In "The Big Short" the banks & corporations are cast as the villains. Hedge fund managers Burry & Baum are the smart heroes who see that the emperor has no clothes and call him out by "shorting" mortgage-backed securities. But are they heroes? Their ploy massively enriches them and their clients by exploiting the failure of the "villains" and THEIR clients. The heroes' righteous indignation against the Big Guns is in some ways hypocritical; that's alluded to briefly at one point in the movie. So are they just another set of villains? They could claim that they're acting in the interest of their clients. But would that make their clients villains too?

What's your view about the ethics & morality of all the actors in the big 2008 collapse? What about the short sighted greed or naivete of all the folks who bought homes they couldn't possibly afford? I think it's a pretty complex issue. Plenty of blame to go around.

   

No one is innocent in any of this. The idiotic keep-up-with-the-neighbours mentality has destroyed more individuals and more families than alcoholism, gambling, and drug addiction ever could. Others are far more guilty though in what happened in 2008. Under the cover of a government mandate, as well as exploiting an environment where any criminal behaviour in the financial sector had been essentially legalized by Ronald Reagan, the housing collapse/sub-prime disaster was one of the worst and most damaging scams of all time. How something like having someone's interest rates and monthly payments triple or quadruple at the end of the initial contract was allowed was beyond insanity. That the US government wouldn't, or couldn't, enforce re-negotiation of all risky mortgages into ones that were more stable and reasonable so more people could keep their homes was an obscenity. Hiding behind some bullshit "let the buyer beware" nonsense when the collapse was caused by a quasi-criminal enterprise is ridiculous and only served to let the real villains of the situation, i.e. the banks, off the hook with zero consequences whatsoever.

The housing market has been sheer crazy for a long time now and doesn't appear to be getting any better. In a recession that has the potential to be fall worse than 2008 was, thanks to the Chinese collapse and the Arab economic war against other oil producers, the news yesterday was that average house prices in Canada had managed to go up another 12%. How this is sustainable as Canada enters a period of higher unemployment is baffling. The nuke is going to go off in the housing sector pretty damn soon. And it'll be accompanied by tens or hundreds of thousands of people across the country, not just in Alberta where foreclosures and property abandonments are skyrocketing, leaving the keys on the kitchen counter and telling the banks they're walking away from it altogether. Maybe that's what it takes anyway to fix the system. Let it collapse completely then rebuild it under close government supervision and regulation, just like they did after Black Tuesday in 1929, so it can't happen again. Doubtful it will ever happen though because when it comes to finance and the transfer of money the interests of the many will never be seen as important compared to the interests of the few wealthy overlords of what's an entirely rigged game.

   

Just wait until the Vancouver housing market bubble explodes and the ripple effects it will create.