I recall at one point in the early 1990s where people in California used to love to get up in the morning to read in the paper how much their homes had appreciated overnight.

Clearly, those days are over.

And while I well realize that some of this mess IS being driven by people losing their (often grossly overpaid) manufacturing jobs to overseas suppliers, I have little sympathy for others who insisted on purchasing homes WELL beyond their financial means...often with adjustable rate mortgages (and often with no money down!)... and who now wonder why they can no longer afford to live in them.

The truth is that, in most cases, these people really couldn't afford to live in those homes when they first bought them!

My hunch is that these are many of the same people who routinely finance all manner of "nice to have" purchases by running up their multiple credit cards to the limit, routinely pay only the minimum balances due each month, and then transfer balances from one credit card to another so as to stay one step ahead of their creditors.

These are often the same people who have placed second mortgages on their homes in order to finance all manner of other (often depreciating) "nice to have" things (like expensive boats and new cars) and who then absolutely insist on driving around in THE most expensive (often leased) SUVs and Hummers...vehicles that serve absolutely NO useful purpose for their needs, other than to perhaps stroke their own over-inflated egos.

Whatever happened to personal financial responsibility in this country?

Whatever happened to people saying, "I (we) can't afford it?"

I well realize that the United States leads the world with some of the lowest math and science scores on the planet, but, Geesh...we're talking about simple addition and subtraction here!

That is, it doesn't take a degree in higher math to work out a projected family budget to determine whether or not one can afford all the of the "gozintas" (like taxes, insurance, maintenance and utilities...things that are over and above the mortgage payment(s)) and still keep food on the table BEFORE buying the home.

And anyone who DOES figure all that out and THEN myopically believes that all of those "other" costs of home ownership (not to mention the price of gas or the mortgage payment itself if it is one of those adjustable rate jobs!) will all stay absolutely fixed throughout the entire life of their 40 year mortgage is smoking something as well.

Now, clearly, there certainly HAVE been some predatory loan practices at work in all this.

But, then again, common sense dictates that before signing on the "dotted line", shouldn't those doing so take at least PART of the responsibility for fully understanding what they are getting themselves into financially?

The bottom line here is that most of this financial mess has been driven by a combination of greed and financial ignorance...governmental, corporate AND personal.

However, sadly, a LOT of it is personal.

So, in that sense, my hunch is that a goodly number of the over 700,000 actual and pending foreclosures on the books right now in the United States were caused by people choosing to live WELL beyond their financial means...and greedy banks allowing (if not encouraging) such people to do so.

Not all of the forclosures are due to stupidity. Some folks had their jobs shipped overseas (Globalization). Others in this country without a healthcare system got sick. See Michael Moore's Sicko.

I remember Bush braggin on how we were the "ownership society". Well it was his deregulation of the banking industry that made all those bad loans possible. He allowed unqualified people buy homes with weird teaser terms just so he could brag on it.

It makes me disgusted.