I know when I got my mortgage (admittedly a nice simple fixed rate job at what is now a very low interest rate) I was handed 22 pages of disclosure information, plus a form that I had to sign indicating that I head received all of that information. Yeah, it is a bit daunting, and lots of the legalese is probably hard for some people to understand, but by the same token the consequences of financial loss are not the same as those of bodily harm, so it is not clear that the same level of consumer protection should apply.

After all, if you lose bodily function as a result of a defective product, you are in a situation where a lot of potential has been taken away from you. If you lose some money that sure does suck, but either you had earned that money in the first place, and therefore can earn some again, or you were purely speculating with money that you did not have. While I agree that we need to make sure that the disclosures are comprehensible, we do also need to insist on some degree of personal responsibility for those people who borrow more than they can afford. I was always told that if someone offered me a deal that seemed too good to be true, it probably was. Many people do not seem to have heeded this lesson.

I for one do not believe that the challenges that we are facing now had a lot to do with consumer protection, at least in teh narrow sense you are describing it.

There is no question that a lot of people were sold mortgages they could not afford. While some people were clearly just plain lied to, that is criminal no matter when it happens or whether you are lied to about a mortgage or a used car. Systemically, what seems to have failed is the banks oversight of the riskiness of loans (again, lots of reasons for this, mostly having to do with unregulated activities that appeared to lay off risk but in fact did not do so). While we can and should go after those salespeople who lied to their customers about the financial products they were sold, it is rather hypocritical to blame a person who is paid to sell things for selling the things they were supposed to sell.

In the same way that we need to allow the bankers who screwed up the lending requirements to fail, we also need to allow the people who borrowed too much to fail as well. Obviously, the hard part is figuring out the difference between who was defrauded, who was overtaken by circumstances, and who was buying something they could not afford. IMHO there is no way consumer protection (especially with the way tort stuff works here in the US) can be the vehicle for this .

If you put the pet in the microwave anyway, despite the warning, it seems to me you can hardly blame the microwave manufacturer for that.

One 80-year old testified about how he signed up for a product with a lot more risk, based on the advice of his banker with whom he a had a business, and personal, relationship for over 50 years.

A lot of trust has been violated in the past year, and it will take a long time to rebuild it.