re: #472 freetoken

I do not consider taking risk to be “gambling”. All of life includes risks and they are unavoidable.

Yes, but not all risks in life are of a financial nature.

By “gambling” I mean specifically the same mindset as experienced in a casino in Vegas. It is an expectation of unrealistic events.

That sounds like you are blaming the investors more than the bankers who initially created the subprime mortgage vehicles. But the latter did indeed expect shit to go bust. That’s what they speculated on. They were shorting their customers based on knowledge they intentionally withheld from them for that very purpose.

Demand for real estate cannot grow faster than the population (in long term averages.) Buildings are constructed and land use changed in response to the needs of humans and the US is already a well built out, highly developed nation.

I don’t think the problem was accurately assessing risk. That’s always going to be a problem, more or less. The actual problem was that it was profitable to mislead, lie, and deceive about those risks. The legal situation contributed (and still does) to that a lot.