Today I was listening to Fresh Air on NPR.  They had an economics guy on who’s now a professor at one of the University of Maryland campuses and was involved in Clinton’s economic team.  (Although he didn’t always see eye to eye with Clinton’s treasury secretary)  This guy put the current economic crisis in the best terms and framed it so well, I can’t believe that we’re in this mess.  Those stupid jackasses on Wall Street “were betting that people who did not have money to pay their mortgage would pay their mortgage.”  Just take a second and read that again.  Yeah, pretty nutty, isn’t it?  If people had just used their noggins we wouldn’t be in this mess.  “Sure,” you might say, “hindsight is 20/20.”  Yeah, but it doesn’t take hindsight to see that people who have bad credit probably aren’t going to pay their mortgage.  Couple that with the fact that Wall Street swindled them into interest only loans and variable rate mortgages, and you HAD to see that a disaster was on the way.  Again, they were betting that people who didn’t have the money to pay their mortgage would somehow pay their mortgage.  Again, in their defense you might say, “but they thought housing prices were always going to go up.”  And to that I say, WHEN has ANY market EVER gone up FOREVER?  Hello!  The tech bubble was just 10 years ago!  Nothing ever goes up without an end.  That’s just ridiculous.  Sigh!  Seriously, I don’t know how they let this happen.  These guys all have degrees in finance.  They should have known and done case studies on how whatever’s hot now won’t be hot in a few years.  And then AIG freakin’ insures the mortgages of people with bad credit?  I just can’t believe it!