Free Republic

The risky mortgage is making a comeback. More than a decade after home loans triggered the worst financial crisis in a generation, the strict lending requirements put in place during its aftermath are starting to erode. Home buyers with low credit scores or high debt levels as well as those lacking traditional employment are finding it easier to get credit. The loans have been rebranded. Largely gone are the monikers subprime and Alt-A, a type of mortgage that earned the nickname “liar loan” because so many borrowers faked their income and assets. Now they are called non-qualified, or non-QM, because...

OBAMA'S MONEY CZAR OWNS HOTEL HOSTING AHMADINEJAD Penny Pritzker, national finance chair of Barack Obama's presidential campaign, is the owner of the Hyatt, the hotel hosting the genocidal Hitler wannabee, Ahmadinejad. This is the latest in an assault on Israel and Jewish Americans. Obama and co. strong armed and bullied the craven organizers of the Anti-Ahmadinejad rally to disinvite Pro-Israel supporter Sarah Palin. Clearly Obama's chief fundraiser could refuse to host the Ahmadinejad at her hotel. Instead, she has rolled out the red carpet. It was bad enough that Obama would not send someone to represent him at the anti-Ahmadinejad...

Barack Obama's audacity is a grave concern for anyone troubled by the Wall Street meltdown. Sen. Obama continues to support Penny Pritzker -- the disgraced billionaire hotel heiress who helped sink a major bank that used subprime mortgage machinations -- as she helps fund his crusade. Ms. Pritzker is the finance chairwoman overseeing Obama's fundraising and a "bundler" who has pledged to personally raise between $200,000 and $500,000 for him. She has contributed nearly $500,000 to Democrat candidates and political action committees since 2000, reports The Washington Times. Pritzker, among Forbes magazine's 2008 richest Americans with a net worth of...

WASHINGTON -- The Securities and Exchange Commission tapped Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executive Adam Storch on Friday to serve as the agency's first-ever chief operating officer of the enforcement division. The new hire represents the latest personnel change at the SEC in its effort to improve its operations following its failure to detect Bernard Madoff's massive Ponzi scheme. Enforcement Division Director Robert Khuzami created Mr. Storch's position of managing executive as part of the major re-structuring effort he announced earlier this year. Mr. Storch will oversee division operations that include budget, information technology and administrative services. He will also supervise...

[I begin] with the story of a series of Socialist scholars conferences that Barack Obama attended when he lived in New York City between the years 1983 and 1985. And when I finally reconstructed what had gone on at these Socialist conferences that Barack Obama attended, I truly was amazed because what I saw was a kind of map of Barack Obama’s entire subsequent political career. It was at this Socialist conferences in New York in the mid-’80s that Barack Obama encountered the groups, the strategies, and the mentors who would guide him throughout his entire political career. [T]hese Socialist...

“Astronomical” default rates and losses. The New York Fed just warned about the ticking mortgage subprime time bombs once again being amassed, and what happens to them when home prices decline. But unlike during the last housing bust, a large portion of these time bombs are now guaranteed by the government. Subprime mortgages are what everyone still remembers about the Financial Crisis. They blew up has home prices fell. Folks who thought they were “owners with equity” found out that they were just “renters with debt.” And they dealt with it the best they could: forget the debt and the...

What you’re about to read is a real blood-boiler. Mortgage meltdowns and housing bubbles don’t cause themselves, they are caused. The root cause of our current housing mess was massive government intervention that went horribly wrong. In previous columns, we covered the early precipitating causes. Now, let’s stroll back to the latter half of the 1990s decade. The Clinton Administration had already hot-wired CRA and HUD to extend home ownership to all citizens, regardless of their creditworthiness. Congress and the Federal Reserve then jumped on the bandwagon. This activism caused mortgage standards to be relaxed across the industry. Clinton juiced-up...

Barack Obama wants to crush an investigation that's getting too close to him and some really close friends: Attorney General of N.Y. Is Said to Face Pressure on Bank Foreclosure Deal Eric T. Schneiderman, the attorney general of New York, has come under increasing pressure from the Obama administration to drop his opposition to a wide-ranging state settlement with banks over dubious foreclosure practices, according to people briefed on discussions about the deal. In recent weeks, Shaun Donovan, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and high-level Justice Department officials have been waging an intensifying campaign to try to persuade...

RUSH: Now, I have a story here that's simply unreal, and it's from last week. I purposely sat on this story to see if I would see it anywhere else. I've had it in the stack since May the 5th, almost a week. It's from Business Week magazine, a story by Clea Benson, headline: "A Renewed Crackdown on Redlining -- In the wake of the subprime implosion, the Obama Administration has stepped up its scrutiny of disadvantaged neighborhoods' credit access. Community activists in St. Louis became concerned a couple of years ago that local banks weren't offering credit to the...

