Mortgage Failures are a Symptom, not the Disease.

In numerous places now, most notably the president's speech on behalf of his bank bailout, mortgage failures are being used as the scapegoat for a declining economy.

This is, the way I see it, at very incorrect and dangerous assumption. Mortgage failures are an indicator that something is not well in the system. The resulting impacts of the failures point to the heart of the issue.

Institutions that have been funding the debt have levered themselves to the point that they could not even withstand modest losses. And further more, not unlike some addicts, some of the financial institutions on Wall Street could not sustain any longer if they could not produce more and more mortgages.

Wall Street's financial institutions have over leveraged themselves. This country has over leveraged itself. Investment needs to be made into non-financial productive work.

These mortgage failures are indicators, margin calls. And instead of settling our debts, we're creating a $700 billion dollar bailout that threatens to continue the problem.

UPDATE: Finally here's an article on just this subject from the Financial Times via Naket Captialsim.