DURING OBAMA’S FIRST 2 YEARS ALONE, HIS CRIMINAL BANKSTERS
MADE MORE PROFITS THAN DURING ALL 8 YEARS OF BUSH!
BANKSTER PROFITS AND CRIMES ARE SOARING! So are
foreclosures!
GIVEN OBAMA’S KISSING UP TO THE MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of LA
RAZA, YOU WOULD THINK HE WOULD AT LEAST HELP HIS PARTY BASE OF ILLEGALS?!?!
Frustrated
allies — including Congressional Democrats and liberal advocacy groups not
normally focused on housing, like the National Council of La Raza — were
shouting for new action to prevent foreclosures.
Cautious Moves on Foreclosures Haunting
Obama
WASHINGTON — After inheriting the worst economic
downturn since the Great Depression, President Obama poured vast amounts of money into efforts to
stabilize the financial system, rescue the auto industry and revive the
economy.
But he tried to finesse the cleanup of the
housing crash, rejecting unpopular proposals for a broad bailout of homeowners
facing foreclosure in favor of a limited aid program — and a bet
that a recovering economy would take care of the rest.
During his first two years in office, Mr. Obama
and his advisers repeatedly affirmed this carefully calibrated strategy,
leaving unspent hundreds of billions of dollars that Congress had allocated to
buy mortgage loans, even as millions of people lost their homes and the
economic recovery stalled somewhere between crisis and prosperity.
The nation’s painfully slow pace of growth is
now the primary threat to Mr. Obama’s bid for a second term, and some
economists and political allies say the cautious response to the housing crisis
was the administration’s most significant mistake. The bailouts of banks and
automakers are now widely regarded as crucial steps in arresting the recession,
while the depressed housing market remains a millstone.
“They were not aggressive in taking the steps
that could have been taken,” said Representative Zoe Lofgren, chairwoman of the California
Democratic caucus. “And as a consequence they did not interrupt the
catastrophic spiral downward in our economy.”
Mr. Obama insisted the government should help
only “responsible borrowers,” and his administration offered aid to fewer than
half of those facing foreclosure, excluding landlords, owners of big-ticket
homes and those judged to have excessive debts.
He decided to rely on mortgage companies to
modify unaffordable loans rather than have the government take control by
purchasing the loans, the approach advocated by his chief political rivals in
the 2008 presidential race, Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain.
The administration did not push for legislation
to make mortgage companies help borrowers. The financial incentives it offered
were often insufficient. And it responded slowly to warnings, including those
in letters homeowners sent to Mr. Obama, that companies were not cooperating.
The result was a plan that failed to meet even its
own modest goals, data shows. Mr. Obama said in Arizona a few weeks after
taking office that the government would help “as many as three to four million
homeowners to modify the terms of their mortgages to avoid foreclosure.” As of
May, 4.3 million people had applied for aid, but only one million had received
government-sponsored modifications, according to the most recent data. About a third of those turned away lost
their homes, were facing foreclosure or filed for bankruptcy.
In June 2011, Mr. Obama conceded that his administration
had not done enough. “And so,” he said, “we’re going back to the drawing
board.”
The government has since enriched incentives for
companies and found new ways to press them to take action. More people are
getting help, and the housing market has finally begun to recover, leading some
of the president’s allies to wonder what might have been.
“If the program they have now had been used at
the beginning, it would have had a tremendous impact,” said John Taylor, chief
executive of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, an umbrella group
for housing advocates.
But it is impossible to know whether a more
forceful response would have produced better results. Administration officials
argue that the missed opportunity was relatively small because mortgage
companies were unprepared to help homeowners even if the government had pushed
harder — and the government was unprepared to take the companies’ place.
“We operated at the frontier of what was
possible,” Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, whose department oversaw the
housing plan, said in a statement. “These programs helped millions stay in
their homes and millions more refinance to take advantage of lower interest
rates.”
Help Wanted
The president gets a purple file each day
holding 10 letters selected from the thousands that arrive at the White House.
Almost as soon as the administration started its housing plan, he began to see
complaints.
“I get letters every day,” Mr. Obama said at a
June 2009 news conference, “from people who say, ‘You know, I appreciate that
you put out this mortgage program, but the bank is still not letting me modify
my mortgage, and I’m about to lose my home.’ And then I’ve got to call my staff
and team and find out why isn’t it working for these folks, and can we adjust
it, can we tweak it, can we make it more aggressive.”
Some of the letters came from people the
administration was not trying to help. But in Arizona the president had also
made promises that the government was not ready to keep.
Mr. Obama had emphasized that borrowers with
financial problems could get mortgage modifications even before missing a
payment. But the administration did not define eligibility for that kind of
pre-emptive aid, and more than 4,000 people called the Treasury Department
during the first year to complain they had been turned away on the grounds they
had not missed a payment.
People who lost their jobs generally could not
qualify for modifications, but more than 18 months would pass before the White
House persuaded mortgage companies to let people skip a few payments while
looking for work.
And there were unsettling stories about mortgage
companies repeatedly losing paperwork, rejecting qualified applicants and, with
surprising frequency, foreclosing on the very customers they had just agreed to
help.
The president’s advisers, including Mr. Geithner
and Lawrence H. Summers, then director of the National Economic Council, played
down the significance of these anecdotes. They saw no evidence of widespread
problems, and besides, the broader strategy was working: the recession ended in
June 2009, and housing prices posted the first monthly increase in three years.
In late July, eager to claim credit, the
president bounded onto a high school stage in Raleigh, N.C.
“We knew that ending our immediate economic
crisis would require ending the housing crisis, where it began, or at least
slowing down the pace of foreclosures,” he said. “We didn’t stop every
foreclosure. We couldn’t help every single homeowner who had gotten
overextended, but folks who could make their payments with a little bit of
help, we were able to keep them in their homes.”
The celebration was premature. By the end of
2009 only 66,465 borrowers had received government-backed mortgage
modifications, and the pace of foreclosures continued to rise: more than
900,000 homes in 2009 and more than a million in 2010, more homes than in any
American city save New York.
Peter P. Swire, Mr. Obama’s special assistant
for economic policy in 2009 and 2010, said both the administration’s successes
in repairing financial markets and its shortcomings in helping homeowners could
be traced to the president’s reliance on Mr. Geithner and Mr. Summers.
“They were the most experienced financial crisis
team that you could have,” said Mr. Swire, an Ohio State
University law professor. “But when you have economists like Larry
Summers working on things — well, Larry Summers is a macroeconomist. He’s not a
case worker.”
Mr. Summers declined to comment on the record,
but other current and former officials echoed Mr. Geithner’s view that the
administration had done well under the circumstances. Some said they
underestimated the complexity of helping millions of people. Some said they
tried too hard at first to protect taxpayers from unnecessary losses. But they
agreed that the most important problem was beyond their control: the mortgage
industry was set up either to collect payments or to foreclose, and it was not
ready to help people.
“They were bad at their jobs to start with, and
they had just gone through this process where they fired lots of people,” said
Michael S. Barr, a former assistant Treasury secretary who served as Mr.
