contrario said:
It reminds me of home loans that caused the last downturn. Just because a bank will give you a loan on something, that doesn't mean you should do it. People will blame the banks again when it goes south.
Because banks share the blame.
They are supposed to manage risk by not lending to people who can't pay it back.
When banks and mortgage companies lend to people who clearly aren't good risk and encourage them to lie on their applications, it's clear that there's a disconnect between the debt-holders, who, in the economic downturn, were investors who were lied to by brokers from Goldman Sachs, among others, about the quality of the investment product, and the people selling the loans and then selling the investment products they were converted into. The salespeople--both mortgage brokers and investment brokers, made plenty of money. Investors who were sold these products were fleeced.
Implying that the economic downturn was solely the fault of consumer is just flat wrong. Both mortgage brokers and investment companies creating "products" to sell played a huge part, and the credit rating agencies that rated these shaky investments much too high were also complicit. None of these players has truly been held accountable for their role in the financial collapse. Until that starts happening, we will continue to see cycles where loans are granted to people when they shouldn't be and investments are sold to people on false pretenses by salespeople who do not have a fiduciary duty to do right by their customers, and we'll all pay for the result.