mortgage bro's (slight return)
Feb. 20th, 2009 01:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
substituteFinally pushed over the limit by this asshole (youtube video):
The talk radio mouths and the right-wing press have locked on to their version of the financial crash, and why foreclosed homeowners should not receive help.
The problem, they say, is that "political pressure" forced lenders to make bad loans to those who didn'tdeserve them qualify. Many of these people were clearly n... ni... ne... NE'ER-DO-WELLS. Everyone knows those people can't keep a mortage. If the government had let these experienced bankers use their own judgment, none of this would have happened. So we definitely don't want to spend money—OUR money—helping these people out any more!
The subprime and alt-A mortgages were largely written by people I saw daily over the last decade, our famous local "Mortgage Bros." These guys bought leads from cold-call telemarketers and sold refinancing to anything with a pulse, lying constantly about the risks. They upsold every potential loan, pushed the limit with interest-only ARM on subprime and alt-A garbage loans. They had no reason to care if the bank ever got the money or if their customers kept their houses. They used the system as it was presented.
The idea that these were stolid, cautious men in pinstriped suits, sworn to the fiduciary duties of their banks, who were somehow forced by dashiki'd oppressors in the Federal bureaucracy into giving money away to the NE'ER-DO-WELLS would be funny were it not such a repulsive lie.
Make no mistake. The financial industry made loans that could not be paid, knowing they were bad loans. They pushed those loans hard on their customers. And they knowingly mislead their customers into taking on impossible obligations. Thousands of these brokers committed criminal fraud.
If this was an attempt to redistribute wealth to the NE'ER-DO-WELLS, it backfired. The result was a lot of Harleys and speedboats and cocaine and blowjobs provided to the grinning, empty-souled asshole Fonzies of Orange County. If you don't want their customers to be saved from eviction, let's use the money to build them a very unpleasant jail.
The talk radio mouths and the right-wing press have locked on to their version of the financial crash, and why foreclosed homeowners should not receive help.
The problem, they say, is that "political pressure" forced lenders to make bad loans to those who didn't
The subprime and alt-A mortgages were largely written by people I saw daily over the last decade, our famous local "Mortgage Bros." These guys bought leads from cold-call telemarketers and sold refinancing to anything with a pulse, lying constantly about the risks. They upsold every potential loan, pushed the limit with interest-only ARM on subprime and alt-A garbage loans. They had no reason to care if the bank ever got the money or if their customers kept their houses. They used the system as it was presented.
The idea that these were stolid, cautious men in pinstriped suits, sworn to the fiduciary duties of their banks, who were somehow forced by dashiki'd oppressors in the Federal bureaucracy into giving money away to the NE'ER-DO-WELLS would be funny were it not such a repulsive lie.
Make no mistake. The financial industry made loans that could not be paid, knowing they were bad loans. They pushed those loans hard on their customers. And they knowingly mislead their customers into taking on impossible obligations. Thousands of these brokers committed criminal fraud.
If this was an attempt to redistribute wealth to the NE'ER-DO-WELLS, it backfired. The result was a lot of Harleys and speedboats and cocaine and blowjobs provided to the grinning, empty-souled asshole Fonzies of Orange County. If you don't want their customers to be saved from eviction, let's use the money to build them a very unpleasant jail.
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-20 09:57 pm (UTC)YEAH
Date: 2009-02-20 10:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-20 10:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-21 04:00 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-20 10:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-22 08:05 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-22 08:08 am (UTC)I agree that the last decade has not been kind to the whole idea of public civility or cooperative behavior.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-23 03:57 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-28 05:19 pm (UTC)After all, managers— especially managers in financial services businesses— who make bad choices really, really need to be held personally accountable for the consequences of their actions and learn for it.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-28 08:19 pm (UTC)Then you go off topic to cite torts and crimes as if they have anything to do with the discussion as to who is at fault for willingly entering into a contractural agreement where one party defaults. Defaulting has yet to be a crime, it is all part of the possible conclusions of a legal business transaction.
No one has yet said there was any fraud involved, none has been proven. The whole point is borroweres made bad decisions to over extend themselves by entering legal contracts with financiers. The economy when to shit and they got caught short in their obligations. The logical conclusion is the borrowers took a chance, which turned out to be a bad choice. So why should they be able to go back to the finance companies and cry for a do-over?! People NEED to TAKE responsibility for their own actions.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-01 01:44 am (UTC)He made perfectly clear and persuasive arguments, which you pretended were incomprehensible to you when the credentials you proudly flaunted here would never have been awarded to you if you were as ignorant as you postured. If I were to start lecturing you about matters you should already understand, then I expect you would treat me just the same as you did him.
He clearly knows you and doesn't want to hurt your feelings. I don't know you, and I'm fine with being a little coarse with the obviously disingenuous. Like you.
