-- Dr Adrian Rogers.
Posted on 02/21/2009 8:07:44 AM PST by IbJensen
Open most any urban newspaper to the foreclosure notices, and you'll find the list heavy with Hispanic names. Times are tough for Americans of every demographic, but for Latinos they are grimmer still.
Is this the end of the Latino-American Dream? The answer, in Spanish, is No.
President Barack Obama has just unveiled a $75 billion plan that includes helping homeowners who are behind in their monthly payments but could keep up if their mortgage terms were eased a bit. Many Latinos would fit this category.
Almost one in 10 Latino homeowners reported missing a mortgage payment -- or being unable to make a full one -- in 2008, according to a Pew Hispanic Center survey. Over a third said they feared their own home might go into foreclosure. For foreign-born Latinos, that number rose to 53 percent. (Pew doesn't ask about immigration status.)
Many Latinos bought or refinanced homes at the worst possible time -- just before the housing bubble went splat. Lots of people fell for the pitch that real-estate was an up-only escalator into the American Dream. But with more than half of Latino families still renting their homes, they became a very juicy target for the builders, brokers, loan originators and banks seeking to prosper off mortgage mania.
As with other fans of easy credit, many Latinos were reckless in their borrowing. Some lied about income on their loan applications, often egged on by brokers and mortgage companies. But more were simply clueless. Mortgage companies wrote contracts designed to confuse even the most fluent speakers of English. Those with limited English were especially hard-pressed to understand the terms.
Subprime mortgages were invented for borrowers with poor credit ratings. They come with higher interest rates and often-punishing fees to supposedly compensate lenders for the added risk.
But the road to riches was to make the deal, collect the fees, then palm the dodgy loans onto other investors. Wall Street took its cut packaging the mortgages into securities.
For an unscrupulous lender, the ultimate win-win is convincing a good credit risk that he or she isn't one -- and can only qualify for an expensive subprime mortgage. Subprime lenders found minority neighborhoods fertile ground for playing this trick. For example, 40 percent of African Americans who took out subprime mortgages would have qualified for more-affordable mainstream loans.
The subprime craze crested in 2005. That year, less-than-prime mortgages sold to Hispanics jumped 169 percent. (They rose 110 percent for whites and 122 percent for blacks.)
Further lowering the guard of Hispanic home-buyers were the strong efforts of their so-called allies -- low-income housing groups and Latino lawmakers -- to herd them into the tent. The Hispanic Congressional Caucus Institute's Hogar (''hearth'' in Spanish) initiative was funded by the subprime industry. Subprime executives served as advisors.
Rep. Joe Baca, D-Calif., pushed for lower lending standards as a way, he said, to ''open the door to the American Dream.'' Brokers hawking the most toxic subprime products rushed into his 58-percent Hispanic San Bernardino district, now one of America's foreclosure capitals.
The question must be asked: How many people now facing the loss of their homes would be OK had been given the easier terms of a prime mortgage? The Obama Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan may provide part of the answer.
Things will calm down. The United States will recover from the economic crisis. Debt-burdened families will restore sanity to their personal finances. (They've already begun.) Meanwhile, lower realestate values could help some who lost their home get back in the homeownership game. For the many Latinos among them, the American Dream is not dead; it just has been put on hold.
What about the rest of us, Froma? (What kind of name is that?)
Things will calm down. The United States will recover from the economic crisis.
As long as the sewer-swilling DemocRATs and the Marxist Obomba are in charge: forget it!
I guess checking if they’re legal first is out...
In America
Move over or move out honky!
FTA:
“The answer, in Spanish, is No.”
Isn’t “No” the Spanish word for “No”?
Sorry, what I meant was-the word’s the exact same in either English or Spanish.
People have forgotten what charity is.
If your neighbor needs help, and the community makes sacrifices to provide it, that is charity.
If a criminal illegal takes out a mortgage he has no hope of paying, and then the government steals your wallet to make the payments for him, that is not charity. That is criminal fraud and tyranny.
Carlos Slim alone has enough money to build a comfortable home for every illegal back in Mexico. But that’s not the way the Mexican system works. Instead, the rulling classes send them here, to ship back money that will enrich them still more.
But, of course, Obama is buying votes with this theft.
