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February 23, 2009

Subprime meltdown: the Newport angle.

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The always readable American Caliban lives in (what was) one of America's epicenters of Insane Mortgage Mayhem. A recent, widely seen spew by a cable TV loudmouth inspired this response:

The problem, they say, is that "political pressure" forced lenders to make bad loans to those who didn't deserve them qualify. Many of these people were clearly n... ni... ne... NE'ER-DO-WELLS. Everyone knows those people can't keep a mortage. If the government had let these experienced bankers use their own judgment, none of this would have happened. So we definitely don't want to spend money—OUR money—helping these people out any more!

The subprime and alt-A mortgages were largely written by people I saw daily over the last decade, our famous local "Mortgage Bros." These guys bought leads from cold-call telemarketers and sold refinancing to anything with a pulse, lying constantly about the risks. They upsold every potential loan, pushed the limit with interest-only ARM on subprime and alt-A garbage loans. They had no reason to care if the bank ever got the money or if their customers kept their houses. They used the system as it was presented.

The idea that these were stolid, cautious men in pinstriped suits, sworn to the fiduciary duties of their banks, who were somehow forced by dashiki'd oppressors in the Federal bureaucracy into giving money away to the NE'ER-DO-WELLS would be funny were it not such a repulsive lie.

Make no mistake. The financial industry made loans that could not be paid, knowing they were bad loans. They pushed those loans hard on their customers. And they knowingly misled their customers into taking on impossible obligations. Thousands of these brokers committed criminal fraud.

If this was an attempt to redistribute wealth to the NE'ER-DO-WELLS, it backfired. The result was a lot of Harleys and speedboats and cocaine and blowjobs provided to the grinning, empty-souled asshole Fonzies of Orange County. If you don't want their customers to be saved from eviction, let's use the money to build them a very unpleasant jail.

mortgage bro's (slight return) (The American Caliban)