You borrowed far more than you could ever afford. You splurged on wasteful and unnecessary things. You took on financial burdens that you could never afford to repay. You paid outrageous fees. Yes, the brokers that sold you the loans lied and fudged the numbers and did whatever they had to do to get you to close, but you did this to yourselves.
No, I’m not talking about individual borrowers, I’m talking about entire states, cities, counties. These are the next boot to drop in the Financial Crisis, but the play book is the same. The Wall Street Fat Cats sold big fat loans to people that couldn’t pay. In some cases, they took advantage of less sophisticated country bumpkin towns and cities then pushed them into complex loans and projects with obscene terms that they could never fulfill…..just like the subprime loans these financial pied pipers sold to unsophisticated homeowners…..
Land values soared. States splurged on new programs. Then it all went bust, bringing down banks and state governments with them. This wasn’t America in 2011, it was America in 1841, when a now-forgotten depression pushed eight states and a desolate territory called Florida into the unthinkable: They defaulted on debts. Wall Street Journal
Making matters worse for dozens of metropolitan hubs are obscure, toxic deals with the world’s biggest banks called “interest rate swaps,” a peculiar kind of financial contract that provided city governments with easy cash before the crisis but has now turned sour and cost taxpayers more than $1.25 billion a year….Mother Jones
Wall Street and the bankers have figured out how to suck every last penny out of every one of us….it’s just obscene and yet our government still keeps bailing them out……
