One problem of sending one's kids to a private school in CA is that a lot of the folks in your adult social group will be part of the high-risk financial world. (Full disclosure: my wife works for Capital Group, a much lower risk mutual fund company.)
Twice I have become very friendly with former employees of Goldman Sachs with whom I have much in common, like outdoor activiites including golf, only to largely lose those friendships because of my objection to the GS role in the subprime crisis. Both people deny GS had anything to do it. And the male friend fairly recently said that it was caused by the "guvment."
Well, here's Paul Krugman's piece today about the new movie that he likes and says is accurate, "The Big Short":
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/18/opinion/the-big-short-housing-bubbles-and-retold-lies.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region®ion=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region
Krugman references this piece by Mike Konczal:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/02/13/no-marco-rubio-government-did-not-cause-the-housing-crisis/
They completely debunk the blame the government for the crisis line of attack: basically, Fannie and Freddie bought very few high-risk sub-prime loans, the private label companies did this.
The article also debunks the idea that the government's attempt to reverse discrimination in home lending contributed to the creation of poorly underwritten home loans, which also turns out not to be true. Most of theses loans did not possess the garbage qualities of true sub-prime, such as no docs, ballon payments, sudden interest rate jumps, etc.
So don't believe your bank- or shadow-banking friends or folks like Marco Rubio when they try to blame the 2008 financial crisis on the government.
