Slavery? Or A Bet Gone Bad?

Slavery? Or A Bet Gone Bad?
Where have I heard this whine before?
Moscow (AFP) – When Olga Savelyeva took out a $226,000 mortgage to buy a small apartment on the outskirts of Moscow in 2008, she could never have imagined that the ruble would lose more than half its value in a few short years.
But Savelyeva’s $2,090 monthly instalments have skyrocketed in ruble terms due to the Russian currency’s dive against the dollar. The resulting jump in monthly payments from 49,000 to 115,000 rubles now devours most of her family’s income.
Oh well.
Remember that people in Hungary did this as well — and their banks were forced to convert their foreign-currency issues mortgages to forints in order to bail them out.
Why should these people get bailed out when they got a lower interest rate — the entire point of doing this in the first place — in exchange for the risk that something would go wrong with the currency exchange rate?
It’s not like Russia isn’t known for beating its chest in the international arena, is it? Why no, it’s not!
Should these sorts of loans be banned? Maybe, but they weren’t — and the people who took them out not only knew the risks they did it to obtain a tangible benefit for which there is always a price.
Well, now the price is upon them.
Stupid actions are only deterred by consequences.

This post was published at Market-Ticker on Dec 26, 2014.