So, suck it up: you know perfectly well what I was getting at, and you're pretending otherwise because it allows you to continue with your absurd posturing about how nobody in your tribe should be held accountable for their rapacious irresponsibility as long as there are poor wogs somewhere you can finger instead. All your rhetoric about people needing to take responsibility for their actions goes right out the window when you're put in the position to start applying it universally and to yourself. That's when you discover that that kind of reasoning bites the rich a lot harder than it does the poor. You know it, and so does everyone else here. I'm sure
I'll apologize to
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-01 05:43 am (UTC)Making excuses for your resorting to name calling instead of an exchange of viewpoints is also sad, pathetic and small minded. If you're not prepared to be disagreed with, perhaps you shouldn't participate in a public forum until you are ready and mature enough.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-01 06:28 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-02 04:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-01 03:59 pm (UTC)There are too damned many people like you who think they are duty-bound to express their toxic glibertarianism where everyone has already heard it before— from their bosses, from their parents, from the myriad shouting heads on television and radio— and nobody needs to hear it from random authoritarian follower drones that wander in off the street to know it's bullshit.
At least the media propagandists are getting paid. You just seem to enjoy it for the sheer bloody-minded pleasure of the work.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-02 04:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-22 02:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-20 10:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-20 10:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-20 11:28 pm (UTC)Racket
Date: 2009-02-28 04:14 pm (UTC)But so are rare baseball cards. But at least with rare baseball
cards, you don't have all your eggs in one basket.
Also, a house is very illiquid and risky, and neither of
those are happy-sounding words, given the current US economy.
Also: Pogs.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-20 11:36 pm (UTC)he also told us that the conspiratorial democratic socialists knew their Everyone Gets His Own Football economic policies would damage the economy, but that they wanted that to happen so that they could, "socialize all traditionally strong money-making industries and re-distribute the wealth further."
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-21 02:31 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-23 08:31 am (UTC)well, okay
Date: 2009-02-21 12:19 am (UTC)Re: well, okay
Date: 2009-02-21 01:38 am (UTC)but blaming the borrowers for bad loans... such transparent and nauseating demagoguery! ecch!
Re: well, okay
Date: 2009-02-21 02:13 am (UTC)FUCKING POETRY.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-21 01:37 am (UTC)Make no mistake. The financial industry made loans that could not be paid, knowing they were bad loans. They pushed those loans hard on their customers. And they knowingly mislead their customers into taking on impossible obligations. Thousands of these brokers committed criminal fraud.
is not quite true. One of, or maybe THE, prominent causes of Our New Depression was that normal, greedy individuals were packaging financial instruments in entirely legal ways that ended up making it harder for the buyers to really understand the risk. It was, to borrow a metaphor, like playing hot potato with sealed box. What's inside? Nobody knows, but as long as you can pass it on, you're safe. When people started defaulting on bad loans, and all the leverage birds came home to roost, it became obvious that inside some of these boxes were piles of shit, or bombs, but by then it was too late. In many ways, it is a textbook case of why regulators should make transactions they don't understand illegal, and deregulate later, rather than Greenspan's idea of allowing everything that wasn't provably awful.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-21 03:59 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-21 07:16 am (UTC)Cuba! Motherfuckers are throwing Cuba! Just kill me now.
Cuba?
Date: 2009-02-28 04:31 pm (UTC)Re: Cuba?
Date: 2009-02-28 04:47 pm (UTC)Re: Cuba?
Date: 2009-02-28 04:51 pm (UTC)He means that people like Santelli are rudely drawing an equivalence between the timid and half-baked economic crisis response policies of the Obama administration and the socialist governing order of the Republic of Cuba.
Re: Cuba?
Date: 2009-02-28 11:31 pm (UTC)seethe
most loudly
at the Cuba parts of
Social Collapse Best Practices!
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-21 02:31 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-21 06:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-21 03:28 am (UTC)Stupid people need to finally take responsibility!!!
Date: 2009-02-22 07:35 am (UTC)It didn't have to be that way. When we bought our home, we bought with common sense toward our budgeting of payments. We declined to spend what the mortgage companies said we "qualified for" and bought a house that cost HALF of that! We improved our home a little every year as we could afford it and refinanced from a 30 to a 10 year mortgage. The long term result is that we will own our home in less then 5 years from now. We were not greedy, didn't care about a status address and bought in a quiet inner suburban city, where city goverment runs in the black and keeps property taxes low and services high (without corruption).
I have no sympathy for selfish greedy short-sighted people who didn't use any common sense. Who now want to blame everyone else but themselves for trapping themselves into an over valued house they CHOSE to buy and knew they couldn't afford if they couldn't keep flipping it. No one made them make bad stupid choices!
