Yes the game is very one sided. Of course that is
Post# of 39368
I need to see the movie "The Big Short"! The top five banks played the US mortgage market like a fine fiddle. They funded exotic Option ARM, Interest Only, very low intro-rate mortgages for anyone with a pulse. My dog could have qualified for a mortgage during the real estate boom. The credit default swaps were shorted to death and the mortgage portfolio's over valued. The mortgage tranches were overvalued and manipulated by the banks to the secondary market investor markets. Wall Street profited huge while naïve homeowners were sold and took out these exotic mortgages to achieve the so-called "American dream". The average new home buyer didn't understand and/or couldn't afford most of these homes.
Home equity skyrocketed for a few years but in my opinion it was a set up of things to come. Reset interest rates caused most of these new home owners to default so the banks foreclosed while not only reaping profits from the falsified secondary market, but the profits from the resale of the foreclosed home and the FDIC insurances they receive from the bad loans. All while Wall Street and the Feds allowed this to go on and in my opinion by design! This is largely what caused the 2008 great recession and the bail outs, etc, etc.