collab assignment 2

FAIR GAME
Borrowers and Bankers: A Great Divide
By Gretchen Morgenson
Published: July 20, 2008

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/business/economy/20gret.html?em&ex=1216699200&en=3d928a3185db7165&ei=5087%0A
Outside reading question 1

Thesis
THE credit crisis has exposed and worsened a dangerous and deepening divide in this country between a vast number of average borrowers and a fairly elite slice of corporations, banks and executives enriched by the mortgage mania.
Support
Borrowers who are in trouble on their mortgages have seen their government move slowly — or not all — to help them.
Borrowers should shoulder the consequences of signing loan documents they didn’t understand, but with punishing terms that quickly made the loans unaffordable
In especially dire circumstances, leaders have no choice but to rescue companies.
Counterargument
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, however, present an exponentially larger problem. They are unquestionably too big to fail. With $5.2 trillion in mortgages either on their books or guaranteed by them, their bailout was completely predictable.
“The banks are too big to fail and the man in the street is too small to bail,” said John C. Bogle, the founder of the Vanguard Group, the mutual funds giant, who is a philosopher of finance.
Concessions
“I predicted last summer that this would be my 10th bear market,” he said. “But this one is different. The others were more marketlike, reflecting problems in the market, not problems in the society and the economy as this one does. As a result, we’re in for a much more troublesome era than after the other big bear markets.”
Question 2
The strategies employed by the writer seemed less argumentative because the issue she brings up Is a very current topic. It is very real to the whole public and we can all relate. The writer does support her idea. She brings up actions that the government has done to “deepen the divide” between big business and Americans. The audience for this argument was the average American. The citizen that stood outside those banks that recently failed and wondered if they would ever retrieve their money. I think the audience became the argument in a way. In that way the things said reflected what had happened to the people in this economic crisis.