Geithner’s chief housing aide in 2009 and 2010. “The only surprise was that
they were even more screwed up than the high level of screwiness that we
expected.”
Let Them Eat Carrots
Former Representative Jim Marshall, a centrist
Georgia Democrat who lost his House seat in 2010, was a staunch advocate of the
administration’s economic policies. He supported the banking bailout. He opposed
a similar bailout for homeowners.
The administration made just one mistake, he
said in a recent interview: it failed to rewrite the bankruptcy code.
Congressional Democrats wanted to change the law
to permit “cramdown” — a term that meant letting bankruptcy courts cut mortgage
debts — to put pressure on mortgage companies to modify loans and to provide a
backup plan for borrowers who could not get the help they needed.
“There was another way to deal with this, and
that is what I supported: forcing the banks to deal with this,” Mr. Marshall
said. “It would have been better for the economy and lots of different
neighborhoods and people owning houses in those neighborhoods.”
Mr. Obama sponsored cramdown legislation as a
senator, endorsed it as a presidential candidate and called on Congress to pass
it in the Arizona speech.
But he also repeatedly pressed the pause button.
When proponents sought to add a cramdown to the Emergency Economic
Stabilization Act in September 2008, Mr. Obama, who had flown back to
Washington from the campaign trail, persuaded them to postpone the “partisan”
effort as an example to Republicans, who said the measure would violate
existing contracts.
In February 2009, after Mr. Obama became
president, the White House asked Democrats not to attach the measure to the
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, fearing it would cost votes. In March,
a watered-down version finally passed the House, but the mortgage industry
rallied opposition to block it in the Senate.
Some officials said the White House had tried
and failed. But other officials and participants, including Mr. Marshall, said
it simply was not a priority.
“There wasn’t enough political capital, time or
energy,” said Mr. Barr, the former Treasury deputy.
Mortgage companies, mostly owned by large banks,
had ample resources to improve their treatment of troubled borrowers. But in
the absence of any significant threat of punitive government action, they made
little progress.
“Here we are in 2011, looking at high levels of
foreclosures on the horizon, looking at significant failures in process, and
nothing much has changed,” Sarah Bloom Raskin,
a Federal Reserve governor, said at a housing finance conference in February
2011.
“It seems to me we have reached the point where
this sign of failure is hindering our economy’s ability to rebound.”
How Far a Trillion Goes
A stone-faced building just north of the Capitol
testifies to the federal response to the last national housing crash in the
1930s. The block-long office building housed the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation,
which bought and refinanced roughly 20 percent of outstanding mortgages, most
within two years of its creation in 1933, to help a million families avoid
foreclosure. It even turned a modest profit before closing in 1951.
Mr. McCain surprised Mr. Obama during their
second debate in October 2008 when he proposed investing $300 billion in such a
program, echoing prominent Democrats. Some economists argued that debt
reduction would hasten recovery not just by preventing foreclosures, but by
spurring consumer spending, the nation’s primary economic activity.
Mr. Obama, leading in the polls, dismissed the
idea as a “risky” giveaway to mortgage companies. “Taxpayers shouldn’t be asked
to pick up the tab for the very folks who helped to create this crisis,” he
said at a rally two days later in Dayton, Ohio.
After the election, top economic advisers led by
Mr. Summers told the president-elect that debt reduction was not the best
policy. Mr. Obama hoped to secure about $1.1 trillion from Congress to arrest
the recession — a stimulus package of about $750 billion and the second half of the
$700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program bailout fund Congress had created in September.
In a blueprint delivered at a mid-December meeting in Chicago, the advisers
recommended that nearly all of the money be used to stabilize the financial
system and for a package of tax cuts and government spending programs. That,
they said, would stimulate growth more than paying down mortgage debts and
hoping homeowners spent their savings.
Mr. Geithner told Mr. Obama that if even if an
additional $100 billion were available, he still would not spend it on housing.
As for foreclosures, the advisers said more
modest forms of aid would work just as well in most cases. Indeed, some
economists argued that debt reduction would counterproductively persuade other
borrowers to stop making payments in pursuit of a better deal.
But the decision ultimately was political. Mr.
Obama and his advisers were convinced that even in the depths of an unyielding
crisis, most Americans did not want their neighbors rescued at public expense.
Several cited the response to the Arizona speech — including the televised
diatribe by a CNBC personality, Rick Santelli,
that helped give rise to theTea Party — as proof that they were wise not to do more.
“There’s a lot of risk aversion in Washington,”
said James B. Lockhart III, who participated in some discussions as director of
the Federal Housing Finance
Agency, administrator of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, “and I don’t
think anybody knew how bad it was going to get.”
End of the Beginning
Eighteen months later, the administration’s
hopes for a rapid economic recovery had faded. By summer 2010, it knew that the
recession had been deeper than initially understood and that the effects of the
financial crisis were lingering longer than expected. The housing market still
showed no signs of life.
Frustrated
allies — including Congressional Democrats and liberal advocacy groups not
normally focused on housing, like the National Council of La Raza — were
shouting for new action to prevent foreclosures.
Still the White House held firm to its strategy.
“The most important thing I can do right now to keep people in their homes is
to make sure the economy is growing,” the president said in Albuquerque in
September 2010. “That’s probably the thing that’s going to strengthen the
housing market the most over the next couple of years.”
Two days later, an important deadline passed
quietly. The $700 billion bailout fund Congress had created in 2008 expired.
The administration could no longer use the money to finance new programs even
if it wanted to. It had left more than $300 billion unspent.
In November, Democrats lost control of the
House, further constraining the administration’s ability to address the housing
crisis.
And right about then, in the fall of 2010, Mr.
Obama began to reconsider. The frustrated president told his advisers that what
they were doing was not good enough. He told them to revisit old ideas and to
find new ones.
Mr. Obama was particularly incensed by mounting
evidence that mortgage companies were breaking the law in some foreclosure
cases. There was also new research underscoring the costs of foreclosures and
the benefits of measures like debt reduction.
But perhaps most important was the simple
reality that housing, left to fester, had become Mr. Obama’s biggest economic
problem.
At a virtual town hall in April 2011, Mark
Zuckerberg of Facebook read a question that began, “The housing crisis will not
go away.”
The president, perched on a stool, listened
gravely and nodded. “Well, it’s a good question,” he said, “and I’ll be honest
with you — this is probably the biggest drag on the economy right now.”
*
"I fought against a
bankruptcy reform bill in the Senate that did more to protect credit card
companies and banks than to help working people. I'll continue the fight for
good bankruptcy laws as President." -- Obama**
We’re facing the toughest times since the GREAT DEPRESSION.
It is another massive tidal wave of corporate pillage, and like all of them
since the SAVINGS & LOAN; it has a Bush involved. And the pillage is still
going on and the Bankers are winning as usual!
The banker’s pillage didn’t just start when the bankers got
so greedy they shot themselves in the head. These fuckers knew that it didn’t
matter what havoc they caused to this Nations’ economy, their elected whores in
Congress would, as always, bail them out.