Oh yeah, I like the way the republicans (before W left office) gave their banker buddies billions of our money (with no strings attached, unlike the auto industry assistance)to pay themselves millions in salary(plus bonuses) and finance more bank mergers/buy-outs of each other. I don't see any of this money helping their customers or the economy!
Re: Stupid people need to finally take responsibility!!!
Date: 2009-02-22 07:39 am (UTC)Sure, when said idiots can't pay off their stuff, the inevitable happens. And they found a way for all of us to pay that disaster off, since they'd stolen all the money and the idiots didn't have any.
Pretending that this is somehow the fault of the idiots is ridiculous. No one has to lend money to someone who can't pay it back.
Re: Stupid people need to finally take responsibility!!!
Date: 2009-02-23 04:10 am (UTC)Based on this logic, no one is responsible for anything they do, obviously it was all the fault of someone else?!
Re: Stupid people need to finally take responsibility!!!
Date: 2009-02-23 04:16 am (UTC)Lending policy and the law do not assume that a borrower knows their own eligibility. If you ask for a loan and are turned down, you may well be very surprised. This does not make you some kind of immoral freeloader for applying for the loan. It means that the banker knows more about your risk than you do.
Assessing risk on behalf of the bank and its shareholders is their ENTIRE job. Giving out loans to every crackhead who wants money, knowing that it can't be repaid, and transferring the risk to others, is commercial fraud. What's so hard to understand here?
If you want to blame borrowers for this, go ahead, but you're assuming that lending bankers are incompetent and will lend money to anyone who asks, which is a really weird assumption.
Re: Stupid people need to finally take responsibility!!!
Date: 2009-02-27 01:55 am (UTC)SO the FACT is that either bankers are incompetent and made BILLIONS in bad loans knowing they would put themselves out of business, or THOUSANDS of people WILLINGLY entered contracts for houses they CANNOT afford.
When people ACT of their own FREE WILL they should be responsible for their actions. Not anyone else!
It is stupid ASSUMPTIONS that someone else is always to blame that now gives our goverment the notion to bail these people out and let them keep their house for which the rest of us responsible enough to live within our means will pay for it ALL.
Re: Stupid people need to finally take responsibility!!!
Date: 2009-02-27 02:03 am (UTC)Re: Stupid people need to finally take responsibility!!!
Date: 2009-02-28 05:22 am (UTC)It has all happened before and it will happen again. Last time it happened in the 70's and 80's, I was left jobless and homeless fresh out of college. No one bailed me out, I sucked it up and worked my way out. I am stronger and smarter now which is why I'm not caught up in this round of economic woes so far. There is never any guarantees in life, and our goverment should not try to invent any with short term bailouts.
Re: Stupid people need to finally take responsibility!!!
Date: 2009-02-28 06:31 am (UTC)Re: Stupid people need to finally take responsibility!!!
Date: 2009-02-28 08:03 pm (UTC)Although everyone here in Michigan I think currently agrees that we are tired of winter and job loses but there seems to be no quick solution to either!
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-22 06:57 pm (UTC)I know you were being sarcastic, but you hit the nail on the head. The people railing about 'personal responsibility' of defaulting debtors seem to be wearing blinders. Sellers of sub-prime financing had almost no accountability for the way their transactions turned out. Mortgage brokers and sellers, in every lending institution I worked in - all of which no longer exist - were done with transaction as soon is it was signed off by an underwriter and went to closing. A whole separate group of people closed the loan. Then another group of people audited the transaction and bundled it for resale on the securities market.
The guidelines for selling, underwriting, closing and auditing *were* created by the allegedly cautious fiduciaries in pinstripe suits. And the guidelines were virtually non-existent. They mostly consisted of complying with the bare minimum required by state and federal law dealing with amounts of closing fees and interest in a given state and a debt to income ratio not to exceed fifty percent at the time of closing.
If the alleged unscrupulous buyers are at fault then their percentage of fault is dwarfed by the well-informed folks who decided that it was okay to loan millions of dollars to people who provided no income verification and other brilliant ideas.
Then we get into the really well-informed people who dreamed up the plan of bundling these greasy transactions into securities and selling these bundles on the securities market. These bundles were bought and re-sold as investment tools by powerhouse investment banks like Lehman and Meryll Lynch etc. I know, because I watched their representatives come in and buy them. Talk about high risk.
Admittedly, I don't have a lot of sympathy for people who chose an ARM over a 30 year fixed, but I'm assuming that the choice was even offered to them. For all I know, it wasn't. Also, selling an ARM or an interest only is like dangling the American Dream in front of buyers. Everyone wants to believe they are going to do better and get richer and be able to make those higher payments. (Why do you think so many people want to repeal the Estate Tax?) The way the economy was rolling in the late 1990s that wasn't entirely unreasonable.
Now my disconnected rant is over.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-23 08:36 am (UTC)The topic returned to the memory of the deceased and committing his body to rest.