I have been seeing a lot of references to “a speculative bubble†Nope. They were not speculating. The crisis consisted of people, mostly members of protected minorities with nothing to lose, buying houses they could not afford with borrowed money in the expectation that they would go up, and if they went down, it was the bank’s problem. So the people who bought houses were taking no risk, since mostly they bought them with 100% loans, had no credit rating …
Tag: doom
Escalating prophecies of doom
When prophecies of doom are not working out, the first reaction is to escalate them: Ted Turner tells us: We will be eight degrees hotter in thirty or forty years, and basically none of the crops will grow, most people will have died, and the rest of use will be cannibals, civilization will have broken down. Over past millenia, global temperatures have risen and fallen several degrees. A few thousand years back, hippos and crocodiles basked in the warm waters …