Rather than give this bozo any attention, I would rather shift the attention to the stupidity of how the rescue package is being handled! The notion that you need to default on your loan before you can receive a rate reduction is a joke!!! Why didn’t we just take this 700 trillion dollars, split it up to all the tax payers and get out and jump start this economy!!! That certainly is just as effective of the remedies that have been put in place!!! It is amazing we do not have a brilliant mind out there somewhere that can develop a better alternative to this global economic crisis!!!

There is no easy solution.

Here is my theory on part of the reason ‘why’ this current credit mess happened, comment as you will, this is just a discussion of ‘hmmm, that’s possible’.

We’re a very affluent society, more extremely so in the past 20 – 25 years. The birth of the computer industry has made many, many young people wealthy, far beyond what would have been normal had they started working in the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s or early 80’s. (Obviously the same applies to the decades prior to the 50’s), but let’s just use these years, since it’s not unrealistic to have someone who started working in the 50’s to be an older, but still very productive member of our business communities and corporations.

And, it’s not just the computer industry that has done well, we all have, beyond reasonableness perhaps? And, of course, it is our culture: THE AMERICAN DREAM. I’m not saying any of this is wrong, so just bear with me, I’m sort of thinking aloud here …

As society wealth grew, individual affluence allowed many market and financial managers and experts to retire early – and retire they did, at relatively young ages, many retiring between 1998 – 2005.

To replace them, we saw people in their 30’s & 40’s rapidly moving into positions at younger ages than typical for previous generations.

Maybe this unbalanced set of youth wasn’t such a great thing – the balance of experience vs. new ideas and energy just wasn’t there. Perhaps what was missing was the collective older, voices of reason.

The last few years have been stressful for me as an agent. Not stressful due to lack of clients – but stressful to see the insane price increases, the intense multiple-offers (the last ten years, really), and to hear advice being given by some agents to their clients that I just didn’t agree with. The words ‘prices never go down’ are a foreign language to me.

As a sellers agent, I worked to my sellers advantage, and saw agents representing buyers literally tell their buyers “don’t put a price cap on your escalation clause, it’s the only way we’ll get the house”. Well, naturally, they often did get the house — but as I told my buyers “You didn’t WIN if you paid too much for it.”

As a buyers agent, I would never recommend anything like that, and had many situations where my buyers did not get the house we were bidding on, because I was firm in helping them decide on a solid price that they would not go over, not for any reason. Prices most certainly do not go up forever.

So, do any of the rest of you feel that we lost an awful lot of talented and wise voices of experience due to the many early retirements our societal wealth created??

Well, I’m sure it’s been said above, but anyone who pays these entities money for their advice is naive, at best (to put it politely).