<p>I will post practical ideas here and moral speculations elsewhere.</p>
<p>We are going to be in a situation in which half a trillion to 2 trillion dollars of value is going to vanish. It is possible that it will be even more if we get into a bad enough downward spiral.</p>
<p>There is a point at which the walking away will cause so much damage that the financial system will crash. Nobody knows what straw will break the camel's back.</p>
<p>There is no question that the banks brokers agents and some borrowers engaged in evil practices; those practices may or may not appear to harm the individuals in question, but they certainly affect the society at large. Therefore, to minimize these evils, it is a good thing that they be punished. You can substitute more politically correct words here. But the ex-catholic here feels that there is a place for words like evil and punishment.</p>
<p>Normally, the punishment here is foreclosure and bad credit, meaning you can't buy stuff that you'd like. Seems appropriate to me. Also brokers and agents involved should lose licenses, banks should go out of business, or pull in horns, and certainly people at the top and middle should lose jobs. And some of that has happened.</p>
<p>People have talked about bail outs and how that will hurt others. Well, the walk away mentality will hurt the rest of us too. Banks didn't factor in enough money to cover losses before. Boy, they're are busily factoring in all that stuff now--to the point where hardly anybody qualifies for a loan. The more walks, the harder it will be for all the diligently saving renters on this blog to get a loan, when the sellers finally capitulate and reduce prices to what blogsters are willing to pay.</p>
<p>Also, the more walkers, the higher the likelihood the system will crash. This is good for nobody. This said, if you bought in good faith in Cape Coral, and there's no work there, and the house is 60 grand underwater (30%), and you've lost your job, and you don't want your wife and baby out on the street. . . you walk.</p>
<p>Other posters, as someone else pointed out, seem to want moral justification for something they want to do but believe deep in their hearts is not right, and which they can afford financially, for quite a while.</p>
<p>At some point, which I don't think any of the posters has reached, this fades into con artistry.</p>
<p>I have known a few con artists in my time and have even represented them in non-con endeavors (being very very careful not to set sucked in). The cons were very successful in lying to themselves. But this came out in much worse health than average, and bad, but tension-relieving behaviors, like smoking many packs a day to playing too much bingo. Many con artists die young as a result. And feel bad, but refuse to recognize why they are feeling bad. Some assured me how honest they were using minor examples of honesty, while conducting their life as a whole in an obviously dishonest manner. And I think they had convinced themselves that I didn't see through them. I have been known to sit people down and tell them they are living in a very wrong manner and doing my mommy thing. But when someone is a hopeless con I either politely tell them to go away, or can just represent them in honest stuff, without contamination, I do so.</p>
<p>So yes, I do see karma happen. But you have to be up close and personal and observant over a reasonably long time to see this gradual working out. This is why people read and write novels. On the surface, people seem to be enjoying ill gotten gains. But in the cases I have observed, they often really weren't enjoying them, it only seemed that way.</p>
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