Forced to make bad loans? Please show me evidence that they were FORCED to make these loans. They were HAPPY to make them and the banking firms actively encouraged their employees to make them. Everyone was making so much money on the primary and secondary mortgage markets that they never thought it would come back to bite them in the ass.
What you are saying is like blaming me for someone killing themselves if I leave a gun in the house. Yeah, maybe I should have been more careful, but I can't be responsible for the decisions that a rational individual chooses to make simply because one of my acts enabled them to make that decision. That is, unless you are trying to say that those banks were not rational.
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke
It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...." Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson
