Quote (Neptunus @ Jan 31 2016 10:10am)
Or then we could make loangivers more accountable for their exploits. The problem is that in the case of an ignorant loantaker, there's nobody to stand behind him. Loangivers are rarely ignorant of their own terms and they usually know a thing or two about how the process works out in the large and long scale, so what we have is a clear case of information asymmetry. The most feasible way to correct the asymmetry would be authoritarian measures that penalize banks for making contracts that fuck their customers over. The biggest hurdle is that authoritarianism rings a bad bell in the contemporary economical discussion, even though there's nothing intrinsically bad about it when the result would be less misery.
Its true. Half of the problem was clients overextending themselves, but the other half was indeed the banks knowingly doing it and the government passively "okaying" it. The government even encouraged this behavior. The biggest twist though is that the largest mistake in the crash was actually an added government regulation, mandating banks to meet a minimum criteria of mortgages, which in turn caused banks to lower their lending standards.
If people in the government or elsewhere took a more decisive stance on either one of those two fronts, a lot of suffering could have been avoided.
Was still a solid movie overall.