WELLS FARGO and BANK of AMERICA will be collecting so much
bailout welfare that they’ve each already acquired other banks. These two will
soon be so big they will have every whore in Congress bought and paid for, and
can rape and pillage up a storm, and then are bailed out again. THEY’RE TOO
FUCKING BIG TO LET FAIL!
Here’s
how banker whore corruption works!
DIANNE
FEINSTEIN, A MAJOR OBAMA DONOR, is one of the most corrupt politicians in
America history. In exchange for two votes (Boxer’s) on NO IMPEACHMENT, Bush
made her whore profiteer whore by inviting her slimy husband, Richard C. Blum
to feed at the Bush-Saudi-BigOil Hog’s trough of CARLYLE GROUP. With Di’s first
check, she went out and purchased a $17 million dollar mansion in San
Francisco, orginal home of her paymasters Wells Fargo and Bank of America. This
newest of mansions only added to a collection Feinstein has purchased, using
money from deals she cooks up for her husband. These “deals” include Feinstein
busting her ass to be RED CHINA’S advocate in Congress (Google it!).
Feinstein
has long taken piles of bribes from WELLS FARGO and BANK of AMERICA. Therefore,
these big bankers told their whore, go front for our BIG BANKER’S BANKRUPTCY
BILL because we have the stupid people in this country, and all over the globe
that trusted in investing in mortgage devices by the balls! AND WE DON’T WANT
THEM TO GO INTO A BANKRUPTCY COURT AND HAVE AN IMPARTIAL BANKRUPTCY JUDGE UNDUE
OUR DIRTY LITTLE TRICKS!
Feinstein
always does what her corporate paymasters bid. She, along with Boxer and “Wall
St. Hillary, voted just as they were told. From then on Americans were fucked
over by big bankers coming and going… And then you still have the Banker’s
crime wave of CREDIT CARD abuse that the whores in Congress have repeatedly
refused to curb…. Even just a bity bit! The profit margins on credit cards even
make Bush’s BIG OIL CRONIES salivate! Interestingly consumers now must borrow
off every credit card they can to meet their mortgage payment and feed their
children. HOW’D THAT HAPPEN, DI???
Not
only did Feinstein front for the BIG BANKER’S BANKRUPTCY law, she did so long
after WELLS FARGO had their CALIFORNIA MORTGAGE LICENSE REVOKED FOR CORPORATE
FRAUD and MALFEASANCE --- TRANSLATE: SUBPRIME PILLAGE.
Wells
Fargo simply declared themselves above the law, and there’s no evidence they
aren’t, and went on pillaging, and pillaging and pillaging. California has the
largest number of foreclosures, with 47% of the homes in Los Angeles under
foreclosure! But the WELLS FARGO rape wasn’t only in California. There are communities
all over the country devastated by the loan products this bank perpetrated. The
Cities of Cleveland and Baltimore have massive litigation against Wells Fargo.
But then one wonders how many people in these cities had their homes foreclosed
on and life savings destroyed? Well, all they have to do is line up for a
bailout!
You’ve
probably heard on the media about awful people that shouldn’t have taken out
mortgages they couldn’t afford. GET REAL! The bankers are trained liars that
fuck people over day in and day out, frequently criminally. They’re above the
law! EVEN THE GOVERNMENT OF THE MOST POWERFUL COUNTRY IN THE WORLD KNEELS TO
BANKER’S RAPE AND PILLAGE then BOWED WITH HANDS OUTSTRETCHED FILLED WITH PILES
OF BAILOUT WELFARE! And not even one CEO goes to prison. Reminds me of the
Savings and Loan debacle that John McCain was in the middle of!
Wells
Fargo and Bank of America know victimizing the poor, literate and particularly
ILLEGALS are good for business! The illiterate and non-English peoples think
they can believe the fucking bankers, even when that fucking bankers has an
iron rod up their ass! Remember Wells Fargo had their mortgage license revoked
for this. BOTH ARE LA RAZA DONORS, and their whore, Feinstein is an OPEN
BORDERS, AMNESTY, WELFARE FOR ILLEGALS, GET ’EM REGISTERED TO VOTE, NO I.D., NO
ENGLISH ONLY, LA RAZA ENDORSED WHORE! As are Boxer, Pelosi, Lofgren, Eshoo,
Waxman, and the rest that voted for the welfare check.
Both
of these banks illegally open bank accounts for illegals with illegal ID’s,
typically handed out by Mexican consulates like grocery store coupons.
CNN
estimates that there are now 5 million homes owned by illegals now in
foreclosure. Ten thousand in Congressman Dan Tancredo’s district. You thought
the Mexican government would step in and pay the American people back for the
massive losses? No stupid gringo. We are MEXICO’S WELFARE STATE!
Wells
Fargo is the biggest financial backer of PAYDAY LOAN SHARKS, which victimize….
You’re connecting the dots… the poor, illiterate, and illegals! Interest rates
hover around 400% and Congress has refused to curb the abuse.
You
may be an individual that has a decent mortgage, and you’re paying on it as
agreed. But the value of your home, due to the BANKER’S PILLAGE, is now worth half.
All your equity, which may have been your life savings for retirement is GONE!
Where’d it go? Big Bonuses to Big Banker’s and tips to buy politicians like
Feinstein?
Don’t
you think it’s time you gave Feinstein, Boxer, Pelosi, Waxman, Eshoo, Lofgren a
ring? They’ve all voted for the BIG BANKER’S BAILOUT, just as they did the BIG
BANKER’S BANKRUPTCY BILL.
These
clowns have also done NADA to help people dealing with foreclosures. It’s
common knowledge that the banks are refusing to negotiate their miserable LOAN
DEVICES. Moreover, the politicians are still taking banker’s dirty money hand
over fist.
THE PRESIDENTIAL
CANDIDATE THAT WILL HELP THE PEOPLE, AND NOT JUST BANKERS, IS NOT JOHN
McAMNESTY, a man whose economic policy is formulated by PHIL GRAMM, Bush’s
deregulator and Enron pillager, and Bush’s war machine.
THAT MAN THAT CAN SAVE THIS NATION IS BARACK OBAMA!
CNN - MONEY
Bankruptcy
Obama wants to reform the bankruptcy process and has
proposed changes to help those in financial distress. As a Senator, McCain
voted in favor of legislation aimed at curbing the growing number of bankruptcy
filings.
• Backed 2005
legislation that imposed new costs on those seeking bankruptcy protection.
The law, which Obama opposed, passed the Senate with Democratic
support in 2005.
• Fast-track
bankruptcy process for military families.
• Help seniors facing bankruptcy keep their home.
• Put pension promises higher on list of debts a bankrupt
employer must pay.
• Amend bankruptcy laws to protect people trapped in
predatory home loans.
"I fought against a bankruptcy reform bill in the
Senate that did more to protect credit card companies and banks than to help
working people. I'll continue the fight for good bankruptcy laws as
President." -- Obama**
From the Los
Angeles Times
Editorial
Subprime
meltdown culprits
Low-income borrowers and affordable-housing advocates
didn't cause the credit crisis. The real villains are greedy mortgage brokers,
lenders and investors.
