Free Republic

A Long Island couple is home free after an outraged judge gave them an amazing Thanksgiving present — canceling their debt to ruthless bankers trying to toss them out on the street.

Make My GSE a McGE Sarah Carlsruh, October 22, 2009 The burden of bailing out mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae will fall to taxpayers, predicted Brooklyn Law School Professor David Reiss, at a cost which the Cato Institute suggested could top $200 billion. The Cato Institute hosted a lecture on October 19th called, “Which Way Forward for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac?,” where economics and real estate savvy speakers discussed secondary mortgage markets and the government sponsored enterprises (GSE’s) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Subprime loans were, until recently, considered by the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) to be...

William White predicted the approaching financial crisis years before 2007's subprime meltdown. But central bankers preferred to listen to his great rival Alan Greenspan instead, with devastating consequences for the global economy. William White had a pretty clear idea of what he wanted to do with his life after shedding his pinstriped suit and entering retirement. White, a Canadian, worked for various central banks for 39 years, most recently serving as chief economist for the central bank for all central bankers, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), headquartered in Basel, Switzerland. Then, after 15 years in the world's most secretive...

It's something any bank would demand to know before handing out a loan: Where's the money going? But after receiving billions in aid from U.S. taxpayers, the nation's largest banks say they can't track exactly how they're spending the money or they simply refuse to discuss it. "We've lent some of it. We've not lent some of it. We've not given any accounting of, 'Here's how we're doing it,'" said Thomas Kelly, a spokesman for JPMorgan Chase, which received $25 billion in emergency bailout money. "We have not disclosed that to the public. We're declining to."

Guillermo Loaiza, a loan officer for a unit of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. in Phoenix, has resigned from the board of Acorn Housing, a spokesman for J.P. Morgan said. Acorn Housing is an affiliate of the community-organizing group Acorn, the full name of which is the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Both Acorn and Acorn Housing have been under fire since the recent release of secretly recorded videos that depicted Acorn employees offering advice on evading taxes, setting up brothels and smuggling illegal immigrants. J.P. Morgan has said it doesn't have a regular working relationship with Acorn...

    1) Circa 1994/1995, Bill Ayers ghostwrites Dreams from My Father. 2) Barack Hussein Obama Jr thereby agrees to the publication of a fictional account of his own life, which includes a tale of a bogus Caucasian girlfriend who is in fact based on William Ayers's memories of his deceased lover, Diana Oughton. 3) Diana Oughton has perished in the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion of 1970, and Ayers has gone on to marry Bernardine Dohrn [Ohrnstein] during his period in hiding. 4) Bernadine Dohrn [Ohrnstein] has received her JD in 1967, from the University of Chicago Law School, but...

A landmark ruling in a recent Kansas Supreme Court case may have given millions of distressed homeowners the legal wedge they need to avoid foreclosure. In Landmark National Bank v. Kesler, 2009 Kan. LEXIS 834, the Kansas Supreme Court held that a nominee company called MERS has no right or standing to bring an action for foreclosure. MERS is an acronym for Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, a private company that registers mortgages electronically and tracks changes in ownership. The significance of the holding is that if MERS has no standing to foreclose, then nobody has standing to foreclose – on...

The Subprime home mortgage collapse...a Primer. It's ALL about the CRA of 1977 Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977 - This required banks to offer credit throughout their entire market area for “underserved” populations and small businesses. The CRA gave incentives to help low income borrowers become “home owners”. Liberals call this group “low income borrowers”. Conservatives call them a RISK!The CRA was passed by the Carter administration. In 1995 the Clinton administration authorized subprime loans under the CRA. Democrats added these provisions for the securitization of subprime loans and then ENFORCED the lending to high risk individuals. By 2000,...

Stimulus: The group that pushed banks into the risky loans that brought the economy down is now eligible for a huge chunk of stimulus cash. The stimulus plan does create jobs — for community activists.As in any agreement, contract or piece of legislation, the devil is in the details. So it is with the stimulus package percolating in Congress. Analysts are beginning to figure out that only a small percentage of the money will actually trickle down into the economy in the first two years, not enough to do much stimulating. Yet in this package is a $4 billion pot...

