Or because people like me (mortgage banker) broker transactions between willing buyers and sellers, who apparently view our services as worth the expense?
Yeah, passing on your wealth to your kids and/or making deals possible for folks, that's flat evil alright...
It would be nice if Americans were actually planning on passing on their
"wealth" to their kids. Instead they take out loans for 125% of appraised
value on too much house in the first place, park leased vehicles encrusted
with the latest useless bling in the three car garage, and then proceed to
fill the house up with cr@p of little real value while paying 23+% extra for it
on a maxed out credit card.
Yes, there are people who do better financial planning than that and live on
more modest means, but we have a negative savings rate as a country. When
my grandparents owned their home and vehicle (notice that's not plural)
after WWII it was
paid off, ie, really owned by them --not owned by a
bank that had sold it to another bank which in turn sold it to another bank
somewhere across the country. No one from their generation showed up
at a bank and said "I want a house and a car, but I have little or no down
payment for either." They would have been laughed out of the lobby. Nowadays,
they'd get a loan, a credit card, and would be on their way out the door for
the plasma screen TV.
Speaking of loans and mortgages:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2007/02/24/cnusecon24.xml
Panic has begun to sweep the sub-prime mortgage sector in the United States after the bankruptcy of 22 lenders over the past two months, setting off mass liquidation of housing loans packaged as securities.
....
Peter Schiff, head of Euro Pacific Capital, said the sector was in an unstoppable meltdown. "It's a self-perpetuating spiral: as sub-prime companies tighten lending they create even more defaults," he said.
The greatest generation of my grandparents went through a depression,
fought a war, and built the world's best economy --which was meant to
last past them. The boomers and the gen-Xers have sold it off since then
piece by piece. It hasn't been about evil. Just short-sighted stupidity.
So how does this bode for our national defense? How about our liberty? How
about the very social fabric of our country? Again, all we have to do is look
at history from Rome to Weimar to see where we are headed right now. Every
one of us who took an oath past and present do not want to see it come to
that. Where will the Army fall in on that? Hard to tell. I hope the fiasco at
Walter Reed isn't indicative of our continued health under future leadership.
It is still preventable, but only with some pain.
