I suppose you fall on one side of this or the other in reacting to the end-result of easy mortgages and access to capital.  I can’t help but fall on the personal accountability side.  Maybe that says a lot about me but I really believe people must be accountable for the financial decisions they make.  If you have ever bought a house, there are already way too many "sign this" forms put into place to ensure you understand what you are doing.  Even for someone comfortable with numbers and financial concepts, there are lots of moving pieces in a real estate transaction.

I agree with Paul Kedrosky here and his view on this story from the Washington Post.  It was shady..no doubt.  But it was shady on both sides of the transaction.  Just because you can doesn’t mean you should and it is not the role of government to protect you from yourself.  Right or wrong, we live in a free market/capitalist society where having access to capital carries a level of responsibility.

No one should lose their home and there is no shortage of bad actors involved both in this story as well as the broader debacle but this is as much the fault of the buyer as those that facilitated the transaction.

One undeniable maxim that holds true here is if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.