Sonia Sotomayor, Barack Obama's nominee for a seat on the Supreme Court, served on the board of a New York State agency charged with providing discounted mortgages to middle and low income homebuyers from 1987 to 1992. During the time, she was a consistent advocate of pushing the agency to provide more mortgages to low-income home buyers. In short, she advocated the kind of aggressive lending practices that helped create the mortgage meltdown.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Barack Obama is considering former top military leaders among his possible running mates, according to a senator who met Tuesday with the Democratic presidential candidate's vice presidential vetting team. North Dakota Sen. Kent Conrad told The Associated Press said the team asked him about potential candidates from three broad categories _ current top elected officials, former top elected officials and former top military leaders. Conrad would not disclose which names they discussed, and the Obama campaign has been keeping the process a closely guarded secret. "We talked about many names," Conrad said, including "some that are out...

GWB 2002 Speech :�More and more people own their homes in America today. Yet we have a problem here in America because fewer than half the Hispanics and African Americans own their own homes. That’s a home ownership gap; a gap that we got to work together to close. And by the end of this decade we’ll increase the number of minority homeowners (future Obama voters ) by 5.5 million families. “ “One of the major obstacles to minority home-ownership is financing. Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac (who I will bail out in 2008) have committed to provide more money...

Barney Frank wants credit for putting out a fire that he helped to start. President Obama has declared an era of responsibility. But to Democrats responsibility means blaming Republicans for everything that goes wrong. Aside from the President himself, perhaps no Democrat is more eager to lay blame at the doorstep of conservatives than Barney Frank, Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. I bore witness to Frank's song and dance routine during a talk he recently gave at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. A video of the forum can be found here. (http://www.hks.harvard.edu/news-events/news/articles/forum-frank-apr09) It is worth...

As world leaders in London put the finishing touches to their G20 communiqué, Michael Osinski was up to his thighs in water on the other side of the Atlantic, retrieving oyster cages at low tide off a misty Long Island. Nowadays, he supplies oysters to some of the best restaurants in Manhattan. But he was following the efforts to reach agreement on tackling the global economic crisis with a deep personal interest. For in his previous incarnation, Mr Osinski played a crucial, if inadvertent, role in stirring up the financial whirlwind that has battered the world. As the top computer...

Before beginning, I want to quote from this Wall Street Journal article last fall. Is a housing bailout the solution for clogged-up credit markets and a faltering economy? What the Fed has been doing and did again yesterday hasn't really worked, notwithstanding the pops it produces in the stock market every time it shovels liquidity into the system. The Fed's latest move provides financial institutions another $200 billion in direct short-term lending against their unsaleable housing collateral. The Dow Jones jumped 416 points. But it won't restart markets for the underlying collateral. Where are the speculators, vultures and hedge funds?...

Many conservatives, myself included, have backed away from the political fray since November 4, 2008. Each of us has his or her own reasons for doing so, but I suspect that those reasons fall into two broad categories for most: (1) A sense of hopelessness and futility, even as regards the pen and the ballot box, to make a difference in the direction in which our republic is being steamrolled. Rampant ignorance and apathy brought us to the brink, and evil men in leadership positions are gleefully providing the final push. (2) Where to begin even attempting to bring...

From New York Times September 11, 2003 By Stephen Labaton New Agency Proposed to Oversee Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago. Under the plan, disclosed at a Congressional hearing today, a new agency would be created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that are the two largest players in the mortgage lending industry. The new agency would have the authority, which now rests with Congress, to set...

This is great...... Category: News & Politics

Barack Obama’s grandmother told him to smile more. Bill Clinton tells the new president to strut more. As the country takes a bullet train to bankruptcy, the last Democratic president urged the current one to “embody” that old American spunk. That spirit of — as they sing in “Oklahoma” — “We know we belong to the land and the land we belong to is grand! A-YIP-I-O-EE-AY!” “It’s worth reminding the American people that for more than 230 years everyone who bet against America lost money,” Clinton told Chris Cuomo on “Good Morning America.” “I just want him to embody that...

There is little doubt that ACORN is feeling its oats now that one of their own is in the White House. The payback by Obama is just beginning and the only question in my mind is when we start calling these thugs "Obama's Brown Shirts?" A community organization breaks into a foreclosed home in what they are calling an act of civil disobedience. The group wants to train homeowners facing eviction on peaceful ways they can remain in their homes. Derek Valcourt reports their actions are not without controversy. Near Patterson Park, the padlock on the door and the sign...

