The True Cost of Financial Disaster

The Wall Street financial crisis -- the fraudulent securitization of NINJA mortgages with credit rating agency complicity to give them AAA status -- has cost the American people a lot. The following is from the Calculated Risk blog site:

According to the Fed, household net worth is now off $11.4 Trillion from the peak in 2007, but up $6.3 trillion from the trough in Q1 2009. A majority of the decline in net worth is from real estate assets with a loss of about $6.4 trillion in value from the peak. Stock market losses are still substantial too.

That's an awful lot of wealth that has "gone up in smoke". And this doesn't include the costs spread world-wide as panic created a ripple effect of financial panic and crisis around the world.

Thanks to the US Republican Party with this "pro-business" anti-regulatory, the only good government is no government ideology!

By the way... go look at the graphs at the above web site. The third one (at the bottom of the posting) catches my eye. It shows that back 60 years ago, mortgage debt was less than 20% of house value. But now it is about 70% of the value of the house. That isn't "progress" when the bank owns more of your house than you do. But Americans have gone mad with the idea of having a McMansion and having it when they are 25 and not wait until they are 35. (This disease has hit Canada as well. The current generation is a "gotta have it all! gotta have it now!" generation. This is bad news for everyone.)