The Securites Exchange Commission (SEC) formally charged former Countrywide Financial CEO Angelo Mozilo and two other company executives with civil fraud. The SEC also charged Mozilo with illegal insider trading, an agency spokesman said Thursday. Civil fraud charges also were filed against Countrywide's former Chief Operating Officer David Sambol and ex-Chief Financial Officer Eric Sieracki. Countrywide Financial, the California-based mortgage lender, was a key component to the subprime mortgage crisis in 2007, which was the beginning of the financial decline and current recession in the U.S. Mozilo is the most high-profile individual to face formal charges from the federal government...

US Politicians Duped By The Brotherhood In the United States, one individual maintained a pretense of "moderation" which would later embarrass the left and the right. According to the testimony of Dr. Michael Waller to the US Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Abdurahman Alamoudi was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. A man born in Eritrea in 1951, he arrived in the US in 1979 and became a naturalized US citizen on May 23, 1996. From 1985 onwards he became involved in many Muslim groups. In 1990 he founded the Washington DC-based American Muslim Council (AMC), which Waller states "has...

FBI investigation notes reveal ACORN was working for the Democratic Party and told employees not to talk to the FBI, to cause confusion on Election Day and to go "poverty pimpin'" for votes. Judicial Watch, a corruption-fighting legal group, obtained the notes related to the 2007 investigation and arrest of eight St. Louis, Mo., ACORN workers for violating election laws and committing voter fraud. 'Poverty pimpin,' fraud and work for Democratic Party The FBI investigators interviewed ACORN canvassers working with Project Vote, an ACORN affiliate. Among the documents obtained by Judicial Watch were handwritten notes by FBI officials outlining the...

... [Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's] charges are certainly creative in that they get the bank executives coming and going: "Bank of America's management intentionally failed to disclose massive losses at Merrill so that shareholders would vote to approve the merger. Once the deal was approved, Bank of America's management manipulated the federal government into saving the deal with billions in taxpayer funds by falsely claiming that they would back out of the deal without bailout funds." ... If Mr. Cuomo truly believes that BofA shareholders and executives deserve to pay the political cost of the financial crisis, perhaps a refresher...

NEW YORK (AP) — A stunning 48 percent of the nation's homeowners who have a subprime, adjustable-rate mortgage are behind on their payments or in foreclosure, and the rate for homeowners with all mortgage types hit a new record, new data Thursday showed. But that's not the worst of it.

It's the end of an era. We know that 2008, much like 1932 or 1980, marks a dividing line for the American economy and society. But what lies on the other side is hazy at best. The great lesson of the past year is how little we understand and can control the economy. This ignorance has bred today's insecurity, which in turn is now a governing reality of the crisis. Go back to the onset of the crisis in mid-2007. Who then thought that the federal government would rescue Citigroup or the insurance giant AIG; or that the Federal Reserve,...

This short news report might have been a bit longer if it had been written a couple of weeks later than it was. This story is dated September 5th and deals with one of the key issues about immigration that virtually no one is willing to talk about - especially politicians and others who subscribe to the open borders philosophy and to the idea of providing the millions of illegal aliens who are in our country with a Guest Worker Amnesty Program and a "Pathway to United States Citizenship." It deals with illegal aliens using stolen Social Security numbers and...

WASHINGTON — Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke acknowledges he was wrong in believing that there would be limited fallout to financial markets from risky mortgages that soured after the housing market's collapse. "I and others were mistaken early on in saying that the subprime crisis would be contained," Bernanke said in an article in the Dec. 1 issue of The New Yorker magazine. "The causal relationship between the housing problem and the broad financial system was very complex and difficult to predict," he said in the piece titled "Anatomy of a Meltdown." Subprime mortgages made to people with tarnished credit...

The boss of a successful US hedge fund has quit the industry with an extraordinary farewell letter dismissing his rivals as over-privileged "idiots" and thanking "stupid" traders for making him rich. Andrew Lahde's $80m Los Angeles-based firm Lahde Capital Management in Los Angeles made a huge return last year by betting against subprime mortgages. Yesterday the 37-year-old told his clients that he had hated the business and had only been in it for the money. And after declaring he would no longer manage money for other people, because he had enough of his own, Lahde said that instead he intended...

<p>President Bush emerged from a meeting with foreign financial officials on Saturday and pledged a global response to the credit crisis that will lead toward a "path of stability and long-term growth."</p> <p>"The United States has a special role to play in leading the response to this crisis," the president said. "That is why I convened this morning's meeting here at the White House and it is why our government will continue using all the tools at our disposal to resolve this crisis."</p>

What’s a principled conservative to think of the Bush administration’s proposed $700 billion authority to allow the U.S. Treasury buy illiquid securities? On the one hand it would appear to be a necessary step to solve a systemic crisis in the U.S. banking system. On the other, it promises to be an enormous expansion of government power and commitment of taxpayer dollars. To arrive at a principled view on this intervention, we must answer three critical questions: Is it necessary? Will it work? And even then, is it morally justifiable? Unfortunately, we are thwarted at the outset. There’s simply no...