{"id":82358,"date":"2015-12-16T07:44:16","date_gmt":"2015-12-16T15:44:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=82358"},"modified":"2015-12-16T07:44:16","modified_gmt":"2015-12-16T15:44:16","slug":"the-big-short-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=82358","title":{"rendered":"The Big Short"},"content":{"rendered":"

Steve Sailer writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Thus, the best interludes are when the smart guys take two road trips to the Sand States to meet us dumb Americans. In one, several stars go to a convention in Las Vegas to learn if the mortgage industry is stocked by geniuses who have figured out some new kind of math. In case you are wondering: It\u2019s not. (The Big Short<\/em> could have used more scenes of overconfident sales dudes. Indeed, the film would be better if there were a big role perfect for that living embodiment of Bush-era cluelessness, Will Ferrell<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

And, in a sequence reminiscent of my 2008 short story \u201cUnreal Estate<\/a>,\u201d Carell\u2019s boys visit an exurban housing development outside Miami to see if the Housing Bubble is as dubious in plasterboard as it seems on paper. A brand-new McMansion turns out to be home to a tattooed mixed-race renter. The implication is presumably that no greater fool will come along to pay $600,000 to live next to a tow-truck driver, but McKay, an irate but timid Bernie Sanders fan, wimps out at making this clear. (Lewis, a prot\u00e9g\u00e9 of Tom Wolfe<\/a>, appears to be a closeted conservative, but I doubt if McKay has noticed.)<\/p>\n

In reality, the essential cause of the Housing Bubble in what Lewis dubbed the Sand States<\/a>\u2014Florida, California, Arizona, and Nevada\u2014was that the quantity of population was climbing fast enough due to Third World immigration to seemingly rationalize the higher prices, but the quality of the increasingly diverse population was declining. But under the rules of political correctness, nobody was allowed to articulate this in public. Instead, George W. Bush lectured his federal regulators that the real<\/em> problems with the mortgage market were instead that racist rules about down payments and income documentation<\/a> were redlining minorities out of their American Dreams. <\/p>\n

Lewis\u2019 2008 article \u201cThe End<\/a>,\u201d the basis for his 2010 book, explains:<\/p>\n

\n

In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $720,000\u2026. Eisman [Carell] knew some of these people. One day, his housekeeper, a South American woman, told him that she was planning to buy a townhouse in Queens. \u201cThe price was absurd, and they were giving her a low-down-payment option-ARM,\u201d says Eisman, who talked her into taking out a conventional fixed-rate mortgage. Next, the baby nurse he\u2019d hired back in 1997 to take care of his newborn twin daughters phoned him. \u201cShe was this lovely woman from Jamaica,\u201d he says. \u201cOne day she calls me and says she and her sister own five townhouses in Queens.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But you won\u2019t see any of that in McKay\u2019s movie version.<\/p>\n

Therefore, after all these years, McKay remains unsure whether the mortgage meltdown was due to fraud or stupidity. But Occam\u2019s razor suggests that long-term ignorance and deceit is caused by taboo<\/em>: Our most sacred value today is diversity, so that was the one cause we weren\u2019t allowed to question.<\/p>\n

And we still aren\u2019t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Steve Sailer writes: Thus, the best interludes are when the smart guys take two road trips to the Sand States to meet us dumb Americans. In one, several stars go to a convention in Las Vegas to learn if the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3647],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-82358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mortgages"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=82358"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82358\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":82359,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82358\/revisions\/82359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=82358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=82358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=82358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}