Originally Posted by Rochard

You just said it yourself: "The failure was in not recognizing houw bad the problem was until it was too late".

The Bush administration, Congress, the banks, and Wall Street all encouraged this. No one wanted this to stop. The housing market was going up and up, people were pulling money out of their houses, spending it on toys and improvements, which caused the economy to do well, which only caused the price of houses to up further. At the same time they couldn't build houses fast enough.

We all knew what was going on, we just didn't want it to end. It was crazy. I bought a house for $220k in Phoenix, Arizona - a rather average house with a pool - and two years later it had doubled in value. That's insane.

Don't tell us the President has no control over this, and don't tell us the President doesn't make laws. What President Bush should have done was get together a number of people from Congress, sit them down, and say "Times are good right now but this is going to be a huge problem shortly and I need you to sponsor bills that will become laws that will help prevent this". And this just didn't happen. Our president failed us.

Please don't tell me he didn't see this coming - most of us did.

And then please do not tell us that Obama didn't fix this. He was handed the worst economy in my life time with unemployment over 10% and cut it in half. He made the right decisions. He put the right people in the right departments to make this happen.