it's when we privatize gains but socialize losses.
+1 and a brilliant deduction.
Investors will not LEARN how to invest if they never feel the sting of a bad investment.
People who buy too much house
need to lose it and be $25K upside down, living in an apartment. They pay off the $25K and try again.
Lendors who give $400K to undeserving borrowers need to lose an unrecoverable portion of that money and explain that to their board of directors. That lending officer can be demoted/fired/pay cut to make up for the loses.
It's all called "accountability."
This is why the stock market has essentially been stagnant for the last 5-10 years. No one knows how to research successful investments versus silly investments. Instead, Wall Street is busy inventing new investment tools like ETFs that treat all stocks equally (wall street communism), rather than singling out good stocks from bad stocks by this wonderful skill known as "discrimination."
In the meantime, I don't own a house because I don't have my down payment. I won't get a house until I have a down payment of my own. But... my taxes will go up to pay for this bull sh!t of bailout after bailout.
And... if the FedGov "owns" Fannie/Freddy, I'm going to do my damndest to make sure that my title is held by a real bank... not Fannie/Freddy or some FedGov alias.