Of course the problem is getting worse. You don't fix an economic problem by STEALING from healthy sections of the economy and bailing out corrupt, inefficient and incompetent sections. This isn't like patching a badly leaking boat - where the patch fixes the problem. It's more like trying to BAIL the badly leaking boat, where the bailing is your one and only plan. Eventually, the bailing ends, the problem is still there, and your once healthy crew is too exhausted now to even save itself. Bailing, in the long run, makes a problem MUCH WORSE.
Sometimes... in fact, MOST of the time... failures should just be allowed to fail. And there shouldn't be such a thing as 'too big to fail.' At most, our government should have SMOOTHED OVER the collapse of GM, GE, AIG, homeowners, and other bailout recipients. Government could have eased some of the pain, but that's where I'd have drawn the line.
I'm not even going to delve into the ethics of bailing people out with money taken from others. You guys are old enough to know the difference between right and wrong. The total absence of prosecutions in these scams tells us all we need to know about our government's role in all of this, and the ethics and competence of those who are supposed to perform oversight. Government is as guilty and deserving of prosecution as are the Wall Street bankers and RE lenders. Our politicians and DAs know it.
No end in sight to foreclosure quagmire
A special Nightly News/msnbc.com report on the mortgage mess
By Lisa Myers, Rich Gardella and John W. Schoen
NBC News and msnbc.com NBC News and msnbc.com
updated 5/9/2011 7:28:34 AM ET
Four years after a wave of rogue mortgage lending sent the U.S. housing market into the worst collapse since the Great Depression, the devastating flood of resulting foreclosures shows no sign of abating. In some ways, the problem is getting worse.
House prices are falling again, forcing more homeowners “underwater” — owing more than their house is worth. Lenders’ shoddy document practices have brought widespread court challenges, slowing the process and leaving millions of homeowners in limbo.
And the foreclosure crisis continues to weigh heavily on the fragile economy.
“Right now, it’s the second-biggest drag on the economy after the surge in oil prices,” said Moody's Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi.
Already some 5 million homes have been lost to foreclosure; estimates of future foreclosures range widely. Zandi, who has followed the mortgage mess since the housing market began to crack in 2006, figures foreclosures will strike another three million homes in the next three or four years.
Congress and the White House have run out of ideas to save those homes, he said.
The article continues: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42881365/ns/business-personal_finance/
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