Econ 101

Ok – so there’s a few entries here about Econ and I am not, in point of fact, an Economist – or at least, not one that gets paid for my insights. Really, I’m a poet, but that, too, changes regularly lately… but on with the show.
Here’s a suggestion: the next time you here these words, “… because of irresponsible borrowers taking loans they couldn’t afford…”, go right ahead and punch the speaker in the mouth. Then say to him, “That was because of irresponsible understanding.”
Amerika is not at the mercy of the financial system because Laquisha Burnett and her 4 children from 3 fathers made an irresponsible choice to borrow more than they could afford. Amerika is at the mercy of the Financial system because they no longer want to play by the rules they created. That’s it, plain and simple. Here is a group who made rules, got burned by them (along with burning many many many millions [repeat: MILLIONS] of people), then they are upset at the burning and have spurned the slave that died in the field after working non-stop at the owner’s request.
The slave analogy is particularly useful here. You see, no media outlets have been talking about the insane and completely non-traditional Terms of the loans. I’ll say that again, the Terms of the loans are to blame, not the recipient of those terms, but their creator. Blame the creators.
See, Laquisha and her illegitimate children didn’t wake up one day and say to themselves, “I would really like to have a Mortgage that more closely resembles a Lease.” Or more to the point, they did not ever say, “Could you put me into a loan that basically ensures that I can never pay it back, so that you could them re-possess the collateral [my house] and repeat the process.”
These loan terms – these are what a responsible press and congress would look at. They gloss over them with words like “predatory lending”. And while that definitely is the case, they are preying on borrowers, that just doesn’t give the truth about the terms. Terms that state there will be no equity after 2, 3 or even 7 years are simply lease agreements where the payments are pegged to the current value of the asset. Imagine making payments on a car for 5 years, with penalties for paying it all off early. But at the end, you owe everything you owed in the beginning… as though you’d leased the car and now were expected to buy it at the original value. Of course, that doesn’t make sense to anyone; you would expect a response of, “Um, the car loses value over time – why would I pay full price for it after I just leased it and used it for 5 years?”
The trick that was played was: a little clever someone thought, “Hey, there’s a lot of people paying rent and they usually look for the lowest rent possible. How can I get them to pay the highest rent possible?” and then Bang! “Eureka! I’ve got it – make them think they will own it in the end!”
So, for the person that would present themselves to the front of a train to showcase their stupidity, just be the train and hit them. Then tell them to keep their blame to themselves until they understand the situation. In the mean time, press the media to uncover the creepy terms in fine print. This really is a case of the Slave master being upset with his dead slave who could not survive the beatings and mistreatment.
I mean really, now, does it even look close to right that Bear Stearns and Merril Lynch et. al. could really blame Laquisha for the problems? Yeah, I didn’t think so either.
Mother fuckers.