Subprime will NEVER go away. You see, I don’t look at subprime solely as mortgages made to borrowers that should never have qualified for a home loan under any terms…predatory or not. To me, subprime is much bigger than all that. It’s about what our country has become. It’s about citizens feeling they are entitled to the American dream… not the pursuit of the dream… not about working for the dream …but just skip all that and give me the damn dream. It’s about the belief that personal accountability is not so important anymore and that it’s just too much to expect that a borrower would insist on understanding the terms of the biggest contract that most of them will ever sign. It’s about a high percentage of those borrowers that did in fact know they didn’t qualify for the loan, couldn’t pay for the post-teaser payments and who were willing to lie about their incomes and financial statement to get the mortgage anyway. It’s about liberal and conservative politicians that pressed for more access to credit for the disadvantaged members of society. It’s about politicians that failed to regulate to prevent the creation of a problem that are now trying to regulate the creation of a solution. To me, subprime is about the exploitation of cheap credit and liquidity provided by the Greenspan Fed.  Much like the effort to save the credit markets and pump up liquidity by the current Fed.  It’s about business people that are willing to sacrifice integrity and common sense to make a buck. Yes, some of the lenders were predators … you see, predators have been around throughout the history of capitalism even before William Shakespeare wrote of Shylock over 400 years ago. Subprime isn’t just about writing sneaky loans, it’s about securitization. It’s about complex financial engineering and derivatives. It’s about investment banks who packaged this stuff in fancy acronyms like “CDO” and floated it through conduits with equally-fancy acronyms like “SIV” so they could make a gazillion bucks. Subprime is about the institutional investors like pension funds and insurance companies that were impressed by the complexity of it all and who are on an insatiable pursuit of incremental yield. To me subprime will NEVER go away. It’s about who we are, what we’ve become. All of us… we are subprime. We are all representative of one aspect or another of this mess. If you are reading this post, you are one of the people I mentioned and so am I. Saying that subprime will go away implies that we will all go away. It suggests that our financial systems will somehow be cleansed and pure when the last trace of subprime has been removed from the myriad simple and complex places it now resides from money market funds to pension funds to money center banks and beyond. It’s just not possible. The things that created subprime mortgages are systemic and they will survive.