In an environment where cheating is more profitable than any other activity, those who do not cheat go bust or are bought out. Either way, they cease to exist as independent economic actors. Call it a variant of Gresham's Law.

Individual homebuyers do not have enough market power to resist this mechanism, even if they don't get caught up in the speculative frenzy. Large financial houses may have that power, and the sovereign certainly has, should it choose to exercise it. So "cheating" is the wrong sort of framing for this - it is a political failure, first on the part of a deregulation-obsessed sovereign, then on part of quasi-sovereign banking houses.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.