’re getting into, whose fault is that? If you do your homework and realize this cocaine is unwise to sniff up your nose and you flush it, what happens to the drug dealer? His business withers and dies, and maybe he starves and dies and that’s one less evil bastard in the world.
See my point? This is natural selection in action. Smart people can avoid the cocaine being peddled by either drug dealers or the financial crack cocaine being peddled by the “evil” rich. If Americans were smart they would starve the evil capitalist boogeyman. Instead they get easily bamboozled by subprime loans, cheap Made in China crap, free iPod spam ads, and of course those million dollar inheritances from Nigeria. Then when things go wrong because they took the bait they look to the Government to bail them out. Ugh.
Big business, small business, it’s all the same thing in that if it’s not your business, you’re doing something wrong. The OP, from what I have read, is the only liberal who gets it in that regard. S/he owns their own business. Rare is the liberal I ever know who owns a business. A business owner is almost synonymous with conservative.
The OP was right - this crash was creative destruction. It was a huge structural change. What s/he doesn’t get is that being a worker is overrated. The era of the worker is on its way to a close in America. Workers are disposable, interchangeable, easily replaced. They are a commodity to be used and disposed of at the entrepreneur’s whim. This is not flamebait… this is cold, hard reality. It’s not about big business, it’s not about small business… it’s about outgrowing the outdated idea of being a worker and maturing into becoming your own boss.