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POPSACORN foresaw the foreclosure crisis in 2001
More: Moreover, Oakland's law would have gone much farther than requiring that borrowers could afford loans. In 2001, ACORN officials already recognized that the driving force behind the subprime lending was the ability of brokers to chop up risky mortgages, repackage them with good loans as "securities," and sell them to other banks on a largely unregulated market. When homeowners who couldn't afford their loans later defaulted on them, these securities became widely known as "toxic assets" and were the primary cause of the world financial crisis… But if Oakland's law had been widely adopted, the bailout likely would have been unnecessary and the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression probably averted. Why? Because the city's ordinance not only would have held mortgage brokers liable for making bad loans, but also every other bank that later bought pieces of those bad loans after they were securitized. In short, the market for subprime loans would have dried up.
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POPSAmerican Casino: A Documentary About the Home-Mortgage Crisis more @ clip source the Cockburns meet one guy in "American Casino" who understands the whole mess better than most, a California real estate investor named Jeff Greene who smelled the end of the housing bubble around 2006 and bet $1 billion against the mid-decade exuberance of Wall Street. Sitting in his walled and gated beach compound in Malibu, Greene calmly tells the camera that the opportunity for his successful hedge bet (which has yielded $500 million so far) involved massive pain for millions of homeowners.
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POPSSisters Created a Successful Integrated Neighborhood In one instance in the early 1970s, Polsky recalled, a black clergyman wanted to sell. Every home on his block had been purchased by blacks, Polsky said. She and Melvin asked him to let them hold the house for a white buyer. "He got annoyed and said, 'You're asking me to discriminate against my own people.' I said, 'What we don't want is separation. We're asking you to help integrate the community,' " Polsky said. He agreed. "And so we broke that trend, and then black people came and white people came. Then it became an integrated block. That was our purpose, to integrate every bloc
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POPSLet Greed-om Ring Inhofe needs to brush up on his econ 101. The government places many restrictions on what business can and cannot do. Even setting that aside, ethically big bonus CEOs have shot themselves in their own feet due to their own actions. Tone deafness seems to be the norm on Corporate Avenue these days.
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POPSLoan officers @ WaMu pressured to approve loans "No matter what" This is what people mean by "predatory lending". The whole industry went out looking for people who didn't qualify to give loans to. At the same time, they helped rewrite the bankruptcy laws to make it harder for people to get out from under crushing debt. See also: - In Debt We Trust - Where Does Money Come From?
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POPSThe Debt Trap Our personal information is our own property and without our permission cannot be used in any way. Isn't that simple? So THEY possess and use property stolen from us for THEIR own advantage. Isn't this a crime? More, they got us in trouble, debt trouble with our property. To get rip us off more and more. How long it can last?
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POPSMcCain pushes $300 billion mortgage plan I def. think he is Fracking high on something. First, this "plan" would piss off a lot of people who bought houses they could afford and would then watch others who bought houses they could not afford (granted given bad advice/loans) and have taxpayers bail them out so they can stay in homes they really should not be in, in the first place. If there had been oversight in the govt and better regulation, none of these people would be in the situation they are in because it would have been a crime for these douche bag mortgage brokers and others to pitch them and give them the loans. So now this guy wants to take another $300 billion on top of the almost trillion the tax payers have already put into this mess. What a fracking idiot.
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POPSWHO DUNNIT???THIS MEGA CRISIS Summary of facts of who did what, where and why. Enough blame to go around and it begs the question? WHO COULD REALLY IMPLEMENT CHANGE?????
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POPSFactCheck: Who's really responsible for crisis? "Screwing up takes a great deal of cooperation." D's blame R's and R's blame D's - but those accusations (and I have made them, too, sorry to say) are far too simplistic to help us fix the problem. Here's a list of contributors to the perfect storm.
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POPSHundreds Swept Up In Mortgage Fraud Arrests In separate arrests, two former Bear Stearns managers in New York were indicted Thursday, becoming the first executives to face criminal charges related to the collapse of the subprime mortgage market. Mortgage foreclosure rescue scams, which promise to help struggling homeowners stave off foreclosure and keep their homes, also have become a major problem, officials said. Typically, unsuspecting owners sign over their homes and then find they are victims of fraud. Officials declined to say who might be the next corporate target, but Mueller said the investigations focus on accounting fraud, insider trading, and failure to disclose the value of mortgage-related securities and other investments. Under review for potential fraud are: investment banks, hedge funds, credit rating agencies, brokerage houses and due diligence firms - which evaluate loans packaged into investments.
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POPSMcCain's Treasury Sec. pick tied to Subprime Meltdown More: For his work, Gramm and two other lobbyists collected $750,000 in fees from UBS’s American subsidiary. Wall Street firms are increasingly under scrutiny for contributing to the economic downturn by packaging and selling risky mortgage securities. When the home loans tied to the mortgages defaulted, investors and the banks lost billions, contributing to a widespread credit crunch. UBS has written down more then $18 billion in exposure to subprime loans and other risky securities and is considering cutting as many as 8,000 job Now, some housing experts and economists see Gramm’s thinking in the recent housing proposal from McCain, the Republican Party’s presumed presidential nominee. Gramm is often a surrogate for the Arizona senator, particularly in meetings focused on the economy. And McCain has hinted he’d consider the former Texas senator for Treasury secretary in a McCain administration.
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POPSUh oh... Oh boy. Here we go. I hoped to never see a Republican pull this crap.
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POPSSubprime Crackdown by the FBI According to an FBI report out last year, the FBI is most concerned with "fraud for profit." This often involves multiple loans and elaborate schemes perpetrated to gain illicit proceeds from property sales. The report said such schemes usually involved "gross misrepresentions concerning appraisals and loan documents."
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POPSStress at Sowood? After the shut down of mortgage-laden hedge funds at UBS and Bear Stearns, Sowood, the $3 billion fund founded by the guys who used to run Harvard's endowment, seems to have having trouble finding buyers for some of its assets, prompting fears other funds and brokers will mark down their holdings and force an industry-wide fire sale. -- Liz Moyer
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POPSNightmare Mortgages "After prolonging the boom, these exotic mortgages could worsen the bust. They also betray such a lack of due diligence on the part of lenders and borrowers that it raises questions of what other problems may be lurking. And most of the pain will be borne by ordinary people, not the lenders, brokers, or financiers who created the problem."
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