Call Now to Get Your Own Loan Giant for Ten Easy Payments of 10 Million Dollars

I'd like to first of all say that I think that the columnist is going a bit overboard. But I won't hold that against her, she makes incredibly valid points. It used to be that you went to a bank to store your money and a brokerage firm to invest it. That now is not true for homeowners.
While 9% doesn't sound like very much, it is one in eleven. Do you know eleven people who are in the process of paying a mortgage? Just think that one of them lost their home before June. On the scale of 44 million people paying mortgages that's massive.
I think it is nice that the columnist says that the market can't fix itself as an excuse for the government to create further regulations to protect consumers from bad business. However, it is not completely true. It would not be pretty to watch most of the home loan companies sink into the ground and millions more lose their homes. It would not be enjoyable to see property values plummet for those fortunate few who already own their home or survive the crash. After the smoke cleared though, the country would still be here. The economy would still be here. The people will still be here. Maybe a good Depression is what we need to fix some of the social ails of the nation. The first generation after the Great Depression is called the Golden Generation, after all.
The great thing about free markets is that while it isn't always pretty or enjoyable it does always work. After a while there would be no home loan companies left, there would be terribly low property values, and there would be a lot of empty houses. Sounds horrible right? Well maybe in that situation someone like me, a white-collar worker who makes more than minimum wage but not so much that buying a house is a plausible goal, might actually be able to afford a house to build a future in. Maybe the next time that millions of people want to buy houses they will know better than to sign any paper that a bank puts in front of them on a house they can't actually afford. Maybe people will learn what some of us have always known: a house is not a right, it is earned through hard work and frugality.