Selling the American Dream... Down the River

Here is a bit from a post on the BoingBoing blog about an economist who worked really, really hard to pump up the real estate balloon which popped and has spread misery, unemployment, and foreclosures across the land...

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David Lereah served as economist for the National Association of Realtors and published a series of books advising readers that there was no real estate bubble and that buying highly leveraged property would make them rich. The Amazon reviews sections for these books have become a kind of performance space for highly sarcastic commentary on the conmen who sold America on the idea of going into hock to buy real estate.

The sad fact is that knowingly pumping up a financial bubble that costs 14 million jobs and causes several million Americans to lose their homes is not a crime. To my mind David Lereah created more unjustified suffering than all the American criminals of the 20th century, but unlike the, he gets to walk the street and live off the "earnings" of the people he lied to and misled. He will never spend a day in jail. But he left more pain, suffering, and misery that all the Al Capones, mafiosi, and drug gangs combined. There is no justice here.