Today it's bad mortgages, tomorrow it will be something else. Blaming the little guy doesn't fix the problem.

The US problem was they borrow too much money from the federal reserve. The federal reserve prints money against the debt by a huge factor of 7+ times. So every trillion borrowed from the fed creates 7 trillion in new US$.

It's all a sort of pyramid game, as long as they didn't get too greedy they could borrow forever, the US cash would increase by 7x the debt, if that went into American pockets then they could pay 1/7th as taxes and repay the debt immediately leaving them with the rest of the free money! Hoorah! Free money for every American! From thin air no less.

Except it's something of a con, and it only works as long as the US economy is growing so that people don't lose faith in the US$. Bush & Cheney got greedy, made too much debt, that created 'wealth' that got funnelled into home loans.

The loans popped. But then the valuation of those homes was way above their true worth anyway and lots of the new wealth went abroad to pay for oil, so the usual feedback loop didn't work.

So today it's the housing loans crisis, tomorrow it will be something else. They have no alternate source of funding but debt, and no other place in the world that will take their debt.

If you want to understand whose to blame, he's called Cheney and decided that debt didn't matter when it comes to getting elected, hence it doesn't matter full stop.

http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data

How was you rebate checks? Ever wonder how UGGov refunds you money it doesn't have? Notice the value of your saving in terms of real world goods has decreased? That's where your refund check came from, the devaluation of your dollar assets.

But then again if you read S&P's ratings on that certain recent failed Wall Street Wanker and then down load the Wanker's annual SEC report from 1999 to 2006 it is quite obvious serious flaws exist within the model they use and even the failed ENRON was highly overrated in it's last five years of corporate life as well !

The bulk of the magazine ones are quite superficial and lack any real depth in a street where both greed and insider trading rule the roost awaiting for the suckers lured by the illusion of high returns beat a path to the front door are fleeced absolutely !

The wise ones subscribe to a number of expensive private list exclusive agency reports which do an in depth report of all targeted companies on demand and apply occam's razor to remove much of the wall of absolute verbal garbage that this street generates for the mass media propaganda spin merchants that have risen to new heights of absurdity since Chairman Ronnie in the eighties !

The old old story of this street has been basically buyer beware since it's first creation of the infamous put call option of buying and selling that which you do not own !

So the blind people will be making the glasses to correct the one-eyed man's nearsightedness. Just what we need.

What are you talking about man? You are bashing the U.S. but you are forgetting that almost every financial system in the Western World is based on the "Full Faith and Credit" of the country issuing the currency - almost no one uses a "standard" (gold, silver, sheep, etc...) anymore, which means that any economic system must be based on borrowing from the future.