Dear Mortgage Holder, Obama’s latest plan must sound pretty sweet to you. You bought a house and paid too much for it. It didn’t look that way at first because after you bought the house, it went up in value. Prices were rising everywhere fast. Reasoning that nothing could go wrong, you took out a home equity loan on the increased value so you could get that flat screen TV and some other things you “needed.” You really ran up those credit cards. But then the housing prices started falling to more realistic levels. Sure, they fell fast and some...

Here is video of President Barack Obama today announcing a $75 Billion bailout plan for an estimated 7-9 million homeowners who are facing foreclosure . . . . (Watch Video)

Just how did Americans come to lose $10 trillion in real estate and stock wealth?....And it was Clinton who initially spread the subprime rot to Wall Street. To help Fannie and Freddie reach their "affirmative action" lending quotas, HUD in 1995 let them get affordable-housing credit for buying subprime securities that included loans to low-income borrowers. Less than two years later, Freddie partnered with Wall Street investment banker Bear Stearns to issue the first securitizations of low-income CRA loans. There's even a press release still available on the Web that memorializes the historic deal, which dumped hundreds of millions of...

Mortgage CEO's admit the government pressured them to make bad loans. http://thebulletin.us/articles/2008/12/12/business/doc4941ec5fa6214999572928.txt

Chinese property hunters to raid US By Geoff Dyer in Beijing Published: December 5 2008 20:10 | Last updated: December 5 2008 20:10 Chinese bargain hunters are preparing to descend on American cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, where homeowners have suffered some of the steepest price falls in the US. SouFun, the biggest real estate website in China, is organising a trip next month to look at properties in California and possibly Nevada. Liu Jian, the company’s chief operating officer, said about 300 people had expressed interest in the idea in the three days since it was...

Housing Crisis: A new report from the Associated Press claims that the mortgage meltdown is due largely to President Bush's failure to act in 2005. Sounds plausible — until you actually look at the facts."Under pressure, U.S. eased lending rules," reads the AP special report's headline. But "U.S." is really a misnomer. The news service really means "Bush." "The Bush administration backed off proposed crackdowns on no-money-down, interest-only mortgages years before the economy collapsed, buckling to pressure from some of the same banks that have now failed," the report asserts. The report goes on to catalog what it says are...

Housing: For years, a self-described "bank terrorist" blackmailed banks into making bad home loans in our inner cities. Now those loans are defaulting by the millions, and he's blaming banks.Bruce Marks, founder of the leftist Neighborhood Assistance Corp. of America, makes a good living shaking down banks for loans to deadbeat borrowers that he thinks are entitled to homes. Last month, he and about 100 urban protesters stormed Fannie Mae's headquarters, demanding it stop foreclosures on subprime houses — the same homes his group pressured Fannie to fund. As usual, the bullying tactics worked: Fannie Mae is now reviewing every...

On the eve of what may be the most important election of our time, the financial catastrophe that many believe will most influence Tuesday's vote remains only partially covered by the major media. IBD has run many articles and editorials on the mortgage meltdown, including a 7,500-word history from Web magazine American Thinker on Thursday. This timeline is condensed from that article, written by M. Jay Wells. (Click here to read the full version.) It lays out the essential facts of the crisis, which at its heart is a tale of misguided government intervention rather than a failure of free-market...

WASHINGTON – Barack Obama's campaign has approached Illinois Rep. Rahm Emanuel about possibly serving as White House chief of staff, officials said Thursday as the marathon presidential race entered its final, frenzied stretch with a Democratic tilt. The disclosure came as Republican John McCain, in need of a comeback, focused on pocketbook issues amid fresh signs of a recession. "Ohio is hurting now, people in Ohio are having trouble staying in their homes, keeping their jobs," he said as he set out on a two-day bus tour of the state.

"This corruption was encouraged by Democrats in Congress and abetted by Senator Obama."

Plaintiffs filed their class action lawsuit on July 6, 1994, alleging that Citibank had engaged in redlining practices in the Chicago metropolitan area in violation of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA), 15 U.S.C. 1691; the Fair Housing Act, 42 U.S.C. 3601-3619; the Thirteenth Amendment to the ... read more >

For the Pritzker family of Chicago, the 2001 collapse of subprime-mortgage lender Superior Bank was an embarrassing failure in a corner of their giant business empire. Billionaire Penny Pritzker helped run Hinsdale, Ill.-based Superior, overseeing her family's 50% ownership stake. She now serves as Barack Obama's national campaign-finance chairwoman, which means her banking past could prove to be an embarrassment to her -- and perhaps to the campaign. Superior was seized in 2001 and later closed by federal regulators. Government investigators and consumer advocates have contended that Superior engaged in unsound financial activities and predatory lending practices. Ms. Pritzker, a...

