On Apr 17, 4:57*pm, wrote:
On Fri, 17 Apr 2009 15:51:47 -0700 (PDT), DaveS wrote:
On Apr 17, 8:55*am, wrote:

Rick
You apparently live in a different bubble that I do. Name names?
Sorry, that would hurt people who I care about, but if you do not know
people who were a part of what turned out to be a big hustle, your
social and business circles are lots narrower than I assumed. Here are
just 4 of a range of examples taken from personal experience/knowledge
(with very little disguise), of people who were parts of the pack at 4
different levels.

1, A well meaning VP of a very large nation wide mortgage company,
offering neighbors the services of a very compliant appraiser to goose
up considerably the "valuation" of a property way over even the bubble
market values.

How well-meaning could he be, what with forcing his neighbors to defraud
lenders...? *And what was the VP of a very large nation wide mortgage company
doing living in, um, "an arguably vulnerable neighborhood?"



2. A younger person, running a 12 station phonebank *"hothouse"
operation, pushing home equity loans in arguably vulnerable
neighborhoods, in conjunction with "home improvement" scammers, as a
"cut-out" for nominally respectable banks.

Ah, yes, the dreaded home equity loan pusher... *Another diabolical criminal,
forcing people to sign things....and he must have been especially good, doing it
from a phone bank...

3. A person with no financial education or experience, *set up as a
"financial advisor" at a nominally respectable bank.

Well, ****, you shouldn't have taken the job...



4. An unlicensed person doing compliant loan appraisals for an estate
law firm in a major Florida metro. She once had a cert to "manage
condo associations" but as I recall even that was expired.

So she was, what, running out randomly appraising properties, hoping someone
would happen to drop in with a contract on those properties...?



In half of these situations the visible consumption levels were enough
to raise eyebrows considerably, *even in a very affluent area full of
software and biotech millionaires.

Yeah, they all sound like the real, er, "masters of the universe" types.
Frankly, after your failing to turn in the Border Patrol slave-runner, I think
you owe it to the US to turn these powerful criminals, who are undoubtedly
responsible for the current economic "mess," over to the proper authorities...

In reality, the latter three sound like "Joe Wal Mart" types (the VP could be,
too) that simply chose to prey on their fellow citizen. *As for the VP, he and
his neighbors sound like typical middle-class folks who want to skirt things
until the **** hits the fan, and then, they want to blame it on someone else. So
yeah, they ought to be allowed to fail.







A typical set up for the "nominally respectable" banks was to create
"sub prime" subsidiaries, then to use outfits like #2 above, to rope
in groups of loans, then sell them on in packages up stream to
securitizers etc. . WAMU had at least one sub like this that I know
of, and even Sears was playing that game, until the bad publicity it
got when the linkage was exposed and Sears was outed for practices
that preyed on elderly minorities primarily in the Midwest. I have
heard, but do not know for a fact, that all of the North Carolina
based big boy banks played that game at one time or another in recent
years.

Bottonline, there were ****ers and ****ees. And it is disingenuous to
pretend that in the absence of regulations it is not relatively easy
for even people with normal ethics, to become part of the predatory
system that lives on the blood of "Joe Walmart."

It is? *Why? *If people with "normal ethics" don't use 'em (absurdity of that
premise aside...), how do they have them?

Like the Enron
employees, they were "just doing their job."Then there are others who
seriously believe that preying on others is their right, almost duty,
as a superior being. With a few drinks some of these will tell you
that they see themselves as human wolves, helping evolution weed out
the weak. These last, and generations of selfish teens, made Ayn Rand
a best selling author.

It makes no difference if every bank in the world sets up a "screw everybody
that can fog up a mirror" department and hires the Hell's Banditos to manage
them. *Until someone voluntarily signs papers to buy a house they can't afford
or signs papers to receive money that they can't afford to pay back, it doesn't
do the banks much good. *And to say some bank somehow "tricked" them into
thinking that they could afford it is utter nonsense. *If that were the case,
they would have been "tricked" into all sorts of other schemes repeatedly
throughout their lives. *And yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, someone knows of a little
old lady who actually did get conned. *And I'd acknowledge that such can, did,
and does occasionally happen, but it is a rare thing, relative to the current
situation.

HTH,
R

Dave
Which former Fed Reserve Chairman is a follower of Ayn Rand?

As I've said in the past, I'm no fan of Greenspan, and if "we" must have a
single person to blame, he's as good a choice as any, but even heaping him with
a double portion still leaves quite a load to spread around...- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Yeah, like I said, entirely different bubble. You do need to get out
in the real world more Richard.

Dave.