Mortgage Crisis Caused By Anti-Racist Activism

Awesome.

Most of these 'junk loans' that were made to borrowers with bad credit were resold on the stock market to third parties. The fact that lenders 1) didn't have to suffer the consequences of making bad loans and 2) financially profited from making those bad loans suggests that they had an interest in seeing relaxed underwriting standards. For this reason, I can't help but think that the author is pointedly ignoring the main contributing factor to the mortgage disaster.

That's just one factor among many, but symptomatic of our underlying belief that money should go to where it is "deserved" rather than where it is effective....

I have officially heard it all now.

I knew that a lot of the 'handlers' of corporate bigwigs would have them out angling for a defense at the trials that are looking increasingly likely, but this one just reeks of desperation. The current mortgage crisis was fueled by a myriad of reasons, but believe me, the idea that billionaires were sitting around thinking about ways to get money into the hands of poor black guys was hardly one of them.

I can see now that one of their strategies will be to play the race card. Their aim will be to ensure the jury thinks about something other than the mountain of documents, emails, and other internal and external communications and directives. All of which will point to the inescapable conclusion that their cases are really about garden variety fiduciary negligence on an unprecedented scale. The race card is how many of the wealthy, from OJ to the CEO of HealthSouth manage to escape justice. It behooves us all to hold our wallet and our will a little closer when the wealthy start to talk about racism, or the dangers thereof.

Middle America you are being conned. Just today the CEO of Bear Stearns unloaded what used to be over a USD1 billion stake in Bear for USD60 million, under the terms of the original deal with the government that his stake was only to be USD15 million. Poor him you say? He lost so much money you say? Consider the fact that Bear's stock price is being propped up by a USD30 billion guarantee from the US. Then ask yourself where the money for that guarantee comes from. Even better research it. Did you know several such guarantees are being made?

Consider some news that the government would have us believe is completely unrelated. It just got a whole lot harder for poor and middle class college students to get student loans, because the government has found it necessary to materially decrease the levels of subsidy it provides to student loans. Now a cynic would say that the CEO of Bear just raided the US college fund for USD60 million. An optimist would say the government is simply making financially prudent cut backs in its spending. The truth is somewhere in the middle, but I think we'd all agree that these types of financial machinations are sub optimal. Giving anti-capitalist guarantees of security is how we got here in the first place.

WOW . . . I'm ranting . . . I gotta stop working so late.

At least I caught myself.

The short version is this article insults my intelligence, and assumes that I am uninformed. All of which would trouble me a good deal less if the aim of this article was something other than keeping a scumbag out of Club-Fed.

It doesn't matter if the morgages are repaid and it may even be beneficial to bankers if there is a small level of defaulting. Unlike junk bonds, resold mortgages have an underlaying value in property. Unfortunately, beyond a small level of defaulting, a glut of unsold property decreases property prices, decreases the value of already resold mortgages and make property more affordable to nieve investors.