I’ll often ask “what are the problems with doing X?”.
It doesn’t imply that there should be a solution but you still want to learn why it might not work. Often you can continue the conversation enough to either exclude it or think some more about the problems that are described.
Anyone who is capable of getting a second mortgage will consider holding it and renting it out if they can. The yield is very likely to be higher than the payments these days.
Sure, but they could have sold off a lot of their long term assets earlier instead. To me, the problem was not an outright lack of hedges, rather it was continuing to take too much risk all of the way down. Hedges only make sense to me if they were a cheaper way to achieve the same thing as selling the assets.