Originally Posted by livedarklions

Thanks, Captain Hindsight! A lot of these were smart people being worked on by predatory lenders whose incentives were to get the deal to close whether it made sense or not, and they would convince the buyers of pie in the sky scenarios. People without any finance background were being told by "experts" that they could expect for things to work out. it was deliberate deception by people who got a commission at closing whether or not the mortgage ever got paid. Perhaps the consumers should have known better, but there were literally millions of them. What you're missing is that the logic works out to be profitable if the value keeps increasing infinitely, the bubble part becomes obvious only when that inflation stops. Maybe you're not old enough to remember this, but the notion of profitable flipping was being hyped by trained professionals throughout the popular media as well.

You do realize that several banks collapsed based on this logic, right? Are you arguing that all of the blame for that should go on the consumers? No one was forcing the banks to make the stupidest loans possible.