Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain
So today's meme about the financial crisis seems to be "blame the consumer." Andrew Sullivan attributes it to "rank greed and irresponsibility from ordinary Americans on a massive scale," George Will blames "households [that] decided that it would be jolly fun to budget the way government does," and Tony Perkins says Americans' values trickled up to Wall Street.
This fits in with a worldview whose primary unit of analysis is the individual rather than the system, which implicitly excuses misuse of power. Personal responsibility has to be a factor in assigning blame and turning things around, but people do not make bad choices in a vacuum, and focusing primarily on defaulted borrowers reeks of scapegoating.
My brother, who along with my father owns a real estate title agency, processes more than 50 foreclosures per week. He said they fall into two categories -- people who bought multiple investment properties as the bubble peaked, and first-time homebuyers with adjustable rate (ie, subprime) mortgages, which are often taken out with no down payment. The latter make up a large majority of his defaults, so let's focus on them.
These mortgages are basically lemons. They only make sense under the assumption that income and property values will continue to increase in perpetuity and lenders will refrain from raising interest rates. Should borrowers understand that? Sure.
Should lenders whose job it is to understand mortgages be held accountable for selling them to people who pretty clearly can't afford them? Yes. (If you think the sales dynamic is a buyer demanding a loan they can't afford and a conflicted broker reluctantly assenting, perhaps I could interest you in a subprime.)
Should the barons of Wall Street who treated these unbacked notes like sure profit be punished for playing fast and loose with oure entire financial system? Definitely.
I don't wish to strip consumers of all agency here, but where there is asymmetry of information and money (in other words, power), there should be asymmetry of blame. Sticking primary responsibility on consumers' greed is a power-coddling cop-out. Avarice, recklessness and ignorance fueled this crash, but don't tell me it was some grassroots movement of borrowers rising up to demand untenable loans. Fasttalking marketers exploited ignorance and encouraged irresponsibility, getting obscenely rich while wreaking a crisis that would not have happened without them. They knew (or were professionally negligent in not knowing) that they were trading in lemons. Find me a Scriptural rationale for letting those people off the hook and saving our rebuke for those who have lost their homes. Please.
