Every American citizen must watch this: (for fucking serious)

[Guyute]

I agree whole hearted.   The only people at financial institutions that really paid were the employees.  Imagine 50% of your yearly salary is paid lump sum once a year and then a few weeks before that you are told you aren't getting it because someone created some crazy shit to invest in.  For the lower employees it was 25%.

Not all the guys in these places are making big bucks.   It was across the board, the IT guys, the secretaries, the kid right out of college.   For the firm they aren't making as much money, but they can survive.

I have a lot of friends at various firms that got really screwed in this.   After a while they convert more and more of your salary into options rather than giving you a raise.   That becomes your nest egg really.   1 day you can retire at 45-50, the next you will work for the rest of your life.

[sls.stormyrider]

true
we (myself included)  tend to demonize everyone who walks in the building.
not every firm took place in ? activities (tht we know of   ), and not every employee of those that did take part was a factor.
many people at Lehman, for instance, who weren't involed in this craziness lost everything.

[rowjimmy]

from my own experience,  every time I looked for a house I was pushed into something more expensive than I wanted to pay. when I did a re-fi during those times, on more than one occasion the agent was pushing very hard for a crazy variable loan that I didn't want, and tried to make it sound like an unbeatable deal. It was almost as if they were getting paid extra to right crazy variables.

They absolutely were.
Close more loans, any loans, as fast as possible.

No-doc loans were quick and easy to close and just as easy to sell for securitization.

Consumers didn't invent the no-doc loans. They'd always been told that homeownership was the ultimate goal and path to economic prosperity and here was a lender (or mortgage broker often in cahoots with a real estate agent) who was going to make that dream come true.

Did some consumers lie and attempt to take advantage of that situation? Yes.

But the system should never have allowed those loans to see the light of day. Only the blind pursuit of profits made it possible.

[gah]

The American Dream, lol.