http://online.wsj.com/article/.....24769.html

Best,
Robert O. Lopez

E is also highly popularized in pop-culture. The #1 movie for the past two weeks ‘Hangover’ is set on the premise of one of the main characters secretly drugging his group with roofies thinking it is ecstasy.

Since the CRA was passed in the late 70′s, I would expect a very small and gradual increase in the foreclosure rate from that point, and a much stronger increase in foreclosures starting a few years after the late 90′s when Congress malfeasance occured. If something other than that occured, then I would be more willing to believe the crisis results purely from greed.

But since I’m not an expert in the industry, and GetBack says he is, perhaps he knows of better metrics to prove his contention that I’m 100% wrong in saying that the problems are due primarilly to government intervention in the mortgage market.

And since he is the expert, I’ll be interested to look at the data he points to, even if it isn’t the metric I suggested.

So the Community Reinvestment Act, Fannie Mae, government protection of loans to deadbeats had nothing to do with it.

It’s all about greedy business people. Banking, finance, auto industry, oil industry…..the greedy bastards are bringing us all down. If only they would be more honorable.

Got it.

I’ll let Thomas Sowell know. He’ll probably want to recant his book.

Thanks.

“Capitalism is suited ONLY to a moral people adhering 100% to the Biblical commands laid down by God. It is fatal to any other.”

Amen to that. The mess the U.S. and the rest of the world are in has nothing to do with the economic collapse. It has everything to do with moral and ethic degeneration all around.

I was there. I saw it. I participated in it.

The mortgage business was never rock solid. I was in it from 1969. It’s been a pack of lies since it began. I’m sorry you don’t know that. You want crime, investigate the auto loan business and the portfolios of both lending institutions and dealerships that carry their own paper to create asset backed securities. I helped write that Plan for the nation’s top dealerships. The banking business is cancerous to it’s core. Wall Street is staffed by good people in the trenches but those who steer the ships are rotten. The stories I could tell about the mortgage business alone (having owned a large independent) would scare you speechless. I watched it all unfold.

The boutique investment bank I owned and was Senior Managing Partner of bought, sold, traded and aged commercial paper throughout the nation and we dealt with every major institution. To say it was crooked and cooked to its very marrow is to mock the severity of it. You simply have no idea what you’re talking about, but I’m accustomed to that on this Forum. All emotion, no experience.

I was there in the thick of what caused the Savings and Loan debacle and how it was manufactured out of thin air to benefit a cabal of leading banks that wanted the mortgage business. I was there in the thick of it for the Resolution Trust, as criminal an enterprise as the mafia could have ever rigged. I was there for Prudential’s monumental screwing of its clients. I’ve dealt with the top portfolio managers of pension funds and the Russian Mafia has nothing on those guys. I’ve been personally bankrupted to the tune of $63 million by one of our recent administrations because my insurance plan through the private sector threatened their health care plans. But you never saw THAT on the front page.

You simply do not know. Which is why I say Barry Otero COULD NOT proceed in this manner were there no traction for the emotional, unthinking response of ordinary normal people who SENSE and KNOW in their gut something is exceptionally corrupted at the center of what we roughly refer to as Finance.

Hell, if you don’t understand the Fed and how wrong that monstrosity is and what filth it spawns there’s no sense proceeding further.

That said, all Barry Otero can do is make a Very Bad Thing a whole lot worse. Which is what he’s doing.

But it would have no Resonance if Financial Matters hadn’t been raped and pillaged to begin with. The government already has all the authority it needs to regulate the criminal behavior and stupidity of the Financial Sector. That it does selectively, and otherwise does not says everything we need to know. Power corrupts.

It is the corruption that the world and our own people sense, and it is this AND THIS ALONE which gives the Obama Administration traction on this faux issue.

The government destroyed it by forcing bankers to make bad loans. The mortgage bankers did what any rational people would do with a gun to their head. The government also strongly encouraged the derivatives that hid the problems for several years.

The industry’s greed is a separate and lesser (by far) issue. And greed has existed forever. The toxic loans occured during a relatively short timeframe and are directly tied to government actions.

There may have been other issues with credit cards and leveraged investments. But nobody can say those problems would have brought the economy down without the bad mortgage loans.

Obama wants people like you, GetBack, to line up behind his designated fall guys. That takes the heat off the real perpetrators of the crime. It’s classic misdirection that magicians use all the time.

Here’s a good analogy for what happened. A dog owner buys a big dog and trains it to be vicious. He puts the dog outside on a weak chain and hides some red meat in a box that the dog can see but can’t get at. A pedestrian comes along, picks up the box, takes out the meat, and the dog breaks the chain and ravages the pedestrian as well as the meat. Then the dog owner kills the dog for being vicious, and declares that he can’t figure out why the dog acted like it did.