Perhaps history will tell the real story.
Thanks for your comments. I'm not sure how to measure the price of the mortgage swindle. If you know of something estimating it, I'd like to read it.
There is no way to truly measure it.
You have the direct payments to Freddie/Fannie. You have the indirect bank bailouts from TARP to make banks solvent after they took a bath on the toxic mortgage securities. It was not just our banks either since we bailed out others who were at risk of collapse due to their purchase of these highly rated securities.
I would argue that you could count a significant amount of all the damage across the economy as well as much of the government stimulus (graft at it’s worst) that followed. The precedent of “too big to fail” is extremely dangerous and the entire response to the housing collapse provided a framework to increase the scope of government control throughout the economy. I also believe it pushed us closer to a world bank/currency. It is obvious that central banks have now positioned themselves as the “people who will save us” when needed despite the obvious culpability in creating the problem.
Did you see? http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2770179/posts and http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2731857/posts
Those threads warmed my angry heart!