mortgages

For thenon-insured mortgages, the banks can also go after other assets since all Canadian mortgages are recourse loans.

It's a little difficult to say exactly where housing prices would be without government incentivized 30 year mortgages.

Or would preventing Bear Stearns from issuing mortgages (which they didn't do anyway) have somehow prevented them from going bust?

But people who sold after his trades made a stupid decision -- to buy overpriced mortgages.

Yes, but this still doesn't actually hurt the people that hold mortgages (the homeowners).

The underlying problem was the mortgages themselves; securitization merely shifts the risk around.

I would compare the requisite bailout magnitude to paying off your friend's mortgage, his friend's mortgages, and their student loan debt...

I know of loans and mortgages making $100+ per score, but not per click.

The 2007 financial crash wasn't largely contained amongst the buyers and holders of mortgages in Florida, Las Vegas etc; it was felt clear across the globe.

And it was not just banks that were issuing mortgages.

Governments dramatically impact the price of the housing market already via any manner of policies such as zoning, regressive tax subsidies on mortgages and even school funding.

Zoning codes, building codes, state backed mortgages, etc.

"When it comes to any kind of financial scam, like sub-prime mortgages..." Uh, what?

I'm not sure even a small bank sees $30K/year divided amongst however many mortgages (only a small fraction of which were determined to be fraudulent) as a "significant chunk of profit".

"We know the bank did bad things, because I told some people the bank did bad things, and they agreed that I had told them that the bank had done bad things!" > Abacus sold hundreds of millions of dollars of fraudulent mortgages to Fannie, reaping many millions of dollars in commissions and fees.