We had Clintonvilles the last time around and nobody at all seems to remember those.

Maybe so Martha, but that crisis will seem like a tempest in a teapot when all those prime plus adjustable rate mortgages out there start resetting in the next few years. When prime was at 1 or 2%, those prime plus loans were at very low rates, but with prime now above 5%, millions people in all income sectors who didn't realize that prime was at artificially low rates are going to be hit huge. I'm predicting that the foreclosure crisis will be much larger and deeper than anything we've seen in 75 years. Some parts of the country will fare much worse than others, but it's not going to be pretty when those rates start resetting. The sad thing is that many people could have locked in historically low rates if they had just asked for a fixed mortgage loan product, but the loan brokers wouldn't have made their big cuts. Too many people "trusted" their real estate agents to get them the best loan. The kickbacks were going back and forth back then like ping pong balls back then. So much for the "ownership society". I thought at the time it was a deliberate intent to create a future crisis and I still do.

It's quite true that the current depradations are hurting people at a higher economic level. Clinton's policies hurt people worst who were already poor by denying them public benefits and failing to defend labor rights. The current predatory lending economy is harvesting out the private nest eggs of the middle class. Strange when you consider the Democratic Party is supposed to be the party of the poor and the Republican Party is supposed to be the defender of private profits and savings.

One of the problems is, the FHA trusted private lenders far too much to decide which home mortgage borrowers were worthy of federal homeowners' insurance. The resulting risks and losses were the subject of OIG reports throughout the past five years or so, but they weren't particularly noticed until the last several months. At http://www.hud.gov/offices/oig/reports/oigsearch.cfm , try searching on the word "endorsement" and you'll see what I mean.

As for deliberate intent to create a crisis, though, you misoverestimate the sorts of people who create predatory lending schemes. They aren't trying to impoverish their fellow citizens because they want to make people suffer -- they're simply out to make maximum money and they don't care who gets hurt.

/M

I suppose it defends on how one looks at the situation - I think we're on different pages because we're looking at the economics of it all from micro and macro economic perspectives. I don't think that we've actually seen "current depravations" yet, despite Jim Cramer's tears over the problems of his hedge fund buddies. There are going to be a huge number of wage slaves and much larger numbers of people "out on the street" than we have now. That's my prediction. Although "helicopter Ben", - which I understand is Ben Bernanke's nickname - just did what everyone said his scholarly papers said he would. He caused money to rain down upon the central banks after I put up this post. That'll kick start the economy and keep the engine going for a while yet. Expect more of the same from Helicopter Ben.

As for intent, if I were to shoot my Republican neighbor in the gut because it made me feel better at the time, my personal intent might have been to make myself feel better, but the prosecutor would still call it murder when he died.

I said "depradations," i.e. plundering.

Though we have our share of deprivation and depravity too.