alcohol is way less productive and leads to more problems than weed ever has.

people who talk shit about teh pots have no business saying said shit unless they've actually puffed one themselves.

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The people being laid off is really just complete BS. The entire crisis happened because the economy was riding on bubble economics. The problem is that banking is intrinsically tied to housing. When the housing market collapsed (as many predicted since 2003 when the bubble began massively expanding despite the lack of population boom), it took the banks with it.

People are whining and crying about the bankers. "How dare they do this!" That's all just smoke and mirrors. The real assholes were the housing marketers and Wall Street.

You had developers cranking out cheaply made houses in hopes of reaping massive profits. You had house-flipping running rampant (which TLC and Home & Garden TV were pimping en masse). All of these people were massively inflating the value of houses and flooding the market. There simply was not enough of population boom or population influx with enough wealth to meet the supply.

This isn't to say that banks didn't carry some of the burden. According to the National Banking Association, in 2004 23% of all loans were for flipping houses. The banks saw the opportunity and the need to supply loan options for those flipping houses. So they went to the FDIC with all sorts of insane loan packages, such as being able to not pay interest on your loan and tack it on to your overall debt. A crazy idea for a home owner, but made sense if you planned to sell it within a few weeks or a month. The FDIC rubber-stamped the loan packages and off the banks went.

Then Wall Street saw an opportunity to skim some money off the top of this booming business. They bought these loans from banks and packaged them into massive security bundles. They then sold these to foreign investors with the original intent being that, as these houses got paid off, the investors would be able to reap marginal benefits. These marginal benefits, a few thousand off each loan, would add up to significant wealth boons when packaged with bunches of these loans. Essentially making potential profit margins in the tune of millions of dollars. If these loans were mostly comprised of house flipping loans, which most were, then the loan payments (and interest from which the investor would profit) would be paid off in lump sums at a fairly high rate, instead of a slow trickle rate (which normal home-buyer loans would pay off as).

So, when the housing bubble collapsed, as all bubbles eventually do, it took down many of the uber-wealthy that had invested in these, many of the banks, and many people who got caught up in the house flipping "get rich quick" craze. It is estimated that 30%-40% of the defaulted loans were taken out for house flipping. These people were hoping that they could sell these houses quickly and get back their investment plus some extra. Many of these people didn't have the backup capital needed to have such an investment fail. Essentially, they were gambling with money they didn't have. When the banks suddenly began losing 25% or more of their money; very, very large sums of their money, they had to raise interest rates on their adjustable rate loans, which put heavy strains on the poorer who had bought into these low-rate loans.

I realize this all sounds horrendously complex, but it's basically trickle-down bankruptcy. The big guys lost a bunch of money because the bank loans weren't being paid, the banks lost a lot of money and tried to recoup it from other places (mainly adjustable rate loans), and those people were horribly strained and couldn't pay up. It wasn't poor people that fucked things up, it was house flipping. It wasn't the bankers that caused this, they were just the enablers.

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