October 25, 2008
As the cost of Wall Street's credit crisis has mounted, the
hunt for villains has intensified and the accusations of fault have widened. At
first the focus was on greedy profiteers among lenders and investment bankers,
who were an easy (and deserving) target. Then the finger-pointing became
politicized, with Democrats blaming deregulation advocates in the Bush
administration and previous GOP-controlled Congresses, and Republicans citing
influential Democrats at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and their allies on Capitol
Hill. Lately, even former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who once
incited hero-worship among lawmakers, has been heaped with blame.
But it's not just the rich and powerful who've been held up
for scorn. Some politicians have also started pointing fingers toward the
bottom of the economic ladder, associating the problems in the financial
markets with irresponsible low-income borrowers and advocates for affordable
housing. The latter include the controversial group ACORN, the Assn. of
Community Organizations for Reform Now, which was best known as a lobbyist for
low-cost housing before it gained infamy for its fraud-tolerant
voter-registration drives. Had banks not been forced to make loans to
minorities and people with lower credit scores, some say, the subprime meltdown
would not have occurred.
Underlying this point of view is the belief that government
regulation and intervention in markets cause more problems than they solve. In
particular, these critics maintain that the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act pushed
banks to make bad loans by requiring them to serve low-income neighborhoods.
Although the law set no lending quotas or even targets, it enabled community
groups to extract concessions from banks that sought to expand or acquire
rivals. ACORN, for example, has used the CRA as leverage to compel banks to
create pools of loans for low- and moderate-income families. Its efforts have
generated about $6 billion in loans to these borrowers, while also generating
funds for ACORN’s nonprofit housing corporation. Supporters call that a win-win
scenario; critics say it's legalized extortion.
Linking the credit crisis to the push for more affordable
housing, however, is blaming the victim. Had banks covered by the CRA been the
driving force behind the boom in subprime lending, or had Fannie Mae and
Freddie Mac been true to their mission of promoting affordable homes and
apartments, the housing market wouldn't have inflated as dramatically, and the
pain wouldn't have been as great when the bubble burst. Borrowers made their
share of mistakes and reckless decisions, but the more fundamental problem is
that too many mortgage brokers, lenders and investors stopped caring whether
loans could be repaid. They abandoned the underwriting standards that would
have protected borrowers and lenders alike.
It's easy to dismiss the rap against the CRA if you
understand why Congress enacted the law. Commercial banks' reluctance to serve
minority and low-income communities had left these areas open to exploitation
by less savory sources of credit, such as payday lenders. Consumer advocates
pushed Congress to end this redlining because they wanted banks' good lending
practices to drive predatory lenders out of those communities. The law and
subsequent regulations made clear that banks and thrifts were being asked to
try harder to find capable borrowers, not to make loans that were more likely
to default. As the Federal Reserve Board put it in Regulation
BB:3.0.1.1.9&idno=12%2312:3.0.1.1.9.1.8.1, "[T]he board anticipates
banks can meet the standards of this part with safe and sound loans,
investments and services on which the banks expect to make a profit. Banks are
permitted and encouraged to develop and apply flexible underwriting standards
for loans that benefit low- or moderate-income geographies or individuals, only
if consistent with safe and sound operations."
Here are three more data points that show the CRA or
affordable-housing efforts in general can't be blamed for the growth in
subprime loans. Most subprime loans :TcA9Tzx4aqgJ:
www.house.gov/apps/list/hearing/financialsvcs_dem/barr021308.pdf+subprime+University+of+Michigan%27s+Michael+Barr&
;hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=firefox-a">
www.house.gov/apps/list/hearing/financialsvcs_dem/barr021308.pdf+subprime+University+of+Michigan%27s+Michael+Barr&
;hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=firefox-a started with brokers
and lenders not covered or affected by the CRA, such as now-defunct New Century
Financial. Such loans went mainly to middle- and upper-income borrowers . And
the vast majority were for home refinancing, not new purchases. The problem
with these refinancings was that they were built on sand -- they existed to
generate fees for brokers and lenders and/or to tap equity that would evaporate
soon after the bubble burst. Beyond that, a recent study found that loan
programs aimed specifically at low-income borrowers have significantly lower
default rates than subprime loans in general.
The last things anyone wanted from the CRA were the exotic
mortgages that have failed at alarming rates, including "liar loans"
and "negative amortization" mortgages whose low payments pushed
borrowers deeper into debt. So why did those types of loans and other
questionable practices proliferate? Because they generated higher returns for
lenders and investors.
Consider what happened at Fannie and Freddie. Since 2000,
the Department of Housing and Urban Development has required that at least half
of the mortgages purchased by the companies go to low- and moderate-income
borrowers. To hit those targets, Fannie and Freddie -- whose underwriting
standards prevented them from buying most types of exotic loans -- invested
hundreds of billions of dollars in subprime-backed mortgage securities. The
loans underlying those securities, however, had little to do with helping low-
and moderate-income families buy homes. Instead, they were refinancings that
pulled money out of homes people already owned. No question, Fannie and
Freddie's demand for securities poured gas on the red-hot subprime market. But
the companies lost half their share of that market during the boom years from
2004 to 2006, so they clearly weren't the only sources of fuel. Congress needs
to resolve the tension at Fannie and Freddie between shareholder returns and
HUD targets. But as they do so, lawmakers shouldn't pin the rap for the larger
credit crisis on affordable housing.
New York Times
October 26, 2008
Editorial
Help for Homeowners, at Last?
For all the government’s
actions to prop up the markets, credit tightened again last week and stocks
sold off worldwide. Rather than confidence, fear of global recession has taken
hold — and for good reason.
Bush administration
officials have failed to deal effectively with the root cause of the financial
crisis — unaffordable mortgages peddled during the housing bubble and the mass
foreclosures that have followed. The only ray of hope is that worsening
conditions may finally force them to act. At a hearing on Thursday in the
Senate Banking Committee, Sheila Bair, the chairwoman of the Federal Deposit
Insurance Corporation, confirmed that the F.D.I.C. is working with the Treasury
to streamline the reworking of troubled mortgages. The aim is to make the loans
affordable over the long term so that borrowers can avoid foreclosure and keep
their homes.
Though details of the
plan are not yet worked out, the outline calls for creating standardized
criteria that would be used by mortgage servicers, the firms that handle
collection and foreclosure proceedings for lenders and mortgage investors.
Loans modified under the criteria would be eligible for a federal guarantee
that would protect lenders and investors against default.
If the criteria are well
established, defaults on the modified loans should not be a big problem. When
the F.D.I.C. took over IndyMac Bank in California last summer, Ms. Bair
established a streamlined program for 60,000 troubled loans from the failed
bank. The program, which is yielding encouraging initial results, calls for
modifications that lower a loan’s interest rate, extend the life of the loan or
defer payment on a portion of the principle. Taken together, the modifications
lower the monthly payment to no more than 38 percent of the borrower’s pretax
income.
