Posted on 08/05/2012 3:49:57 PM PDT by tselatysr
The epidemic of home foreclosures has been made far worse than necessary due to the banks' unwillingness to work with homeowners. Although Congress has passed numerous laws to force the banks to assist homeowners, the banks have found ways not to comply. The banks also brazenly break other laws to further their profits at the expense of homeowners, most recently by falsifying interest rates in the LIBOR scandal.
Regular middle class Americans everywhere have unjustly lost their homes to foreclosure. They ended up in homes they could not sell due to the Federal Reserve Board, not their own actions. The Fed manipulates interest rates in order to grow or shrink the economy. It kept rates artificially low several years ago for a lengthy period of time. At the same time, Congress relaxed the laws on lending. The Obama administration ordered banks to lend to risky borrowers or face lawsuits. Many people with poor credit bought homes who were clearly risky borrowers. A large number were issued subprime loans they could not afford, ensuring their default.
Once the defaults began in 2007, the abandoned homes flooded the housing market, driving down home values for everyone. This left most homeowners unable to sell their homes, since most homeowners have a sizable mortgage. Someone who bought a home with a mortgage for $200,000 saw the value of their home dip to as low as half of that. Upside down, there is no way for someone to sell their home without owing the bank a considerable amount.
As people began losing their jobs due to the recession, they could not downsize to a smaller house or apartment because of being upside down on their mortgages. Many tried to short sale their homes, in the hopes of walking away without owing anything. In order to force the banks to accept a short sale, homeowners had to play chicken and stop paying their mortgages. Other homeowners stopped paying their mortgages in hopes of getting a loan modification, relying upon laws that were passed requiring banks to work with homeowners on loan modifications.
Very few of these homeowners were able to save their homes from foreclosure. The banks routinely turned down their requests for loan modifications, for trumped-up excuses like not turning in enough information or ironically missing mortgage payments, a catch-22. The banks turned down their short sale offers, for equally invalid excuses like claiming perfectly reasonable offers were not a good deal, or losing their paperwork. Finally, when some homeowners began to see their home values bounce back this year, allowing them to sell, the banks would not give them a payoff amount but went ahead with foreclosure.
Under Obama's Homeowner and Stability Plan of 2009, the banks were given bonuses for each loan modification they implemented; $1,000 to the bank and $1,500 to the servicer. The banks put some homeowners in temporary "trial" loan modifications, collected the bonuses, then ultimately rejected the homeowners from permanent modifications and foreclosed on their homes. Half of the homeowners who entered the program were booted out. It soon became apparent that the program had been implemented to stave off foreclosures until after the 2010 election. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, architect of the 2009 Troubled Asset Relief Program, TARP, cruelly referred to the program as homeowners "foaming the runway" for the distressed banks looking for a safe landing. Neil Barofsky, former special inspector for TARP, has written a book exposing the fraud, entitled "Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street." Barofsky is a Democrat and contributor to Obama, but was so appalled by what he encountered that he went public with the scandal.
Of the $46 billion in federal aid directed to distressed homeowners under TARP, only 10 percent has been distributed. One of the programs, which allocates $2.7 in TARP funds to encourage lenders to write down or eliminate second liens when refinancing, has not helped a single homeowner. The Treasury Department never bothered establishing any goals for distribution of the funds. The Obama administration's Home Affordable Modification Program, HAMP, put into place to force banks to reduce the interest rate on homes for those who could not afford their mortgages, has helped hardly anyone. Fewer than one million homeowners are in the program, even though millions need assistance. It has been such a failure that House Republicans voted to terminate HAMP last year.
Meanwhile, as innocent people were losing their homes, the Obama administration awarded billions of dollars in bailouts to real estate speculators. The $700 billion government bailout intended to stabilize the economy, known as the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, has gone almost entirely to the banks, not homeowners.
There is no such thing as a free market in the housing industry. The Fed regulates the banks by manipulating interest rates, and Congress, the president and the Treasury regulate what banks can and cannot do. It is painfully clear that the banks will behave unethically and illegally if they can get away with it. The banking system has become big government doing the bidding of big business. America is fast becoming more like Russia than the capitalist free market economy it once was.
The solution is to abolish the Fed. Without its manipulation of interest rates, the housing market will not have wide fluctuations, since people who cannot afford to buy homes will face free market interest rates, not artificially lowered ones. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-run lenders with a history of financial corruption, should also be abolished. Instead of Congress passing failed laws regulating the banks, banks should not be bailed out if they choose to issue risky home loans. Then when a bank goes under, innocent homeowners should have some kind of recourse to protect their homes, such as class-action lawsuits.
Americans who did nothing wrong are losing their homes as a result of irresponsible government enabling the banks. It is difficult to see how Obama can win reelection when one in seven homeowners is in default or foreclosure.
