Reply #5: I'm not saying people *aren't* getting fucked sideways, they totally are.

[asthmaticeog]

But prices were based, for over a decade, not on the intrinsic worth of real estate in a given area or the size and quality of a given home, but on the availability of loans. Speculators and mortgage brokers artificially inflated the prices of homes and real estate agents profited obscenely from these artificially inflated housing prices. And now the market is correcting itself. It was bubbled for so long and so egregiously that the correction is destroying the economy, but it's still a correction - homes are now selling for prices that are much more in line with their actual worth. Yours is not an argument that this isn't a correction, it's THE argument for why these fucking vampires should have been regulated all along. Hell, I *live* in the belly of the bubble. Northern Ohio was hit by predatory lending first and hardest, and my neighborhood got trendy as fuck based on bank speculation, KeyBank in particular, may they be infested with tapeworms and ticks. It used to be you couldn't even rent an apartment around here without knowing the person moving out. Now the for sale signs on the new townhouses that look like they were built out of injection molded Necco Wafers are as ubiquitous as as the yuppie cars parked in front of them. It's completely fucked. It's still a correction.