great economy, blah blah...

Stock market is up today.  

Are you suggesting a faltering economy is the primary cause of increased mortgage defaults?  Or the other way around?  Or both?  Or neither?

While everything economic depends on everything else I submit that higher mortgage default numbers are increasingly inevitable these days.  You take the knuckleheads pimping unsafe products, add the knuckleheads buying them and it's a recipe for disaster.  In my view there's not much difference between a drunken weekend in Vegas with your 401K money and an interest-only (or less) mortgage betting on the come that your house will be worth 40% more in five years.  A few years ago I didn't think it could get crazier than 125s but those seem relatively sane at this point.  I think many of the products/practices currently in play should be outlawed.  That's not a very 'small government' attitude, I know, but it seems we have to protect the idiots from themselves.  Weed out the crap products and the people who make a living off them.  Those folks will land on their feet selling cellular phones and vinyl siding so it won't be an unemployment increase at all. 

'Tis part of the economic woes of this country certainly but I don't think it's because of decreased buying power.  More like a decrease in logical thinking. 

I guess I don't see it that way.  

{edit} comment directed more at the mortgage "crisis" situation. Uisce pretty much summed up my feelings.

"Of course the game is rigged. Don't let that stop you - if you don't play, you can't win." - Robert Heinlein

And it's a lot more than your 'haves' who are playing the game.

I'm not sure if I'm a have or a have-not but I love it when my measly retirement accounts increase in value.  I guess I'm probably not a have as my basement is unfinished.  I'm probably not a have-not as I do have a basement to be unfinished.  I'm probably somewhere in the middle with the other 200 million+ Americans vested in retirement plans, mutual funds and the market in general.