Iceland expressed disappointment that western allies had failed to provide support to help ease the country’s financial crisis, forcing it to turn to Russia for a €4bn loan.

In the early 1990s I attended a conference designed to teach journalists the tools of an emerging field known as computer-assisted investigative reporting. One of the hottest sessions of the conference explained how journalists could replicate stories that other papers had done locally using computer tools, including one especially popular project to determine if banks in your community were discriminating against minority borrowers in making mortgages. One newspaper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, had already won a Pulitzer Prize for its computer-assisted series on the subject, and others, including the Washington Post and the Detroit Free Press, had also weighed in with...

Blocked pipes Oct 2nd 2008 | LONDON AND NEW YORK From The Economist print edition When banks find it hard to borrow, so do the rest of us Illustration by David Simonds ANY good tradesman will tell you the importance of the bits of a house that you cannot see. Never mind the new kitchen: what about the rafters, the wiring and the pipes? So it is with financial markets. The stockmarkets are the most visible: as they soar or swoon, the headline-writers get to work. The money markets, however, are the plumbing of the system. Normally, they function efficiently...

A Republican front organization, AmeriPac, is sending an email out linking Barack Obama to the mortgage crisis. The email is a bit of a stretch, but not a complete stretch. The mortgage crisis was chiefly caused by the easy money printed by the Federal Reserve during the Alan Greenspan era and the early-Ben Bernanke era, and by the econometricians who used faulty equations to justify the financing of sub-prime mortgages. That said, the banking industry's heavy focus on sub-prime mortgages was also influenced by heavy lobbying pressure by left wing groups to provide mortgages to minorities and the poor. Chief...

I know people are going to hate me for saying this, but I'm not sorry that foreclosures nearly doubled last month and are increasing every day. I'm not sorry that real-estate prices are creeping down by the glut of desperate "for sale" signs all over Southern California. I'm not sorry that all those developers building lofts downtown and in Hollywood and North Hollywood with no parking might have to eat their investment when they find they can't get half a mil for the 400-square-foot corner of a former sweatshop. I'm not sorry that people who kept taking the "free" home-equity...

CINCINNATI (Reuters) - A 90-year-old Ohio woman, facing eviction from the home she has lived in for 38 years, shot and wounded herself this week, becoming a grim symbol of the U.S. home mortgage crisis. Addie Polk was found lying on the floor of her home with what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound to her shoulder when police came to the home on Wednesday to serve an eviction notice, Akron police spokesman Lt. Rick Edwards said on Friday. Polk survived the shooting and is being treated in a hospital. It was the latest attempt by sheriff's deputies to...

Last week, as federal regulators seized Washington Mutual in the largest U.S. banking failure, Congress was grappling with whether to spend $700 billion of public money to fix the financial industry's troubles. Lawmakers' initial reaction to the Treasury Department's staggering request: shock. That sum amounts to about a quarter of the U.S. government's annual spending. It's more than the Pentagon's annual budget, more than the nation pays out each year in Social Security benefits and more than the federal government's cost for Medicare and Medicaid. Members of Congress then asked the questions that continue to be on many Americans' minds:...

Uncovering the roots of the disastrous home mortgage bubble that popped last year will keep economic historians busy for decades. Yet, one factor has so far been largely overlooked: the bipartisan social engineering crusade to drive up the rate of homeownership by handing out more mortgages to minorities. More than a negligible amount of the blame for the mortgage meltdown can be traced back to multiculturalism: government-mandated affirmative-action lending, demographic change, illegal immigration, and the mind-numbing effects of political correctness. The chickens have finally come home to roost. About half of all mortgages for blacks and Hispanics are subprime, versus...

