Romney Thinks Like a Predatory Investor Not Like a President

When the home prices were in free fall and banks were foreclosing on millions of homes, Mitt Romney famously said that instead of the government intervening to help homeowners, home prices should be allowed to drop and eventually investors will come into the housing market, buy up the properties and rebuild the market value of the homes.

Instead of looking this terrible turn in the housing market caused more by Wall Street than homeowners as a problem for millions of families who did nothing wrong, he looked at it as a wonderful investment opportunity for the rich investors who could come in and buy up properties for fire sale prices and then make money renting these investment properties to people kicked out of their homes and when the housing market rebound, they could sell the properties and make a great profit.

While I saw Romney say this on TV, I remember that he was smiling.  I didn’t know why he was smiling at such a terrible situation until I realized that to Romney, this wasn’t a terrible situation, it’s the kind of moneymaking opportunity he would look for and one of the ways he made is hundreds of millions of personal wealth.

Romney was right that investors would eventually come in and buy properties which would prop up and help to rebuild home prices, but he seemed to be almost oblivious to the human cost of this investment opportunity.

Wall Street caused much of the housing bubble, its bursting, the great recession and the loss of millions and millions of jobs. This caused millions of homeowners who did nothing wrong other than do what every investment advisor told them to do which was buy a home.  While some may have bought more of a home they could afford at the time, and some may have lied about their incomes, for the most part, those in trouble were in trouble because of things beyond their control and caused by the “investor class”.

I want a President who understands the economics of what Romney said, but not one who would see Romney’s idea as an acceptable, fair or reasonable solution to this type of problem.  There were other, better and fairer options available and just because they required government intervention does not make those solutions bad.  Kicking the down on their luck so the richest of the rich can get richer is not good for America or Americans, including the richest of the rich.