Search for the old threads. I’m not going to do this a fourth or fifth time, as I already linked to myself linking to myself many times back then. There were a half dozen of us (Midnight Son and me were the two I recall) posting examples when the nay-sayers suddenly went quiet, not so much as acknowledging the examples, and the threads went quietly into the night.
Do you perhaps have some date-stamped blog posts where you predicted all of this?
I looked out of curiosity and didn’t find anything (not saying it doesn’t exist, shift6!), but I found some really interesting posts here, by this Efficacy guy. I wonder what happened to him.
Because he kind of nailed our situation in '04.
Not sure I agree with your assessment of his assessment, but I guess this career path may have taken him far enough away from qt3 to be able to celebrate his accuracy. But hey, who knows.
Huh.
I hope he’s OK in that army.
It wasn’t about predictions, it was about current events in rebuttal to posts backed primarily by hypotheticals and political bickering (aka: your source is the such-and-such website, hence your opinion is wrong). An article from the FBI discussing an uptick in borrower fraud has nothing to do with whining about the CRA that was passed under Clinton, for instance.
I’m sitting on a pretty banal conference call right now so decided to go ahead and find some of the old threads (07-08) for anyone interested:
Some of them are pretty long and some only have bits and pieces as threads bled together, but anyway hope that helps.
I was just making an Hrose joke, but those are actually pretty interesting. Thanks.
Yeah I figured that, no worries. I was more frustrated by Mordrak’s upthread post as his name pops up a few times in those threads with the “nuh uh!” point of view.
This will be at least the second and possibly third time I’ve recompiled a list of links pointing to previous links. But it also occurs to me that many of those discussions might have been when you were incommunicado, so enjoy!
Thanks for the links shift6! It’s a fun trip down memory lane. :D
Well, in that first thread, your links don’t say what you think they say, at least in your hyperbolic regurgitation here. Plus, it includes the Wall Street Journal as a source, which is a bit of a joke given how slanted it is when it comes to… you know, Wall Street.
The Journal’s news is (or was) actually pretty top notch, their editorial page is a mess though.
Well, let’s look at the Wall Street Journal’s example of mortgage fraud in shift6’s “subprime” crisis…
It didn’t take a rocket scientist to steal a fortune from mortgage lenders in recent years. That much is clear from the Atlanta scheme. It was perpetrated in large part by a 23-year-old college dropout named Gregory Jerome Wings Jr., aka G-Money. His accomplices included a young nightclub owner, along with the director of an underground documentary called “Crackheads Gone Wild,” a cautionary tale about drug addiction.
Their scam was garden variety: recruit borrowers with good credit to apply for gigantic loans, often of the stated-income variety, using false income and asset statements. Find a mortgage broker willing to submit false information, and find appraisers who will approve inflated values. The perpetrators line their pockets with the proceeds, using some as down payments or for future renovations. Some buyers diverted proceeds to themselves through shell companies.
The brazenness of the scheme is illustrated by the case of Mr. Wright, the New York telephone worker who posed as a highly paid executive to obtain a $1.8 million mortgage from Bear Stearns. Recruited into the scheme by an acquaintance in Atlanta, Mr. Wright, with the help of ring leaders, diverted hundreds of thousands of dollars from that Bear Stearns mortgage to himself, to Mr. Wings and to others in the scheme, according to a federal indictment.
In the very same week, Mr. Wright obtained a $1.9 million mortgage on a second value-inflated mansion near Atlanta, this time from BankFirst, a unit of Minneapolis-based Marshall BankFirst Corp. This deal also brought enormous spoils to Mr. Wright, Mr. Wings and other accomplices.
“It was so easy, it’s incredible,” says Akil Secret, attorney for Mr. Wright, who has pleaded guilty to bank fraud and is awaiting sentencing.
Look at that crazy subprime loan scheme, perpetrated by unemployed nightclub owners, film documentary makers, and their lawyer friends creating mortgage fraud rings buying 2 million dollar mansions in Atlanta. Look at all those unemployed bums diverting profits through shell companies!
I have no doubt that subprime loans make a majority of the [foreclosure] crisis and there was fraud in the application process in many of them, which includes entities like brokers and lending servicers who honest, but unsophisticated buyers, relied on for their expertise. You can’t jump from an orchestrated mortgage fraud ring and then apply it to what was systemic fraud to meet the demand for new loans to feed securities. Stated income loans are known as liars loans in the industry for a long time well before this crisis (as noted by Moyers interview with the SEC either investigator or prosecutor of the Savings and Loan scandal). Anyone taking a stated income loan or asking their clients to use a stated income loan to facilitate the process knew what they were doing.
The problem with the subprime crisis was the willful abandonment of lending standards, by relative experts, in order to generate wealth. All these financial institutions are acting like they were just naive kids who were taken advantage of (which the Wall Street journal propagates). That’s the biggest line of bullshit ever.
Goddamn you voltiac for making me re-read threads with that asshat Cherub (and that other assclown MidnightSon) in them.
Outside of this issue, why are banks rushing through foreclosures so fast? I thought they were whining about people not making payments, and ironically it seems when offered the opportunity to allow grace periods (or lower monthly payments til someone gets back on their feet) so people can get back to paying… they instead choose to foreclose. The banks also complain how the housing market is awful. So if they kicking people out of homes, why should anyone feel sorry for the banks?
Is the goal here for banks to control so much of the real estate market that they can manipulate it as they see fit?
Well, Taibbi thinks the foreclosure process acts as a laundering mechanism for the corporate fraud that took place, not only with borrowers but also with investors. The timing of a lot of these mortgage sales and securitization is all over the place, with shoddy tracking and paperwork (if any at all) on the institution’s end. For example, a particular mortgage already in default can end up in trusts which violate the regulation of the trust and then when they go to pitch it to other investors (like pensions/etc) those investors can end up with delinquent mortgages without realizing it because the vehicle is supposed to be built a certain way to legally carry that classification.
If the institution can reposes the property, they can effectively recreate the paper trail by reselling the home since it would be a new mortgage at that point and that would cover up the fraud or at least the extreme carelessness of the previous mortgage.
The banks couldn’t fall over themselves fast enough to give these loans out. They wanted the lax regulation, because they’d just repackage the junk loans and mortgages as AAA+ bonds, and sell them.
yep yep
So I just want to make sure I’m clear here.
Above are posted links to eight threads with dozens of articles & links spanning over a year of discussion by numerous posters. You find one link, attack the source, make some strange association with what I think they mean*, and your opinion on the matter is preserved? