What these people are doing is exactly equivalent to what tendentious tenants do to avoid eviction. We almost uniformly hold those tenants in contempt; they're perpetrating a fraud. The only difference here is that it's banks holding the loans, not independent landlords.<p>I see how you could sympathize with a ruthless defaulting homeowner; after all, what else are they going to do? Are we really asking them to vacate <i>early</i> solely to make the bank's job easier? On the other hand: what they're doing is morally indefensible, and any costs to the bank their behavior incurs is largely going to be borne by good-faith mortgageholders and new prospective good-faith home buyers.<p>Maybe they shouldn't be bragging about this. Here's to hoping it catches up with them sooner than later.
“We could pay the mortgage company way more than the house is worth and starve to death,”<p>This implies that if the house was worth what they were paying that they would still starve to death and really they made a bad choice in buying the house in the first place.<p>"But the couple also refinanced at the height of the market, taking out cash to buy a truck..."<p>sigh...
The banks don't want to foreclose, because they do better with "extend and pretend" ... until the day before the foreclosure they can still carry the worthless loan as an asset at 100% of its original value (if I understand this part of the process correctly).<p>Who is the greater criminal?<p>Some old lady living in a crappy $125K house in Florida--or bank execs who in concert with corrupt regulators are hiding billions in bad loans and meanwhile paying themselves 100K bonuses or more?
<i>“They’re all crooks."</i><p>Let me see if I got this right... You borrowed money. Now you choose not to make the monthly payment that you have already agreed to pay. And spend that money on other stuff. And you call them the crooks?
The Chinese sees the housing crisis from a different point of view: The US cheated China out of billions by selling them bonds backed up by inflated real estate, money saved up by hardworking Chinese. It's a completely different take on the situation.<p>Someone had to provide the money in the first place. That someone sure as hell wasn't the banks, the banks were intermediaries. Often times that someone was a Chinese or German institution chasing higher interest rates with no clear understanding of what was being sold to them.<p>Who benefited from the transaction? Whoever sold the home. A lot of foreign money came into the US and stayed in the US.
Imagine I decided to move into a foreclosed home and live there rent free until the banks could legally force me out? What is that called? It's stealing. Every month these people live in these houses they are stealing from the banks. Yes, the banks are at fault for creating the opportunity to get robbed but that doesn't justify the actions of these squatters.<p>Would you say that a rapist is justified in raping someone because they acted in a sexually lewd manner?<p>The "they had it coming" argument just doesn't hold water.