Who Do YOU Believe?

As part of my series on the Who, What, Why, When and Where of this tragic tale...

I present the WHO.

Today, we see that Fannie and Freddie are once again on the verge of collapse. But wait... here comes Uncle Sam to the rescue. You know... the government bailing them out.

Who let this happen? Who is going to fix it? Who is going to pay the price?

Easy. We did. We are. We are.

Why "We" and not the banks, brokers, agents, appraisers, financiers or the government? Really. Why not?

This is a question I've thought about over and over for the last 2 years. You see... I'm a mortgage professional. I've been helping people get mortgages for 19 years. I've been a broker and a banker. I've seen good credit and bad. I've watched thousands of people "over-buy" pushing for that sliver of the American Dream. All the while, lending standards slowly began to disappear ultimately, in my opinion, disappearing all together. When you can offer 100% financing on a NO DOCUMENT loan... there is no such thing as an underwriting standard. As a matter of fact, there was, if you will, no such thing as an actual underwriter during that time. Sure, there were people called underwriters, but essentially all they did was check to make sure applications and disclosures were signed and dated correctly but beyond that... well.. you can do the math.

There's a finger pointed in every direction on this one. The banks are pointing at the appraisers and the brokers. The brokers are pointing at the banks. The appraisers are pointing at the brokers and the banks. Analysts are pointing at the Government. Analysts are also pointing the finger at the banks, brokers, appraisers and the buyers.

My first inclination was to point the finger at the Government. After all, it's our Government who encourages things like spending our tax rebates. It's our Government who encourages us to borrow more and more. Just look at what they do... our National Debt is crushing us. We borrow.

Then it hit me. Our Government. We, the people. Sound familiar? We are the Government. We are the banks, the brokers, the appraisers, the financiers, the representatives, the agents and the buyers. We did it. We knew it wouldn't last. We did not want to believe it could end, so we turned the other cheek and ignored the problem. It's all of us. It's our fault. We have no one to blame but ourselves.

The real question here is "Who will fix it?"...

We will. How? Well, that is the 65 million dollar question, now isn't it. One thing I can tell you is that our current form of Government won't do it. They continue to lie to us on a daily basis about the severity of the problem.

Remember the subprime issue? That was a good one. According to Hank Paulson, Ben Bernanke and company, that was over oh... about a year ago. Remember the housing market? Didn't that bottom out 5 or 6 times now? Consider New Fears Of A Fannie and Freddie Bailout Hit Shares and Foreclosure Plague Widens, both recent articles from CNN on the ongoing and widening process.

Freddie Mac is continuing to assert the insane fact that they are adequately capitalized. Please. Stop lying to us. Our Government continues to attempt to artificially prop up already INSANE housing prices by passing meaningless bailout legislation like the Housing Bill just inked. PLEASE... STOP LYING TO US.

WAIT... If WE are the Government, aren't we STILL LYING TO OURSELVES??

Really, America... Who HAVE we become? WHO ARE WE?

Self respect has disappeared.