Nobody was made to buy a home they couldn't afford. They wanted it, and someone was willing to sell it to them at near-predatory rates.
Nobody had a gun held to their head to sign a contract.
Nobody had a gun held to their head to sign a contract.
I suppose, in the same way that no one forces me to buy drinking water, I just want it, so as not to die.
If there is no affordable housing available (as is the case in most US markets today), you essentially are made to buy/rent an unaffordable home if at all possible. Because the alternative is homelessness, which isn't really an alternative.
Obviously, sometimes people purposely overspend on housing because of lifestyle inflation. But I don't think that's a majority -- many people are overspending on housing because housing is a fundamental human need and they have literally zero alternatives to overspending. It's more common than most people will admit.
But companies spend vast amounts of their revenue to manipulate you in to doing so, or perhaps you haven't heard of advertising?
Loan officers just facilitated what their customers already wanted.
Go back and review the news that came out. "The Big Short" is a decent summary. The trading manager at Bear Stearns who bought the derivatives got to walk out and keep his big bonuses. The share holders ate it. The rating institutions were complicit too - they knew the products were crap but knew the customers (lending institutions) would go to another one and so wrote the bogus ratings. See the players in the game got paid. The snooks got screwed.
Bill Black, who prosecuted the Savings and Loan Crisis, and sent many fraudsters to jail reviewed the 2008 crash and was incensed at the lack of prosecution.
The consumers saw what they wanted to see. Very few consumers perfomed due diligence. The old proverb tends to be true: "If something seens to be too good to be true... It probably is." Fraudsters have taken advantage of the gullible throughout human history. Our generation has no excuse: we have unparalleled access to information and most are too lazy to put the effort in to check these things out our to hire competent counsel who work for us not the seller. How many parents and students understand the debt they take on for college and the expected ROI???