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Protesters demand end to bloodsucking lenders in Boston
By adamg on Wed, 10/26/2011 - 10:18pm
Vampires out of Boston!: Photo by City Life.
City Life La Vida Urbana held a protest march around Rowes Wharf and its yacht-filled docks today to protest the presence of Fannie Mae President Charles Haldeman, speaking before the Boston College CEO Club.
The group, which has actively fought bank-led foreclosures in Dorchester and surrounding neighborhoods, says Fannie Mac needs to work to stop evictions of tenants in foreclosed properties and to help foreclosed owners buy back their properties.
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Bloodsucking lenders? Hmmm...
Bloodsucking lenders? Hmmm... where have we heard that term before?
Red Sox
John Henry looked out the porthole from his yacht and thought the protesters were Red Sox Fans holding up John Lackey and coming to seize his yacht and dump all the beer and fried chicken over the side
Is that the bow of staunch Dem John Henry's "Iroquois"?
Looks like the starboard bow of Red Sox titan and staunch Dem John Henry's mega-million dollar yacht, "Iroquois" (where he "fell" recently) tied to the dock that the protester's are walking on.
If the protesters only knew they were in the right place after Henry's idols Barney Frank (D-Hot Bottoms) and Christopher Dodd (D-La Brasserie) forced the banks to make loans to those unable to pay them back.
That old chestnut?
Fishy, while it was arguably a bad idea for HUD to encourage Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to increase their portfoliios of low-income mortgages, no one in Congress "forced" the investment banks to cheat the system till it broke. And Fannie/Freddie's involvement in the sub-prime market lagged that of the rest of the lending market and clearly wasn't the cause of the crisis, as you so cunningly imply. In fact, Fannie Mae stopped acquiring Alt-A mortgages in the early 1990s.
At this point in time it's pretty clear to anyone who's actually educated themselves about this that the begining of the crisis was the passage back in the early 80s of AMTPA (the law that allowed non-federally chartered housing creditors to write adjustable-rate mortgages). By opening up that market and then failing for a quarter century to pass regulations to prevent its exploitation, Congress left the keys in the car with the doors unlocked. The greedy, unethical investment bankers who boosted that car and ran it off a cliff are primarily responsible for the current mess.
Should Frank get grief for opposing a clamp-down on Fannie/Freddie in the mid 90s? You betcha. But the GOPers behind the repeal of the Glass-Steagal Act have far far more blood on their hands. The only reason we hear Frank's name so much in these discussions is because he's hated by the right and he's horrible at admitting when he's made any kind of mistake and keeping his mouth shut. Plus he's fat and gay. He's the perfect target for reactionary ideologs.
Actually
Clinton gladly signed off on the repeal of Glass-Steagall. That was an equal opportunity screw-up. It was seen as a law whose time had come and gone - and they were right. However, they didn't follow up with the underlying cause of what almost destroyed the banking system - overleverage and a mismatch of funding. Letting commercial banks perform investment banking activities would not have been so bad if they had greater controls on the amount of leverage they took on as well as controls on how they took on that debt. A large part of the problem was that they were using short term debt to fund long term obligations. When the credit markets dried up this arrangement necessarily failed. Even if the credit markets hadn't dried up, this was still a risky proposition if interest rates moved in the wrong direction although the banks probably had a variety of hedges against that risk.
As for greedy bankers - face it, we are all greedy and probably would have done the same thing in their shoes. This was almost a universal problem and even those that avoided it got a little lucky - Jamie Dimon reduced his mortgage exposure in the nick of time. A few months, maybe a year later and JP Morgan would have been in the same problem. Skill - perhaps. Lucky - definitely.
This was more a case of almost the entire industry wearing blinders more than a case of a greedy few. Human nature, not the nature of these particular people or the problems would have been far more isolated.
The problem in a nutshel:
Rather than replacing unnecessary general regulations with important but targeted regulations, we simply got rid of regulation altogether. Your examples are good, and there are many others. The refrain in the 80s and 90s should not have been "less regulation," but "better regulation."
It wasn't just the industry,
It wasn't just the industry, it wasn't just bi-partisan, it was practically the whole darn population. Otherwise sane homeowners gorged on HELOC and ReFi money, in some cases over and over as real-estate inflation increased property values. Proletarians took out zero-down loans to buy investment properties which they quickly had to put under-water to finance to up keep. Banks cleverly found ways to lend money to illegal aliens. Dubya traveled to Las Vegas to declare war on down payments.
The whole thing was insanity.
And the real kicker: In spite of all of the money printing the '00s weren't all that roaring, just a band-aid covering up recessions that had been avoided through monetary chicanery.