From: joetaxpayer 
Newsgroups: misc.invest.financial-plan
Subject: Re: A Good Look at the Subprime Mess
Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2007 19:20:13 -0500
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Sgt.Sausage wrote:

> "Elle"  wrote in message 
> news:13ici5lhks7n171@corp.supernews.com...
>>Joe is right.
>  
> No, he's not. The only way to make it avoidable is
> for Government Intervention -- which is a bad, bad
> way to go. You really don't want to go down that
> road, do you?

Sgt, the opposite of 'avoidable' is 'inevitable'.
If you believe that the combination of greed, for lack of a better word, 
and ignorance came together in such a way that there was no other 
possible outcome, I'm listening.

I believe that the interest rate cycle made a housing crunch (note: I do 
not say bubble) a probable outcome. Allowing for the ignorance of the 
average borrower, I'll concede that people will be happy to borrow what 
looks good today with no thought for tomorrow. And I'll hazard a guess 
that most of these ridiculous teaser rate loans were not held in-house 
but packaged and sold. So we go down a path which lead to a complete 
breakdown of a system that was working until recently. That may suggest 
inevitable.

The 'regular' (i.e. corporate) junk bond market found a way to raise 
huge sums of money, and if we ignore for a moment, the Milken/Boesky 
insider trading issues, the money raised helped to finance companies in 
the US which would otherwise have been unable to raise capital.

Sup-prime used to not be a dirty word, not when these loans were 
properly rated.

JOE