Thanks, President Bush, for doing nothing about illegals or CRA mortgages for eight yeras, thus giving Obama this perfect opportunity to wreck the country and ensure his rule as a President for Life.
The American dream is to be denied to American-born, native-English speaking white citizens.
Thanks also go out to RINO Orin Hatch who got behind this massive effort.
So they were crooks too.
“As with other fans of easy credit, many Latinos were reckless in their borrowing. Some lied about income on their loan applications, often egged on by brokers and mortgage companies. But more were simply clueless. Mortgage companies wrote contracts designed to confuse even the most fluent speakers of English. Those with limited English were especially hard-pressed to understand the terms.”
BS. A 5 year old can understand if he has a nickel and something costs a dime, he doesn’t have enough money. Groups like LaRaza and banks like BAC schooled these folks on how to get more than they could afford. The American dream = take from us to give to those who didn’t earn squat!
And the MSM jumps on the liberal bandwagon to trumpet every hard luck story that puts Santelli in his place...
Almost two years ago (March 2007) I posted here on FR that the subprime mortgage problem was an illegal alien problem that would lead to a collapse of the Ponzi scheme mortgage market.
I even showed how the subprimes going into foreclosure almost mapped exactly with the areas of concentrated illegal alien populations, to the ZIP codes.
I was raked over the coals by all the financial geniuses herein who lectured me with the same financial gobbledygook that the pundits and politicians were using, totally ignoring the obvious if they took the effort to review the data.
Now this article proves exactly what I said. The subprime foreclosure mess that started the avalanche had its roots in the overnight housing needs of 12-20 million (and more accurately 30-40 million) illegals. Lenders took advantage of this gaggle of illegals to provide the phony mortgage base for their derivative paper creations, leverage these mortgages into other investment structures that were guaranteed to fail when the Ponzi scheme collapsed.
I will now go off to gloat. I told you so.
We are a conquered people and had better get used to being exploited. "Woe to the conquered!"
Surely you jest....
Some lied about income on their loan applications, often egged on by brokers and mortgage companies. But more were simply clueless. Mortgage companies wrote contracts designed to confuse even the most fluent speakers of English. Those with limited English were especially hard-pressed to understand the terms.
It wasn't their fault - they were all duped. As in "victims".
See any $20,000 tulip bulbs for sale? Only a fool OR dem tries to prop up a bubble.
The MSM will trumpet every hard luck story that puts Santelli in his place.
Hispanics, who had much more massive immigration than Asians, for a long time resisted this identification and in fact there is still a fair amount of suspicion of blacks among Hispanics. But the fact that they were often subject to the efforts of left-wing movements, such as Cesar Chavez' farmworkers union, etc., made them much more willing to think of themselves as a grievance-fueled underclass.
Generally, what has happened in places like Miami is that newer groups, such as Venezuelans, have arrived and don't want any part of the welfare state; many of them are fleeing Communism in their home countries and are well off and expect to be even better off after starting a business here in the US.
But over the years, you've had a growing, Marxist-influenced group, who unfortunately are the ones who tend to go into politics while everybody else is out trying to get ahead in business. So now you have a large number of overtly left-wing Hispanic leaders, who of course identify with black grievance movements, the Democrat Party, and Latin American Marxism. Accordingly, they adopted the gimme mentality. The result has been terrible for those Hispanics who actually wanted to achieve the American Dream the way all other immigrant groups did.
But maybe it doesn't matter; it looks like none of us are going to be able to achieve the American Dream anymore. Bambi has basically snatched it away in less than a month.
I seem to recall the position you took earlier. And, as it turned out, you were certainly right.
But I'd argue with one statement above: Was it "lenders" or was it Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae who were responsible for the phony mortgage base?
After all, it was Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae who encouraged such loans by offering to buy them (indeed, subjected lending institutions to punishment if they did not cooperate with their "affordable housing" policy). And it was Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae who then consolidated and re-sold these mortgages to the financial market in order to fund additional purchases.
The more mortgages Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bought, the bigger the bonuses for Franklin Raines, Jamie Gorelick, et al.
Looks to me like the federal government is the one who created the situation, not the lenders.
AKA “Predatory Borrowers”.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.