Article shared using the Free Republish tool on Tea Party Tribune.
The banks made BILLIONS of those loans, BILLIONS and BILLIONS.
“The Community Reinvestment Act destroyed the banking industry by turning our banks into proxy welfare offices. As the banks drowned in the bad debt, they began to flail. These flailings have been mischaracterized by the anti-free marketers among us as dishonesty and greed.
This wreck was caused by do-gooders in D.C., not by the nation’s bankers who ran their industry honestly and faithfully for over two centuries before the CRA. “
Exactly! When I was selling Real Estate, during the Catarrh administration, “Red Lining” still existed. And for a good reason. Back then, you had to have a 20% down payment. Banks in Cleveland wouldn’t give loans in areas like Hough, because they knew most of them would never be paid off. The in stepped Catarrh, and Clinton upped the ante. And Obama, in Chicago, threatened to sue banks who “Red Lined,” Banks got screwed! What were they going to do with all these useless loans? Lose tons of money? No. They bundled them up and sold them to anyone dumb enough to buy them.
Lotsa other crap was involved though.
This article is BS. As a Tea party member I reject this article.It is convenient to blame the banks, but look at the laws that forced them to make bad loans. Look at the mandates forced by democrats on FNMA and FRMAC to make bad loans and then loon at the democrats that were running them and looting them. Look at the morons who refinanced 4 and 5 times sucking the equity out of their homes to go on vacation.There is a lot of guilt to go around but you should start with the community reinvestment act. Remember Bush tried to stop it and was thwarted by DEMOCRATS.
“The banks made BILLIONS of those loans, BILLIONS and BILLIONS.”
Correct, in a $15 trillion/year economy. I wouldn’t expect any less.
Stick your ‘empathy’ where the sun don’t shine...
“I just remember the S&Ls - not exactly honesty and faithfulness from the banking sector there.”
From http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/SavingsandLoanCrisis.html
“The bankruptcy of the FSLIC did not occur overnight; the FSLIC was a disaster waiting to happen for many years. Numerous public policies, some dating back to the 1930s, created the disaster. Some policies were well intended but misguided. Others had lost whatever historical justification they might once have had. Yet others were desperate attempts to postpone addressing a rapidly worsening situation. All of these policies, however, greatly compounded the S&L problem and made its eventual resolution more difficult and much more expensive. When disaster finally hit the S&L industry in 1980, the federal government managed it very badly.”
I highly recommend you read the article - it lists the 15 causes of the S&L crisis. Please avoid Wikipedia’s hatchet job.
“I highly recommend you read the article - it lists the 15 causes of the S&L crisis. Please avoid Wikipedia’s hatchet job.”
Regardless, a lot of bankers (and others) went to jail. I’m sure at least some of them were guilty.
“Let’s keep our eyes on the real target here and the real source of this problem”
The big banks are deeply intertwined with govt officials. They own stock in the banks, sit on the boards, family members work for the banks, bankers go to work in the govt.
Its really one and the same.
Neither party was an innocent, and bankers lending into the bubble knew that the risk from many of the loans was higher than other more traditional loans. They just wanted to get clear before the bubble burst, like the developers, speculators, and buyers. But bubbles pop, and when they do a lot of money is lost. Derivative transactions, including those by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac added to the losses.
If the government wasn't up to their ears in the real estate and credit markets, the taxpayers wouldn't have ended up on the hook for the bad loans. And if banks with Federally insured deposits had to pay insurance fees proportional to the real risk they would not have been speculating in risky credit instruments.
The economic mess we are all dealing with can't be blamed on the deadbeat borrowers, as much as the government and the banking industry would like to. The blame must lie also with the lenders who took the opposite side of the deal with the borrowers. Put another way - if you lend a million dollars to a hairdresser in Chicago who has a $20,000 a year income so they can buy a bunch of apartment buildings and then resell those loans as AAA grade securities, aren't you trying to "get something for nothing?"
creditor = debtor
Gotta agree with you, the banks didn’t owe those homeowners loan modifications.
No wonder no homeowners were helped. What can you do with two dollars and seventy cents?
Bad news for you: a LOT of people caught in this mess are highly responsible, hard-working, credit-worthy conservatives who did not think they were getting something for nothing. They bought houses they could easily afford long before the recession started and paid their mortgages faithfully.
This wreck was caused by do-gooders in D.C., not by the nation’s bankers who ran their industry honestly and faithfully for over two centuries before the CRA.
Most of those bankers are dead. The people running things now aren’t cut from the same cloth.
Great. So why do you include them as 'caught in this mess'?
If they are still paying their mortgages, there should be no problem, even though the value may be less that the mortgage.
My paid-for home is worth less now...so do you include me 'in this mess'?
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