Originally Posted by Fly4hire

There was/is a certain percentage of that. There are also plenty of people who bought homes at the market price that is well above today's values they could afford and then lost their jobs as a result of the fallout of the above impacting companies and businesses and subsequently were stuck with homes they were under water on even with substantial equity and were forced to short or foreclose. These were honest people doing their best and got caught up in the mess created by others and now have the bad credit as a result that as you indicated will further cripple them in recovering their careers and lives. THIS is the real devastation of the housing bust. What do you tell them?

It's too easy to look at the ends of the bell curve and make summary statements about the causes of this disaster. I think the whole story is a lot more grey with a lot of truly innocent victims with repercussions that have rippled throughout society and the perps happily enjoying their ill gotten riches at the expense of the nations future economic well being.