Mortgage Crisis?!

I have been quiet for a long time but the 'Mortgage Crisis' has finally prompted me to emerge.

The latest article I read was on Marketwatch.com today and went into great detail about how millions of families are on the verge of losing their homes because of the strict bankruptcy laws and how the laws should be relaxed to assist these poor folk.

Screw the poor folk (meaning ones approaching bankruptcy, not folks who generally don't have a lot of money) and I would prefer to express myself with much stronger language. There are some who end up in financial straights by no design of their own via means such as illness or unexpected job losses, I have no problem trying to assist this class of bankruptcies if someone could figure out how to neatly identify them.

The fools who took out the sub-prime mortgages with variable rates or interest only payments and every other variation designed to lower their payments so they could buy ever bigger houses and continue driving housing prices higher should lose everything. I don't feel they deserve any pity. If they deserve pity then I was a fool for not going whole hog and borrowing obscene amounts of money beyond what I could ever be forecast to afford just so the government could step in let me keep my oversized home and forgive a significant chunk of my mortgage so I can start making payments that I can truly afford.

The mortgage companies and those who borrowed from them should be made to pay the price for their decisions and actions. If anyone thinks the banks and mortgage companies are in it to help the borrower they are the fool - the lenders are in it to make money. For the past several years they just cared about approving more and more loans to generate the origination fees and income. Rising home values, fueled by their lending abandon, masked the issues as they would simply refinance at ever higher levels or the home would be sold and cover the debt with a profit for the borrower.

I look forward to millions of Americans losing their homes and declaring bankruptcy. I want to see housing prices fall dramatically (I live on the West Coast so a $500K house is a hovel) so that I can pull out my stellar credit record and buy a reasonable house at a reasonable price. A nice recession would put some reality back into peoples outlooks.