-income verification is going to stop a large percentage of small business owners from obtaining mortgages (which in turn could cause a significant drop in small business investment as business loans are often collateralized with property).

-whereas prepayment penalties were relatively rare on mortgages previously, i'm sure they will become much more common, along with an increase in other fees.

-say goodbye to prime minus lending...that ship was being buoyed by high returns from subprime borrowers. even ppl with exemplar credit can expect to pay more now.

i work in commercial lending & if there's one thing i've learned, it's that gov't regulation doesn't do anything to stop abusive practices. it just increases time & expenses & gives companies a justifiable method of increasing product costs.

You should probably be a little more specific in your objection. Barring a few loonies on the outer fringes of libertarianism, everyone accepts some degree of government intervention to maintain social order.

Characterizing anything over your personal line as 'regulat[ing] every facet of our lives' is hyperbolic and just plain silly. Apart from your emotional reaction, what are your criteria for determining what merits government regulation and what doesn't?

Regardless of how punitive you'd like to be about what you perceive as a lack of 'personal responsibility,' it's not just the in-over-their-heads borrowers who are in trouble right now. We all live in the same economy. When my neighbor's house is foreclosed, it affects me. When a lot of my neigbors' houses are foreclosed on, it affects me pretty dramatically. Should we just sit back and let our economy tank, in the vain hope that people will learn some kind of lesson or something?

The Government's job IS NOT to regulate every facet of our lives and protect us from ourselves. That line of thinking is how we get into these sorts of messes. People think that the government should always step in and clean up their mistakes. I see nowhere in the constitution that says the government is supposed to protect us from ourselves.

Because that's how things got flarged up in the first place?

Personal responsibility is a nice phrase, but it only works with at least a somewhat level playing field in place. What we've got now is more like a system for throwing perfectly reasonable, hard-working, honest Americans to the lions in order to make some tricky banksters a profit. That's the sort of situation the government is SUPPOSED to step in and regulate.

All we really need is for the government to tell them we're not going to bail out your sorry asses again (and mean it).

As long as they believe that they've got Uncle Sam to take them fall for them why should they be prudent?

It's a crazy world when you need the government to tell businesses to follow common-sense guidelines.

This sort of thing is exactly why business needs to be regulated: protect businesses from their own stupidity... Idiots and their short-term focus.