Don't forget where loan crisis started

I recently saw the movie "The Big Short," a very well written, well-acted and informative movie. My only issue is it could have used a few extra minutes at the beginning.

It started in the early 2000s when the Wall Street types were figuring out how to bundle a large inventory of bad mortgages into something they could sell. There is little doubt that what was done at some of the big investment houses on Wall Street was underhanded and fraudulent and that they certainly deserved some of the blame for the collapse that cost all of us a lot of money, but it wasn't the entire story.

The movie could have gone back to the '90s and introduced players with names like Bill Clinton, Janet Reno and especially Chris Dodd and Barney Frank and explained why and how we ended up with thousands and thousands of bad mortgages and foreclosures.

Without this back story we are to assume that all these banks and lending organizations got together and decided it would be a great idea to loan huge sums of money to people with no ability to pay them back - a very bad business idea that could only have come from one place, Washington, D.C.

I bring this up now because I just heard the idea of subprime mortgages with very little down is being floated again by the current administration. I think the natural reaction to this has to be: Why, didn't they learn?

So we wonder why someone like Donald Trump can be doing so well. Yep, having Trump as president would be crazy. At some point we have to ask compared to what.

Marc Thomsen

Elk Grove Village