[sailaway21]

sck5,
You just don't get it! Get off the prototypical liberal poor people bandwagon. sure the Congress, the Dem's in the Congress, were arrogant enough to think that everyone should own a home. Typical one size fits all government thinking. The problem is just as much the person making $50,000 a year, not poor but not rich, who thought that he could buy a $300,000 house because in a year he'd have $50,000 in instant equity in it. And that's what the Congress encouraged by letting the GSE's run wild. No problemo because the Fed's will bail them out, right?

The common sense you want is not going to come from the government. When did you ever see common sense from the government? Your government is the one who thinks that the same speed limit that is good for the Long Island Expressway is good for rural Montana! The common sense has to come from the individual investor or home buyer. And, if enough of them get the impression that something is riskless, you'll get another bubble of some sort and there isn't a damn thing the government can do to see it coming, or going.

If somebody drives up to your house today and offers you approximately twice what you intuitively know it to be worth, are you going to contact your government to alert them to the fact that there is "irrational exuberance" in the upstate New York real estate market?

If gold has gone up 10% per year over the last five years and you put your money into it, do you think you should be assured that it will continue to go up at the same rate?

You're asking for government to do what the market only can do. If we were to follow your desires we'd end up with a country like 1975 Czechoslovakia and you'd be living in a concrete apartment with a shared bathroom, and driving a Trabant. Government is incapable of doing what the market does automatically. Central planning does not work. The market system means that for almost every person who wins someone loses something. It ain't great but it beats all of us being in poverty like Czechoslovakia. Which is pretty much where our government has us headed now! Please tell them to stop before they help us some more!