Flippers
I moved from New York to Pittsburgh in 2004 to start my fellowship in Transplant Surgery. While I was looking for an apartment to stay in, I received advice from friends and colleagues: "buy a house instead of renting. Instead of paying rent, you can pay EMIs on the house and when you move, you can sell the house for more than you bought it for. The price of property always goes up." Fortunately I did not heed the advice and we know what happened in 2007-2008. It has long been thought that the reason for the financial crisis was banks giving loans to people who could not afford the properties they were buying with the loans. Bank employees received incentives according to the number of loans they could negotiate. It was in their interest to negotiate loans for more and more people and when they ran out of people with good credit histories who could afford to pay back the loans, they turned to people with poor credit histories who could not. Incomes were falsely stated and ...