Originally Posted By mawnck <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/01/opinion/kristof-a-banker-speaks-with-regret.html?_r=2" target="_blank">http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12...tml?_r=2</a> A former Chase Home Finance banker: >>“You’ve got somebody making $20,000 buying a $500,000 home, thinking that she’d flip it,” he said. “That was crazy, but the banks put programs together to make those kinds of loans.” Especially when mortgages were securitized and sold off to investors, he said, senior bankers turned a blind eye to shortcuts. “The bigwigs of the corporations knew this, but they figured we’re going to make billions out of it, so who cares? The government is going to bail us out. And the problem loans will be out of here, maybe even overseas.” One memory particularly troubles Theckston. He says that some account executives earned a commission seven times higher from subprime loans, rather than prime mortgages. So they looked for less savvy borrowers — those with less education, without previous mortgage experience, or without fluent English — and nudged them toward subprime loans. These less savvy borrowers were disproportionately blacks and Latinos, he said, and they ended up paying a higher rate so that they were more likely to lose their homes. Senior executives seemed aware of this racial mismatch, he recalled, and frantically tried to cover it up.<<
Originally Posted By skinnerbox No one should be surprised by this. Pundits on the left have been stating this for years, that this was a deliberate scam on low information buyers from the get-go, spurred on by the 'ownership society' touted by W during his presidency, for the sole purpose of lining the pockets of the banksters at the expense of the housing market and the national economy. This was not Freddie's and Fanny's problem. This was not the result of 'criminal negligence' on the part of Barney Frank. This was deliberate fraud on the part of the banks because of greed. Remember the creed of 1%: "Privatize profits while socializing losses." These corporate robber barons are the scum of the earth.
