Talk:Subprime crisis background information

Holding pending citation
Subprime loans are graded A-, B, C, and D paper. Alt-A loans are typically used to categorize borrowers with high credit and hard to verify income such as the self-employed or real estate investors. A- describes borrowers who have credit slightly below the A threshold or slightly high debt-to-ratio factors with B, C and D categorizing progressively higher risk.

Use of language in this page is not useful to the layman
This page has been written by people well versed in finance, obviously, but who haven't sufficiently defined their terms that a layman can easily understand what is being said as they read the page. Finance is not an area that contains concepts much tougher than basic arithmetic, but it can easily be made to appear as impervious to the layman as a really nastily written bit of law. I should point out that I'm a professor of physics, so I think I should be able to read an article like this straight through, and this one just defeated me. An encyclopedia is simply not useful if only experts can make sense of it right away. It must be useful to a layman. One should not have to pore over the page, constantly clicking away and consulting dictionaries in order to form the concepts in one's mind. Please, contributors. If what you have to say is clear to you, make it clear to everyone else, or you needn't have bothered. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.147.195.133 (talk) 08:27, 30 September 2008 (UTC)


 * I sympathize with you. I had to learn this the hard way...long study.  I suggest you read the President's explanation on whitehouse.gov.  Seriously, I don't understand relativity no matter how many times somebody explains it and the new financial instruments and risk management structures aren't much simpler.  To quote a writer's guide in dealing with science fiction gadgets:  "Tell them what it does and not how it works."  I know what a photon torpedo does; that's good enough! So, I'll try it this way:  Homeowners, banks and investors made bets on house prices going up.  When house prices tanked, they lost huge money. Banks stopped lending to each other because they didn't know how bad the each other's finances were.  The causes are pervasive; everybody is at fault.  And I mean everybody...from the borrowers who got in over their heads, to the lenders who helped them get there, to the regulators who were asleep at the switch, etc.  I hope that helps.  The problem is, you have to understand the instruments to understand how the fix will work.  Think of the mortgage securities the government is going to purchase as toxic waste swallowed by the banks. Further, try this for a start.Blackburn Subprime Crisis

A plain language view
The following is excerpted (with some modifications) from President Bush's Address to the Nation on September 24, 2008. I can't begin to explain how alarmed I am to see the primary source of the explanation of this problem be the discredited politician who was in charge of the country when it happened. --Tysto (talk) 05:47, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

Rest assured, he didn't figure it out himself. Lots of smart folks that work for him put that summary together. It was a prepared address and summarizes the conventional wisdom pretty well. We'll see in five years once all the lawsuits are over if he was right or not. At the core of most big problems are conflicts of interest and lousy incentive structures. This goes all the way back to allowing institutions (like Fannie and Freddie and big Wall St. firms) to make campaign contributions, move their folks into and out of the SEC, and not have term limits on our Congress.Farcaster (talk) 07:12, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

POV tag on Bush's speech
Since when does one of the culprits of the subprime crisis get to define the crisis for all of us. Scribner (talk) 05:24, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

Article structure
This seems an odd article for wikipedia as it does not cover a subject itself. The subject is already covered in Subprime mortgage crisis and the timeline section could easily be added to the more appropriate Subprime crisis impact timeline article. It seems this article contains information that could be condensed into the the relevant articles instead where it would be more accessible to readers. Sargdub (talk) 00:13, 25 April 2013 (UTC)

removing POV tag with no active discussion per Template:POV
I've removed an old neutrality tag from this page that appears to have no active discussion per the instructions at Template:POV:
 * This template is not meant to be a permanent resident on any article. Remove this template whenever:
 * There is consensus on the talkpage or the NPOV Noticeboard that the issue has been resolved
 * It is not clear what the neutrality issue is, and no satisfactory explanation has been given
 * In the absence of any discussion, or if the discussion has become dormant.

Since there's no evidence of ongoing discussion, I'm removing the tag for now. If discussion is continuing and I've failed to see it, however, please feel free to restore the template and continue to address the issues. Thanks to everybody working on this one! -- Khazar2 (talk) 04:52, 27 June 2013 (UTC)