The chairman of the House Financial Services Committee declared today that an agreement on legislation to relieve a spreading financial crisis depends on House Republicans "dropping this revolt" against President Bush. Rep. Barney Frank said leading Democrats on Capitol Hill were shocked by the level of divisiveness that surfaced at a White House meeting Thursday, not long after key congressional players of both parties declared they'd achieved the broad outlines of an agreement on a bill implementing the administration's proposed $700 billion bailout plan. Frank said he did not think that Democrats were going to see a substantially different proposal...

The Treasury plan to buy illiquid financial assets has been widely criticized as being unfair to taxpayers, who will have to bear losses ahead of shareholders of the institutions that will be bailed out. There is a better alternative to stabilize the markets: Invest the $700 billion of taxpayer money in senior preferred stock of the troubled financial institutions that pose systemic risks. Let's call this the "Preferred plan." In fact, it is the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac model -- which the Treasury Department has already endorsed and used in practice. It is also the approach Warren Buffett...

After days of intense bipartisan negotiations and meetings today at the White House, the deal to bail out staggered investment banks may be dying amid partisan finger-pointing. Republicans blame Democrats. Democrats blame Republicans, and a key Democrat even pointed a finger at Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain. House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank, D-Mass., told Democratic colleagues that McCain's sudden heightened involvement in the negotiations has destroyed chance of an agreement, sources told ABC's George Stephanopoulos. Frank compared McCain's involvement to "Richard Nixon blowing up the Vietnam peace talks in 1968."

Former Reagan diplomat Alan Keyes commented Sept. 23 on the federal government's bailout of mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The former Assistant Secretary of State, currently running for president as an independent, said the bailout plan as proposed by the Bush administration would effectively transform our nation into "a socialist society." The following is the text of Keyes' statement: What I have to say about the bailout is that, with a concrete proposal on the table, it becomes much more obvious what is actually going on right now, and I think that we have to confront it. And...

It is now consensus that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are at the heart of the systemic meltdown we are seeing in the mortgage market. They are costing taxpayers billions through their own bailouts and through the role they played in fueling an artificial mortgage boom.But eight years ago, when I testified before Congress that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's "special privileges create a serious hazard to the market, to taxpayers (and) to the economy," my criticism of these sacred financial entities was met with ridicule. At the hearing on June 21, 2000, before the House Financial Services Committee, I...

Existing-home sales resumed falling in August and prices took a record drop of 9.5% from a year earlier, but inventories decreased sharply. Sales of previously owned homes declined in August, but in a promising sign the backlog of unsold homes shrank. Sales of existing homes fell 2.2% in August from the previous month to an annual sales pace of 4.91 million units, the National Association of Realtors said Wednesday. The data cover sales of homes, condominiums, and townhouses. The inventory of unsold houses fell to a 10.4-month supply at the current sales pace, compared to July's 10.9-month supply. The current...

As the cost of the credit panic becomes clearer, Americans are furious and have every right to be. The political and financial classes created this mess, and now taxpayers are being asked to save the day. We wish there were a way around this outcome, but the price of doing nothing now is likely to be far higher both for taxpayers and the cause of free markets. The reality is that last week we had a global panic that included a flight from even basic financial assets like money-market funds and commercial paper. This was not Hank Paulson's invention. Panics...

Credit Crisis: Everyone's chiming in on the financial mess, but we have yet to hear a better idea than that set out by our Treasury secretary and Fed chief. Congress should act on it without further showboating or delay. Watching the same politicians who created this mess grill Mssrs. Paulson and Bernanke yesterday about what they intend to do about it was almost surreal. Where, for example, does Chris Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee and the leading recipient of Fannie Mae campaign cash, get off acting so self-righteously when he and his panel were asked to move quickly...

I’ll bet it came as a surprise to most folks that the financial stability of the world as we know it depends upon the survival of a couple of outfits called Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Yet that’s what the so-called experts are telling us. Moreover, we taxpayers are now being asked to guarantee Fannie and Freddie’s tab, one that could make the $124 billion S bailout of the late 1980s look cheap. So how did we get stuck with this bill? Well, Congress wanted to “do something” about what it saw as a “housing problem.” To them that meant...

The possible collapse of one of world's biggest investment banks could be "catastrophic" and lead to the "implosion" of the banking sector, Sky sources say. British bank Barclays had appeared to be the frontrunner to take over the struggling Lehman Brothers but has pulled out of the bidding, a source close to the deal said. And a consortium led by the Bank of America is reported to have also dropped out. ~ snip ~