An IndyMac-like plan, on
the federal level, would be significantly better than anything else tried so
far. To date, servicers have been reluctant to amend loans, saying they could
be sued by loan investors who might be disadvantaged by the modification. A
government guarantee on the modified loan should reduce the risk of lawsuits.
The new plan could also be up and running quickly, because the authority to
offer the government guarantee was included in the bank bailout legislation
passed this month.
An IndyMac approach,
with its emphasis on permanent changes to a loan’s terms, is also superior to
ad hoc anti-foreclosure efforts of the past year that have focused on offering
catch-up repayment plans. The administration has often cheered the
proliferation of repayment plans as evidence of the mortgage industry’s
willingness to work with troubled borrowers. But such plans often only delay
foreclosure, because they do nothing to make the loan affordable over time.
No single approach will
solve the foreclosure problem. But Ms. Bair and the F.D.I.C. — an independent
agency — deserve enormous credit for bringing a workable plan this far along in
an administration resistant to such efforts to address the problems of
homeowners.
Congress should give the
plan its full backing, and pursue other anti-foreclosure efforts. In a hopeful
development at the hearing on Thursday, the Banking Committee chairman, Senator
Christopher Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat, said he was considering a new round
of anti-foreclosure legislation in November. That would include allowing bankruptcy judges
to modify troubled loans under court protection — a much needed and long
overdue change in policy.
In the meantime, the
Treasury would do well by the American public by going where Ms. Bair and the
F.D.I.C. are leading.
NEW YORK TIMES
October 25, 2008
EDITORIAL
Rescuing Capitalism
It would be fairly easy to dismiss the gleeful boast by
President Nicolas Sarkozy of France that American-style capitalism is over, to
file it with French critiques of fast food and American pop culture.
Except that the United States government now owns stakes in
the nation’s biggest banks. It controls one of the biggest insurance companies
in the world. It guarantees more than half the mortgages in the country.
Finance — the lifeblood of capitalism — has to a substantial degree been taken
over by the state.
Even Alan Greenspan, the high priest of unfettered
capitalism and a former chairman of the Federal Reserve, conceded this week
that he had “found a flaw” in his bedrock belief of “40 years or more” that
markets would regulate themselves. “I made a mistake,” he said.
The question is what new direction capitalism should take.
In a globally interconnected world, the United States cannot simply march back
to the gray flannel capitalism of the 1950s and 1960s when regulations were
tough and coddled monopolies dominated the corporate world. Still, the next
president will have a chance, not to be missed, to re-evaluate some tenets of
the freewheeling, deregulated version of a market economy that has dominated
America since the Reagan administration.
Financial deregulation enabled our boom-and-bust dynamic —
removing barriers to capital flows, allowing unrestricted trading of abstruse
financial products and letting financial institutions take on more and more
debt. Cheap money, from China or the Federal Reserve, fueled the fire. But
America’s virtually unregulated shadow financial institutions — brokerages,
hedge funds and other nonbank banks — played a particularly important role at
the center of this process.
The solution will require rethinking the rules of finance.
The amount of capital that banks must keep in reserve will have to rise;
deregulated financial institutions will have to be regulated. Yet much more
will be needed than just putting the bridle back on American banks.
The next government must re-establish some notion of equity
of opportunity. Investment is desperately needed in health care, education,
infrastructure. The social contract and the government’s role in it should be
examined anew. Addressing these challenges will be an enormous task —
especially amid the bitter recession that most economists expect over the next
year or so. But they must be faced. Fixing finance is merely the start.
NEW
YORK TIMES
February 11, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Trillion Dollar Baby
WASHINGTON
So much for the savior-based economy.
Tim Geithner, the learned and laconic civil servant and financial engineer, did not sweep in and infuse our shaky psyches with confidence. For starters, the 47-year-old’s voice kept cracking.
Escorting us over the rickety, foggy bridge from TARP to Son of TARP by way of TALF — don’t ask — Geithner did not, as the president said when he drew on the wisdom of Fred Astaire, inspire us to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and start all over again.
The Obama crowd is hung up on the same issues that the Bush crew was hung up on last September: Which of the potentially $2 or $3 trillion in toxic assets will the taxpayers buy and what will we pay for them?
Despite the touting, the Treasury chief unveiled a plan short on illumination, recrimination, fine points and foreclosure closure. The Dow collapsed on its fainting couch as Sports Illustrated swimsuit models rang the closing bell.
It wasn’t only that Geithner’s own tax history — and his time as head of the New York Fed when all the bad stuff was happening on Wall Street, and when he left with nearly a half-million in severance — makes him a dubious messenger for the president’s pledge to keep the haves from further betraying the have-nots.
It wasn’t only that Americans’ already threadbare trust has been ripped by Hank Paulson’s mumbo-jumbo and the Democrats’ bad judgment in accessorizing the stimulus bill with Grammy-level “bling, bling,” as the R.N.C. chairman, Michael Steele, called it.
The problem is that the “lost faith” that Geithner talked about in his announcement Tuesday cannot be restored as long as the taxpayers who are funding these wayward banks don’t have more control.
Geithner is not even requiring the banks to lend in return for the $2 trillion his program will try to marshal, mostly by having the Fed print money out of thin air, thereby diluting our money, or borrowing more from China. (When, exactly, can China foreclose on us and start sending us toxic toys again?)
There’s a weaselly feel to the plan, a sense that tough decisions were postponed even as President Obama warns about our “perfect storm of financial problems.” The outrage is going only one way, as we pony up trillion after trillion.
Geithner is coddling the banks, setting it up so that either we’ll have to pay the banks inflated prices for poison assets or subsidize investors to pay the banks for poison assets.
As Steve Labaton and Ed Andrews wrote in The Times on Tuesday, Geithner won an internal battle with David Axelrod and other Obama aides who wanted to impose pay caps on every employee at institutions taking the bailout and set stricter guidelines on how federal money is spent. Geithner prevailed over those who wanted to kick out negligent bank executives and wipe out shareholders at institutions receiving aid.
In a move that would have made his mentor, Robert Rubin, proud, Geithner beat back the populists and protected the economic royalists. The new plan offers insufficient meddling with Wall Street, even though Wall Street shows no sign that the hardscrabble economy has pierced its Hermès-swathed world.
Wells Fargo, for instance, which has leeched $25 billion in bailout money, bought an inadvertently hilarious full-page ad in The Times to whinge about the junkets to Las Vegas and elsewhere it was forced to cancel because of public outrage. (The ad in The Times on Sunday could have cost up to $200,000, which may count as a bailout for our industry.)
“Okay, time out. Something doesn’t feel right,” John Stumpf, the president and chief executive of Wells Fargo wrote in an open letter defending their two decades of four-day employee recognition “events.” Calling them junkets or boondoggles is “nonsense,” he protested, adding about his employees: “This recognition energizes them.”
In this economy, simply having a job should energize them.
Geithner is wrong. The pay of all the employees in bailed-out banks, not just top executives, should be capped. And these impervious, imperial suits who squander taxpayers’ money after dragging the country over the cliff should all be fired — preferably when they come to D.C. on Wednesday in a phony show of populism on Amtrak and the shuttle to testify before Barney Frank.
