>None of them appeared to have any qualms about inviting, pressuring or luring me into a precarious situation.<

I agree with you that there are innocents in this category as well, and that predatory lending practices should be fought with flamethrower intensity, because they can damage the hopes of small folks for decades of setback. However, I also don't think we should be a nation of whiners to the extent we can't accept the blame that lies with Main Street denizens. Neither of us knows the relative balance in the separate categories. But as Peace says, $430,000 for a couple of rooms and a place to crap (for zero down!!) was unsustainable and obvious. It was only a few years ago that the idea of buying a house you could ever pay for was an idea that went the way of the Dodo.

I still am mystified about Greenspan's quote from a few years back that you can't see a bubble when it is forming. We could see it as clear as day.
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Frank Ahrens, Washington Post Staff Writer - Thursday, September 25, 2008

"The director of the Congressional Budget Office said yesterday that the proposed Wall Street bailout could actually worsen the current financial crisis.

During testimony before the House Budget Committee, Peter R. Orszag -- Congress's top bookkeeper -- said the bailout could expose the way companies are stowing toxic assets on their books, leading to greater problems.

"Ironically, the intervention could even trigger additional failures of large institutions, because some institutions may be carrying troubled assets on their books at inflated values," Orszag said in his testimony. "Establishing clearer prices might reveal those institutions to be insolvent."