If you want to blame the sub prime mortgage market the Fannie and Freddie are not who to blame. I personally know three people who went jail for falsifying loan applications and absolutely wrecking the lives of people who could have never possibly afforded to pay those loans back.
It was the royal scam. Two of the guys were tradesmen that I worked with and they thought all of us were stupid for not quitting like they did and going to work with them. They were both bringing down over 250k per year for the two short years they were in it.
It was free money back then. I remember working in office spaces of fly by night mortgage companies and it was an outright circus atmosphere. They operated like they were in a boiler room pushing penny stocks. None of them survived. We did a 2 million dollar build out for a company called Ace Mortgage and they abandoned their space after only 4 weeks of occupancy.
when the shit hit the fan, the only ones to blame were the greedy bankers who were signing off on all these blatantly fraudulent loan applications. Not to mention the crazy ass inflated home values that the crooked estimators were pushing through.
The government was the dupe, not the other way around. The only mistake they made was bailing those greedy pigs out. I saw that shit first hand bro. I've flipped and rented a house or two in my days and Me and the Missus still talk about how crazy inflated that shit was back then. I wish I had the foresight for the market like I do now because I knew it wasn't going to end well for those idiots. I probably never would have heard about a mortgage backed derivative in my lifetime if it weren't for the meltdown.
My overseas vendors are German and Swedish lock makers. The USA locks all come from Mexico and are "less desired" than the high end hardware that comes from Europe. If I told them to go F themselves I'd be out of a job. Chicago is booming. Thousands upon thousands of doors are coming up.
The hardware companies have factories here, just not US owned. Sadly, the plants are mostly automated and don't employ as many people that you might think they would. But that is also the wave of the future. Too many people and not enough jobs.
America is great and it will continue to be. I have no idea what the hell that blonde haired oompa loompa is taking about aside from armageddon.
"The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain."
-Aristotle