Wall Street cannot be trusted to change its culture. Just look at the full-page ads that Bank of America (which got $45 billion) and Citigroup (which got $50 billion) are plastering in newspapers, lavishing taxpayer money on preening prose.
We don’t want our money spent, as Citigroup did, to pat itself on the back “as we navigate the complexities together.” Bank of America cannot get back our trust by spending more of our cash to assure us that it’s “getting to work” on getting back our trust.
Just get back to work and start repaying us.
*
Washington
Post
Foreclosures
Are Often In Lenders' Best Interest
Numbers Work Against Government Efforts To Help Homeowners
Numbers Work Against Government Efforts To Help Homeowners
By
Renae Merle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Government
initiatives to stem the country's mounting foreclosures are hampered because
banks and other lenders in many cases have more financial incentive to let
borrowers lose their homes than to work out settlements, some economists have
concluded.
Policymakers
often say it's a good deal for lenders to cut borrowers a break on mortgage
payments to keep them in their homes. But, according to researchers and
industry experts, foreclosing can be more profitable.
The
problem is that modifying mortgages is profitable to banks for only one set of
distressed borrowers, while lenders are actually dealing with three very
different types. Modification makes economic sense for a bank or other lender
only if the borrower can't sustain payments without it yet will be able to keep
up with new, more modest terms.
A
second set are those who are likely to fall behind on their payments again even
after receiving a modified loan and are likely to lose their homes one way or
another. Lenders don't want to help these borrowers because waiting to
foreclose can be costly.
Finally,
there are those delinquent borrowers who can somehow, even at great sacrifice,
catch up without a modification. Lenders have little financial incentive to
help them.
These
financial calculations on the part of lenders pose a difficult challenge for
President Obama's ambitious efforts to address the mortgage crisis, which
remains at the heart of the country's economic troubles and continues to upend
millions of lives. Senior officials at the Treasury Department and the
Department of Housing and Urban Development have summoned industry executives
to a meeting Tuesday to discuss how to step up the pace of loan relief. The
administration is seeking to influence lenders' calculus in part by offering
them billions of dollars in incentives to modify home loans.
Still,
foreclosed homes continue to flood the market, forcing down home prices. That
contributed to the unexpectedly large jump in new-home sales in June, reported
yesterday by the Commerce Department.
"There
has been this policy push to use modifications as the tool of choice,"
said Michael Fratantoni, vice president of single-family-home research at the
Mortgage Bankers Association. But "there is going to be this narrow slice
of borrowers for which modifications is the right answer." The size of
that slice is tough to discern, he said. "The industry and policymakers
have been grappling with that."
The
effort to understand the dynamics of the mortgage business comes as the
administration is prodding lenders to do more to help borrowers under its
Making Home Affordable plan, which gives lenders subsidies to lower the
payments for distressed borrowers. About 200,000 homeowners have received modified
loans since the program launched in March, while more than 1.5 million
borrowers were subject during the first half of the year to some form of
foreclosure filings, from default notices to completed foreclosure sales,
according to RealtyTrac.
No
doubt part of the explanation is that lenders are overwhelmed by the volume of
borrowers seeking to modify their mortgages. Rising unemployment and falling
home prices have added to the problem.
But
a study released last month by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston was downbeat
on the prospects for widespread modifications. The analysis, which looked at
the performance of loans in 2007 and 2008, found that lenders lowered the
monthly payments of only 3 percent of delinquent borrowers, those who had
missed at least two payments. Lenders tried to avoid modifying the loans of
borrowers who could "self-cure," or catch up on their payments
without help, and those who would fall behind again even after receiving help,
the study found.
"If
the presence of self-cure risk and redefault risk do make renegotiation less
appealing to investors, the number of easily 'preventable' foreclosures may be
far smaller than many commentators believe," the report said.
Nearly
a third of the borrowers who miss two payments are able to self-cure without
help from their lender, according to the Boston Fed study. Separately, Moody's
Economy.com, a research firm, estimated that about a fifth of those who miss
three payments will self-cure.
Administration
officials have not said publicly how many borrowers they expect to re-default
under Obama's program.
Mark
A. Calabria, director of financial-regulation studies at the Cato Institute,
warned that political rhetoric is driving the policy discussion. "What we
really need to do is have an honest debate about what are the magnitudes of
people we really can help," he said. But administration officials defended
their program's progress, reporting that it has surpassed an initial goal of
offering 20,000 modifications a week. These officials said they have taken into
account the re-default risk and possibility for self-cure in designing the
effort.
"We're
still not talking about a program that will stop a large number of
foreclosures," he said. "We're talking about a program that, at the
margins, will assist more people. It is unlikely we will see a sea
change."
*
Meltdown
101: Why is housing aid slow to arrive?
By ALAN ZIBEL, AP Real Estate Writer
Monday, July 27, 2009
(07-27) 14:44 PDT
WASHINGTON (AP) --
Speaking at a high
school in Mesa, Ariz., about a month after taking office, President Barack
Obama launched an effort to keep as many as 9 million homeowners out of
foreclosure in a major federal effort to stabilize the U.S. housing market.
So what kind of impact
has this plan — backed by $50 billion from the financial industry bailout fund
— had on the housing crisis over the past few months?
While outside analysts
expect the program to ultimately make a difference, it's been slow to get up
and running. And the impact of the plan is likely to be less significant than
the Obama administration's original projections of up to 4 million loan
modifications and 5 million refinanced loans.
In an effort to get
things moving, the government has summoned mortgage executives from 25
companies to meetings Tuesday with top staffers from the departments of
Treasury and Housing and Urban Development. Six other companies weren't invited
because they just joined the program this month.
Meanwhile, government
officials, lawmakers and activist groups are urging the participating companies
to ramp up their efforts.
"Much more progress
is needed," Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Housing and Urban
Development Secretary Shaun Donovan said in a July 10 letter to the industry,
arguing that participating companies should "devote substantially more
resources to this program."
Here are some questions
and answers about the program.
Q: How many borrowers
have been helped?
A: So far, more than
55,000 borrowers have received refinanced loans and at least 200,000 were enrolled
in three-month trial loan modifications, out of about 370,000 who were offered
modifications by mortgage companies.
Q: What's the difference
between a refinanced loan and a modification?
A: When you refinance
your home loan, you sign a new contract with your lender. A loan modification
involves changes to the existing contract — such as lowering the interest rate
or extending the term from 30 years to 40.
Q: Why has progress on
loan modifications been so sluggish?
A: The loan modification
program requires major changes in the operations of companies that collect
mortgage payments — known in the industry as loan servicers.
In normal times, those
companies simply collect payments from the vast majority of borrowers who pay
on time — and try to recoup what they can from those who are delinquent. But
enrolling borrowers in the Obama administration's plan is much more like
writing a new mortgage. That means training employees, reworking computer
systems and spending a lot more time with each borrower.
Also, the initial
assumptions behind the plan may have been overly optimistic, the Government
Accountability Office said in a report last week. While the Treasury Department
estimates that about 65 percent of borrowers at least two months behind on
their mortgages will sign up, the actual rate of responses is more likely to be
about 50 percent.
