Re: All bankers are criminals and should be treated as such.

Rubbish. You cannot hold individual householders who defaulted responsible for the meltdown of the banking system. It was the professional duty of the bankers to ensure that risks are properly assessed and managed so that defaulters do not risk their institution. What else are they paid for? When an institution lends money it knows that a certain proportion of those loans will be defaulted. Because that's life. Objecting to it is as sensible as objecting to earthquakes or tornados. They happen. Plan for it and get over it. If the institution fails to take adequate care to reduce its exposure to defaulted loans then it has no one to blame but itself.

And that recklessness is the root cause of the problem.

Yes I can. The cash that is vanishing down the Swanee is a result of them not acquitting themselves of their obligations.

They did. They concluded that since house prices only go up, there was no risk as the house could always be sold to settle the loan. They made a false assumption, but 99.99% of the population did exactly the same. There was nobody to correct them.

FoFP

Yes, but also the fact that the loans got sliced and diced and sold on as low risk investments.

It's like disguising a junk bond (issued by a company in a dodgy financial state) as a gilt. Are you saying that if a someone sells you a junk bond and pretends it's a gilt they should bear none of the blame when you lose your money?

Nobody?? There was you. There was me. There were loads of others on uk.finance. There were all the residents of housepricecrash.com. There were several articles in the financial pages of the newspapers. There was the history of the first half of the 90's. OK, these didn't reach nearly as many people as thick-as-pigshit property journalists did with their bullshit, but there were voices out there.

That wasn't happening at HBOS was it ?

Or are you saying the whole industry of providing mortgages was compromised by these bad practices and HBOS (although not guilty) was the most opportune target for the sharks.

If you are saying it was defaulters defaulting that brought this about be aware the best is yet to come !

My son didn't, he decided to stay living at home :-((

I didn't, once mortgages started being granted that went beyond 3x the first salary plus 25% of the second the alarm bells started ringing with me.

Derek

Caveat Emptor. If there's clear evidence of intent to deceive then sue for fraud. Otherwise it's up to the buyer to do due diligence.

True, but they don't listen to little old us. In a bubble, none of the bubbleheads is interested in listening to nayysayers. That's a feature of bubbles. I've probably written thousands of usenet etc articles on this over the years. I know of only two people who took action to protect themselves as a result. How about you?

Voices crying in the wilderness...

FoFP

Sure it was.

The banks are functionally insolvent inasmuch as they can't stay in business without taxpayer help. They're all targets of opportunity.

People defaulting on loans are the source of much of the vanishing cash. The vanishing credit is more down to the extreme leverage of the whole shadow banking setup.

Good for him (though maybe not so good for you).

Sadly, thee and me are sooner or later going to pay for the cleanup anyway :-(

They'd just claim incompetance.

So you expect buyers to know better than ratings agencies?

Protect myself how? I didn't need to. I could have tried making money by selling my house and renting but that was too much hassle and there are other reasons why we want to own.

Anyway ISTR at one stage you were considering buying a house...did you?

Nevertheless, they were there, so in the style of Tim, there *was* somebody to correct them. Even if nobody listened.

Either they do their own due diligence, or they rely on the ratings agencies. Those that did the latter haven't come out of it well.

I meant: how many people listened to you and took action which protected them?

The plan has always been to buy at the bottom. Meanwhile we keep amassing cash and gold.

The nature of a buble is that they can't hear the naywayers.

FoFP

But the slicing and dicing made things far too complex for anyone to understand properly.

I think I persuaded a few people that it's a silly idea to buy a big house/buy a holiday home/BTL in the last few years. That's in real life, I haven't got a clue if anyone's acted on my usenet rantings...

On Mon, 22 Sep 2008 at 19:50:17, Andy Pandy wrote in uk.politics.misc :

In which case, the company's shareholders could press for them to be fired...

"Andy Pandy" wrote

... so the result of due diligence is then "unable to quantify, so either don't buy or else accept unknown risk".

Simple, innit?

It is the bankers fault, anyone could see houses were vastly overpriced and that when the bubble inevitably burst prices would fall. Their lending was irresponsible. The homebuyers had little choice in the matter other than living in a cardboard box.