I’ve heard stories of people speculating in the housing market.

You know, not everybody’s who’s got caught up in this mortgage crisis is poor, and not everybody was lent money that had no business being lent money. A lot of these people were speculators. They were buying houses and flipping them, never living in them, just buying them and flipping them. When the crisis hit.

They got caught in the flip. Several of them, I can’t give you an exact number, but there were speculators in the market who purposely, consciously, decided not to pay their mortgages when this happened, betting on the fact that they would be bailed out, because they knew that a lot of people got caught up in these adjustable rate mortgages.

They had no business being lent money in the first place, had no business borrowing it, but they were because government policy, and they just thought, “Okay, if we hang around here, if we lurk and we don’t pay, and the threat of foreclosure comes up, we think we’ll get bailed out eventually.” That was some of the thinking on the part of the speculators.

Now, if that kind of thing among wealthy risk takers begins to take hold, if they think they’re going to get bailed out, then they’re going to be less conscious of any risk and there’s going to be less responsibility in the risk that they take, and this is going to have sort of a domino effect if this keeps going.