Q: Why has progress on
the refinancing program been slow?
A: Initially the
administration's refinancing program to help borrowers who owe more than their
homes are worth was limited to borrowers who owe up to 5 percent more than
their home's current market value. That excluded many people in areas like Las
Vegas and Southern California, where prices have declined by as much as 50
percent.
More borrowers may now
qualify because the government expanded the program this month to borrowers who
owe up to 25 percent more than the market value.
Q: Is the Obama
administration planning any big changes?
A: Not yet. While some
mortgage companies have been slow to get moving with the loan modification
effort, others are faring better, said Howard Glaser, a Washington-based
mortgage industry consultant and former housing official in the Clinton
administration.
"The fact that some
servicers are doing well means that the program can work," he said.
Q: What more can the
government do to step up pressure on the industry?
A: Shame might work. The
government will soon release a public report on how each company is doing.
Exposing the leaders and the laggers could be a powerful incentive for the
latter to perform better.
Q: What's in it for the
mortgage companies?
A: Money. Under the
program, the servicers will pocket up to $4,500 for each loan they modify. But
they won't start to be paid until homeowners have made on-time payments for
three months. The owners of mortgage securities — complex investments backed by
the value of mortgages — can get paid as well, but how much will depend on what
it costs the investors to modify the loan.
For borrowers who make
timely payments for at least a year, the government also will pay up to $5,000
to reduce borrowers' outstanding principal balances.
Q: What are the
consequences if the effort doesn't work?
A: If the program
doesn't kick in reasonably well, experts warn, the recent spate of optimism
about the housing market and the economy could fade as more borrowers fall into
foreclosure, putting downward pressure on home prices and forcing banks to
write down the value of their mortgage-backed securities.
Q: How does this effort
compare to previous efforts to tackle the mortgage crisis?
A: It's actually doing
better. For example, lawmakers spent much of last summer arguing about a
refinancing effort known as the "Hope for Homeowners" program. It was
launched by the government last fall but so far has provided few homeowners
with hope, proving unattractive to banks required to absorb large losses.
So far, only about 950
borrowers have applied for that program, and only 1 loan has been refinanced.
*
Ex-TARP
overseer denounces US government cover-up of Wall Street crimes
31 July 2012
In interviews prompted by the publication of his new book (Bailout) on the $700 billion
US bank bailout scheme—the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP)—the former
special inspector general for the program, Neil Barofsky, has denounced bank
regulators and top officials in the Bush and Obama administrations for covering
up Wall Street criminality both before and after the financial crash of
September 2008.
In an interview last Thursday with the Daily
Ticker blog,
Barofsky accused Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner of facilitating the banks’
manipulation of Libor, the global benchmark interest rate, when he was
president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 2007-2008, prior to his
joining the Obama administration. Recently published documents show that as
early as 2007, Geithner knew that London-based Barclays Bank was submitting
false information to the Libor board to conceal its financial weakness.
Geithner merely
wrote to the Bank of England suggesting certain changes in the Libor
rate-setting mechanism, but made no public statement and failed to notify
regulators at the US Justice Department, the Commodity Futures Trading
Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission, even though major US
banks were alleged to be involved in the rate-rigging fraud.
In his interview,
Barofsky rejected Geithner’s claims to have acted appropriately. Calling the
Libor scandal a “global conspiracy to fix one of the most important interest
rates in the world,” the former TARP inspector general said, “[Geithner] heard
this information and looked the other way. Geithner and other regulators should
be held accountable, they should be fired across the board. If they knew about
an ongoing fraud, and they didn’t do anything about it, they don’t deserve to
have their jobs. I hope to see people in handcuffs.”
In the same interview and others given over the past week,
Barofsky has spoken in scathing terms of the domination of Washington by Wall
Street and the subservience of both major parties to the financial elite. “It
was shocking,” he told the Daily Ticker, “how much control the big banks
had over their own bailout and how they often would dictate terms of some of
the TARP programs and the overwhelming deference shown by Treasury officials to
the banks. I saw no differences in these core issues between the Bush and Obama
administrations.”
In an interview
with CBS News’ Charlie Rose on July 23, Barofsky referred to key elements of
his account of TARP, including the lack of any restrictions on the banks’ use
of bailout funds and the fact that they were not even required to tell the
government what they were doing with the taxpayer money that had been handed to
them.
“When I got to
Washington,” he said, “I saw that it had been hijacked by a small group of very
powerful Wall Street banks... It’s not Democratic, it’s not Republican, it’s
across political barriers… [Geithner] oversaw a policy that saw our largest
banks, the too-big-to-fail institutions, get bigger than ever and more
powerful, more politically connected.”
In his book,
Barofsky derides the cynicism of the claims made when President Bush, candidate
Obama and congressional leaders of both parties were seeking to ram through the
TARP law over massive popular opposition that the bailout would benefit Main
Street as well as Wall Street. He notes, for instance, that the government’s
mortgage modification program—billed as a means to help millions of
homeowners—has disbursed only $3 billion out of the $50 billion set aside for
it.
Barofsky, who
served as the Treasury Department’s special inspector general for TARP until
his resignation last February, is well placed to document the collusion of the
government with the banks. He issued numerous reports while in his TARP post
exposing the lack of any real government oversight over the taxpayer money
funneled to the banks, as well as decisions ensuring that Wall Street firms
such as Goldman Sachs recouped tens of billions of dollars in potential losses
at the public’s expense.
Deprived of any enforcement powers under the TARP law drafted by
Wall Street lawyers and ratified by Congress, Barofsky was simply ignored by
Geithner and the Obama administration and his reports were largely buried by
the media.
Barofsky’s book has
received a similar response from the media, as did reports issued last year by
the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission and the Senate Permanent Subcommittee
on Investigations documenting in detail fraudulent and illegal activities by
the banks in the lead-up to the financial crash of 2008.
Four years after the crisis precipitated by the banks, not a
single top banker has been prosecuted, let alone convicted. Meanwhile, the same
bankers, and the government officials who shielded them and ensured that they
grew even richer, are demanding that American workers accept the “new normal”
of wages at $13 or less, along with the destruction of pensions, health care
and working conditions.
For all of his
exposures, Barofsky, a Democrat, fails to draw the requisite conclusions,
suggesting that popular rage can “sow the seeds for the types of reform that
will one day break our system free from the corrupting grasp of the megabucks.”
The criminality of the financial system and the complicity of all
of the official institutions are not, however, mere aberrations or blemishes on
an otherwise healthy system. They are expressions of the putrefaction and
failure of the capitalist system itself. Its mortal crisis is reflected above
all in the ever-greater scale of social inequality.
There is no way to
break the power of the financial oligarchy outside of a mass working class
movement armed with a socialist program, including the seizure of the
ill-gotten wealth of the financial mafia and the nationalization of the banks
and major corporations under the democratic control of the working population.
