What’s good for Wall Street and huge corporations isn’t good enough for us plebes. From the HuffPo:
Former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson once said: “And let me emphasize, any homeowner who can afford his mortgage payment but chooses to walk away from an underwater property is simply a speculator – and one who is not honoring his obligations.”
The head of the Mortgage Bankers Association, John Courson, played up the moral argument against walking away, telling the Wall Street Journal last month: “What about the message they will send to their family and their kids and their friends?
But corporations and businesses don’t play by those rules. Like CalPERS’s McKinley said, “You come to a point where you write it off or stay in the game. If you want to stay in you got to put in more capital. We reached our limit on that. It was not a prudent thing to put more money into it.
“You get to a point where you can’t keep throwing good money after bad,” he said. “These are illiquid investments. You gotta fish or cut bait.”
As for homeowners walking away en masse — perhaps lenders’ biggest housing-related fear — McKinley added: “We’re hopeful that won’t happen.”
I just love how that works.
In any case, Wednesday is going to be interesting. What’s sad is that at this point, I’m so jaded that I’m pretty sure that whatever comes out of Steve Jobs’ mouth is going to be far more important and world-changing than what comes out of Obama’s mouth.