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Gotta go with sugarpop on this one. The mortgage structures that paved the way for the mess we are in should never have been allowed to exist.
Once they hit the market, Fannie and Freddie had no choice but to buy the damn things since they were targeted at folks who could not otherwise have purchased a home otherwise they would have been criticised for not fulfilling their charter of expanding home ownership.
Trouble is, those instruments were abused. They were used to buy more house by people who didn't need the extra help. That's why housing prices skyrocketed and the collapse of these time-bomb mortgages is a big part of why the housing market and nearly the entire international financial market almost collapsed.
These risky instruments were not only created in the mortgage market but in every kind of credit market. Across the globe. A lot of people saw how bad an idea this was but nobody could stop it. One could even make the case that this economic collapse was inevitable. Kind of like a fault line that never eeks out periodic mini-quakes of tolerable magnitude but continues to build pressure until the inevitable 9.5 continent-crusher.
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