Andre Damon and
Barry Grey
The authors also recommend:
JPMorgan scandal: The tip of the iceberg
[17 July 2012]
[17 July 2012]
Libor scandal exposes banks’ rigging of global rates
[6 July 2012]
[6 July 2012]
THERE’S NO ONE IN AMERICAN HISTORY THAT HAS WORKED FOR
CRIMINAL BANKSTERS MORE THAN BARACK OBAMA! THERE’S NO ONE THAT HAS TAKEN MORE
MONEY FROM BANKSTERS THAN OBAMA.
DURING IS FIRST 2 YEARS IN OFFICE, BANKSTERS MADE MORE THAN
ALL 8 UNDER BUSH! AND NOT ONE HAS BEEN PROSECUTED!
Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption,
and the Hijacking of America [Hardcover]
BY CHARLES H. FERGUSON
Book Description
Publication Date: May 22,
2012
Charles
H. Ferguson, who electrified the world with his Oscar-winning documentary Inside
Job, now explains how a predator elite took over the country, step by
step, and he exposes the networks of academic, financial, and political
influence, in all recent administrations, that prepared the predators’
path to conquest.
Over the last several decades, the United States has undergone one of the most radical social and economic transformations in its history.
· Finance has become America’s dominant industry, while manufacturing, even for high technology industries, has nearly disappeared.
· The financial sector has become increasingly criminalized, with the widespread fraud that caused the housing bubble going completely unpunished.
· Federal tax collections as a share of GDP are at their lowest level in sixty years, with the wealthy and highly profitable corporations enjoying the greatest tax reductions.
· Most shockingly, the United States, so long the beacon of opportunity for the ambitious poor, has become one of the world’s most unequal and unfair societies.
If you’re smart and a hard worker, but your parents aren’t rich, you’re now better off being born in Munich, Germany or in Singapore than in Cleveland, Ohio or New York.
This radical shift did not happen by accident.
Ferguson shows how, since the Reagan administration in the 1980s, both major political parties have become captives of the moneyed elite. It was the Clinton administration that dismantled the regulatory controls that protected the average citizen from avaricious financiers. It was the Bush team that destroyed the federal revenue base with its grotesquely skewed tax cuts for the rich. And it is the Obama White House that has allowed financial criminals to continue to operate unchecked, even after supposed “reforms” installed after the collapse of 2008.
Predator Nation reveals how once-revered figures like Alan Greenspan and Larry Summers became mere courtiers to the elite. Based on many newly released court filings, it details the extent of the crimes—there is no other word—committed in the frenzied chase for wealth that caused the financial crisis. And, finally, it lays out a plan of action for how we might take back our country and the American dream.
Over the last several decades, the United States has undergone one of the most radical social and economic transformations in its history.
· Finance has become America’s dominant industry, while manufacturing, even for high technology industries, has nearly disappeared.
· The financial sector has become increasingly criminalized, with the widespread fraud that caused the housing bubble going completely unpunished.
· Federal tax collections as a share of GDP are at their lowest level in sixty years, with the wealthy and highly profitable corporations enjoying the greatest tax reductions.
· Most shockingly, the United States, so long the beacon of opportunity for the ambitious poor, has become one of the world’s most unequal and unfair societies.
If you’re smart and a hard worker, but your parents aren’t rich, you’re now better off being born in Munich, Germany or in Singapore than in Cleveland, Ohio or New York.
This radical shift did not happen by accident.
Ferguson shows how, since the Reagan administration in the 1980s, both major political parties have become captives of the moneyed elite. It was the Clinton administration that dismantled the regulatory controls that protected the average citizen from avaricious financiers. It was the Bush team that destroyed the federal revenue base with its grotesquely skewed tax cuts for the rich. And it is the Obama White House that has allowed financial criminals to continue to operate unchecked, even after supposed “reforms” installed after the collapse of 2008.
Predator Nation reveals how once-revered figures like Alan Greenspan and Larry Summers became mere courtiers to the elite. Based on many newly released court filings, it details the extent of the crimes—there is no other word—committed in the frenzied chase for wealth that caused the financial crisis. And, finally, it lays out a plan of action for how we might take back our country and the American dream.
Guest
Reviewer: Simon Johnson on Predator Nation by Charles H. Ferguson
Simon
Johnson is coauthor of 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the
Next Financial Meltdown and White House Burning: The Founding Fathers,
Our National Debt, and Why It Matters To You.
Predator Nation demolishes the view that the global financial
crisis was merely some sort of freak accident. Charles Ferguson makes a
convincing case that the world’s banking system was brought to the brink of
complete collapse in 2008–09 by a virulent combination of unchecked greed and
criminal behavior.
This is an epic crime story with an apparently clean getaway,
courtesy of the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations. Both
presidents proved unwilling to hold anyone to account—or even to launch
meaningful investigations.
Leading bankers walked away with billions of dollars in
unjustified compensation. The costs imposed on the rest of us can be measured
in the trillions of dollars.
Predator Nation provides a roadmap for prosecution,
systematically covering the banks involved, the names of culpable executives,
the obvious crimes, the precise laws broken, and the evidence hiding in plain
sight. No doubt it will be widely ignored by our legal officials.
Ferguson’s points are also intensely political. Reckless behavior
by bankers can be traced back to the bipartisan consensus around deregulating
finance in recent decades. This result is a socially destructive industry with
immense political power—and capable of defeating all attempts at meaningful
reform. The continued predominance of rogue finance is greatly facilitated by
its effective corruption of American academia and many so-called “independent
experts” (documented in Charles Ferguson’s Oscar-winning movie, Inside Job.)
Big banks hold American politics in a death grip. To understand
this—and to start to think about how to break this grip—read Predator Nation
and give a copy to everyone you know.
*
THE
BANKSTER-OWNED PRESIDENT PROMISED HIS CRIMINAL BANKSTER DONORS NO real
REGULATION, NO PRISON TIME, AND UNLIMITED PILLAGING OF THE NATION’S ECONOMY!
DESPITE
THE DEVASTATION THESE BANKSTERS HAVE CAUSED AMERICANS, THEIR PROFITS SOARED
GREATER DURING OBAMA’S FIRST TWO YEARS, THAN ALL EIGHT UNDER BUSH. SO HAVE
FORECLOSURES!
Records show that
four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial industry
giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207)
and Citigroup ($358,054).
*
“Barack Obama's favorite
banker faces losses of $2 billion and
possibly more -- all because of the complex, now-you-see-it-now-you-don't trading
in exotic financial instruments that he has so ardently lobbied Congress not to
regulate.”
Is JPMorgan's Loss a Canary in a Coal Mine?
Posted: 05/16/2012 4:49 pm
That sound of
shattered glass you've been hearing is the iconic portrait of Jamie Dimon splintering
as it hits the floor of JPMorgan Chase. As the Good Book says, "Pride
goeth before a fall," and the sleek, silver-haired,
too-smart-for-his-own-good CEO of America's largest bank has been turning every
television show within reach into a confessional booth. Barack Obama's favorite
banker faces losses of $2 billion and
possibly more -- all because of the complex, now-you-see-it-now-you-don't
trading in exotic financial instruments that he has so ardently lobbied
Congress not to regulate.
No comments:
Post a Comment