re: Don't buy things you can't afford.

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Can you elaborate?

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The speculation market was a huge reason. (Speculation gets hardly any attention but it has severe repercussions. Food speculation, which makes starvation much worse will hopefully be illegal in the near future).

Low interest rates, creating cheap money.

Safe harboring in real estate after the dot.com burst.

As a start...

Thanks for sharing that Sleeping Tiger.

Are you a CFA or something along those lines?

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If people would have followed this, then we wouldn't have even had the housing bubble that led to the recession in the first damn place.

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THAT ... is the key to a good life friend. As I told my children, and still remind them today, "forget about keeping up with the Jones and instead live within your means. You'll be happier and live longer "

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If people would have followed this, then we wouldn't have even had the housing bubble that led to the recession in the first damn place.

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Frick that shite party like a Rock Star let tomorrow take care of itself...

i heard it was crab people.


but seriously individual markets are incredibly complex when trying analyze, let alone the national or global economic trends.

- i wasn't trying to be a dick, just saying that there were a whole lot of reasons, some of which were pretty natural fluctuations. when we fight the fluctuations to keep going up and up it places more and more downward pressure in the end. add in to that the fact that there is no test lab for a lot of the ideas that get generated and copied so in the end we can put ourselves in a precarious position without even realizing it until it is way too late.

Obviously a lot had to go wrong to get us in that position...

I don't disagree with anything you said.

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THAT ... is the key to a good life friend. As I told my children, and still remind them today, "forget about keeping up with the Jones and instead live within your means. You'll be happier and live longer "

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You sound like my dad.

It's funny, because now that they're retired and my brother and I are adults, he and my mom go on these elaborate vacations together.

Like "wait a second, you mean you bought shite on sale at Old Navy so you could spend a goddamn month drinking wine in Spain* later on in life?"

Well, looks like I know what I'm doing to my kids.


*Yes, my parents just did this, and I'm jealous. But, then again, they didn't rack up debt when they were younger and can go on these kinds of vacations. I'm totally doing that shite when I grow up.

for sure, i just added that cause I didn't want you to think i was trying to get an e fight going. they can be tough to avoid around here sometimes it seems.

I was being a smartass.


I can't get back to a British car fast enough. I've grown to loathe my Infiniti.


I agree with your OP.

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Bad banking practices backed by bad government policy led to a fricking sinkhole that people were just pouring money into. fricking travesty is what it was.

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People probably won't believe me when I say this, but those bad banking policies were put in under Clinton and attemptedly fixed by Bush, but denied by a dem controlled congress.

I don't credit Bush with a lot, but he did try to pass policy and warn congress that would have circumvented some of the bad loans made, that led to a large portion of the recession.