Mary in Atlanta, GA:

Richard Friedman in Wilmette, IL

"The first thing taught on the first day of contracts in law school is to break a contract when it is more advantageous to do so. That was in 1979 by the way. So the attitude discussed in the article is nothing new, just something being applied in the consumer arena that has long been the way of the world in commercial transactions. Sorry to say, morality is for suckers."

T Boyer in Doylestown, PA

"This story's not written with a lot of authority about mortgage finance.

It depends on state law, but in most places the lienholder can go after the personal wealth of the person who walked away from the mortgage. If you owe $2 million on a house now worth $1 million, in many states you're legally on the hook and the bank could go after your other assets. In fact, getting that judgment for the $1 million you owe is fairly straightforward as long as the mortgage paperwork is in order (and with these large properties it probably is).

So my bet would be that the vast majority of these wealthy folks were just barely affording the houses in the first place and don't have a lot of other assets. If the bank gets the $1 million judgment, they'll just file for bankruptcy and discharge it, so it may not be worth suing."

So what's going on here? Did the article's author not do his homework? Or is this another piece of the narrative being sold to we Americans that the government and our taxes are being used to bail out our neighbors when in reality it's only a tiny percentage of homeowners that receive taxpayer funded bailouts (unless you're Goldman Sachs, etc).

This is the NYT, supposedly a "liberally biased" media organization.

I don't know about you but to me this is continues to be outrageous. And I'm not long term optimistic like Cenk. I don't know if we can beat it.