It isn't facts that are important anymore, it is your Point of View.
For example, let's take mortgages and debt.
The "Progressive" point of view- Evil mortgage bankers exploited the ignorance of hard-working lower and lower middle class Americans by selling them time-bomb debt in the form of a diabolical financial instrument called an Adjustable Rate Mortgages that reset rates at a higher price than what was originally locked in. Poor folks were pushed into buying much more house than they could afford because the bankers got the fees on these mortgages. Ergo, a failure of Capitalism.
The "Free Market" point of view- Politicians, always eager to share other people's wealth, founded Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac as markets and defacto government subsidies of mortgage loans that would never have otherwise been made, since people don't risk their own money out of proportion to the risk they incur. By "de-risking" these loans, the government set up the engine for the systemic failure of the economy. Ergo, a failure of Government Interventionism.
Which side is right?
Like all things, it's somewhere between the absolutes that the rigid idealists espouse, but I think the truth is probably closer to the Free Market argument than the Evil Capitalist argument.
The "Progressive" point of view is that debt should be widely available, not just to the rich. In fact, it is the poor that need access to capital MORE than the rich. I get this idea. I actually like it.
(Digression- The very far left branch of the "Progressive" point of view; the Code Pinko Commie side, would argue that money should be given outright to the poor... screw "loaning". A clean prescription to be sure. All one has to do is convince themself and enough others that state sponsored theft of property is a-ok. In societies where there are few stakeholders and a lot of real serfs and no upward mobility or potential thereof, the marketing of this ideal has been pretty easy. In a society like ours, you have to do a lot of psychological shucking and jiving in order to make "haves" without historical antecedent feel like "have nots". Given enough time and an educational system sympathetic to such a message, it seems to work).
The "Progressives" then make laws that limit how much interest can be charged, since it looks exploitive to make the poor borrowers pay more than the rich. That the risk of`non-repayment from the poor is much higher is given lower if any consequence.
The "Free Marketeer" approach is that debt should be priced based on risk of repayment. The higher the risk, the higher the interest, because no rational person would choose to loan money for the same rate if the risk was substantively higher... in essence how many people would bet on double zero on the roulette wheel if it paid the same as Black or Red? The devil is in calculating the risk. If you manipulate the market by fixing all risks being priced the same, you will find that people will not bet on the high risk pool, so no action there at all. The unintended consequence of Usery Laws. If you make a player bet on all risks at the same price that are presented to them, then they will either not play at all or demand that the overall odds be changed to reflect a return on investment. Therefore Black and Red, and all other potential bets on the roulette wheel would be priced at 6:1 to make the overall, evenly proportioned bet slightly break even.
In our Real Life case, we got the government to guarantee payment of those loans via Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The loans are now either priced lower than the real risk in the interim, because the risk has been mitigated by guaranteeing the loans or the original risk was not correctly measured. Maybe, the risk was calculated all wrong in the first place, and the Government won't really have to pay out! The best of all possible outcomes, this is the "pray the bankers are stupid" scenario. Usually, when you get a choice between "the bankers are all stupid" and "the politicians don't know what they are doing when they manipulate markets", choose the outcome that depends on "the politicians don't know what they are doing" option.
Mortgages are among the easiest debt instruments to price because they have a term, and you can easily determine if the borrower income is enough to repay the loans as per the conditions. Now that we have de-risked the loans, the poor can now buy homes! Yay!
Except now they all buy homes, and the supply shrinks, and the home prices get higher because a lot of cheap capital is chasing fewer homes. That is the result of the pesky supply/demand equation, that some deny as vehemently as they accuse others of denying climate change and evolution, never mind that it has been proved in practice countless times, which does exactly what it always does. The definition of a physical law, really.
So now what? Interest rates are about as low as they can go, so lets create a mortgage that gives a nonlinear payment schedule... lower than straight interest and principal to begin with, ie "Below Market" payments for some initial period of time that resets later to an above market payment later, in hopes that your employment situation improves or your house appreciates. Or how about a simpler "interest only" note that only depends on home appreciation? And let's top it off with a Zero Down, No Equity policy? Why not? The government WANTS us to do this... everyone should have a home... and government policy is to insure that risk so the public gets what it wants.
Lower income people can have homes! Great times ahead! Progressive policies seem to be working! Homeownership is on the rise! But then...
Interest rates increase, as they always do. Or the price of homes gets so high that no amount of restructuring payment schedules can yield a defensible cash flow scenario for approving loans. Or both. Those people that had low rates to begin with are seeing them reset to higher rates They can't refinance because this is happening broadly... interest rates hit the market everywhere. Prices fall, as supply and demand dictates if no one can buy. No equity turns into negative equity. Homeowners now owe more than their house is now worth. Not a problem in the 1930's or 1940's, where people still had some integrity about their debt. A real problem today, where no shame is attached to walking away from debt, and societal scorn is instead heaped on those stupid enough to extend it to people who refuse to honor it, with the only defense offered as "I was too stupid to know what was being offered me".
The "Progressive" THEN blames the mortgage bankers for making loans that were affordable, but because of their very affordability, caused home prices to bubble. Some bankers weren't stupid. Goldman Sachs, while securitizing and selling crappy debt obligations to pension funds et al, used their fees to short these same securitized debt obligations they sold to others. They saw the big picture, even when the politicians and the dumber bankers didn't.
In reality, if we hadn't had government policy to reduce the cost of debt below market conditions, ie had debt had been priced at market conditions, where the debt wasn't guaranteed by big bro, and the financial institutions were placed in a position to get a return on their capital, would this still happen? The answer is "Probably not to the extent it did". Yes, the securitization of the debt obligations certainly played a big part, but the risk was much more knowable. 20% down payments, plenty of equity, and not a flood of buyers bubbling up the pool to the extent it was bubbled wouldn't have happened either.
Bankers did exactly what the rules told them to do... they just had a set of risks that the government took off their hands and a system that allowed them to scale debt out like never before. Proper regulation, like not allowing a single asset to be insured for 13 times its value, would have helped a lot. Funny. I cannot insure my house for 13 times its value and then burn it down. That is called fraud. The allegorical equivalent, though, is business as usual for the insurance industry.
Want to fix it all? Don't let the government guarantee debt obligations. If you let insurance guys and bankers be paid on fees generated at closing, and not on full cycle economics, then you must escrow the amount that a full meltdown would require to fix. Let's see how that works.
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