If 3 times is a trend…
Posted on August 14th, 2008 by Punning Pundit
Then what do we call 272,171? If you’re Rachel Lucas, you see 1 in every 464 American households as idiots.
If you’re a bit smarter, though, or at least a bit better educated, you start to wonder at the structural issues. What you might wonder what would cause so many hundreds of thousands of people to make the same mistake all at the same time? . And then you start digging into the history of the mortgage industry and find this picture:
(image stolen from Brad DeLong)
Oh. It seems we used to have regulations that prevented these loans. And then we didn’t. And then the loans got bad. And now we have foreclosures. Must just be 200,000 isolated cases of idiocy, then. It’s certainly not the fault of the bankers…
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[...] Punning Pundit doubts Rachel Lucas’s conclusion that 0.2% of Americans are too stupid to manage their finances. He repeats his call to address housing foreclosures by increasing regulation of the mortgage industry, presumably because 100% of us are too stupid to manage our finances without government assistance. Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]