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ACey01

Listed below are comments made by ACey01 between Thursday, 2nd October 2008 and Thursday, 2nd October 2008.

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In the red 11:56am on 02 Oct 2008 In terms of the "it's the fault of those taking out the loans" this is just the same old passing off of blame from one side to another - the reality to me is that there isn't a simple black and white position on who is to blame, lots of people are and they should start to think about being responsible for the situation and not trying to make themselves out to be the victims.

Sure some people shouldn't have taken out the loans but as others have said they were being hooked in to take out these loans by some pretty aggressive (and successful) marketing ploys. In my experience you can't go to a bank and force them to give you money - they have to want to give out the money, if they give to people who they now say should never have asked for it then surely they have to accept responsibility for doing so. Likewise some responsibility has to lie with the individuals who asked for money which they could not really afford to have, but I have a bit more sympathy for them as a lot of them were being persuaded by the banks to borrow - just look at all the ads that were about telling us to get consolidation loans, buy now and pay later, cheap credit etc...

Banks thought they could make money by loaning out money to these markets, they packaged off the loans and swirled them around the system in "sophisticated packages" and thought they had passed off the risk. They were wrong - they hadn't invented some new wonderful risk free world, they didn't understand the risk, as soon as the ability to pay started to reduce and defaults started to happen the whole deck of cards started to fall in.

In any other business the companies would have to live and die by their actions but because the impact of financial institutions failing and the wider knock-on to the "real" economy the banks need to be bailed out - however unpalatable this is. That has to be the short term focus - the longer term focus must be to curb the excesses that caused this and to ensure that there is no longer a sector of the economy (banking) that milks the good times and keeps the rewards for themselves then in bad times passes the hat around and expects everyone to bail them out.

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ACey01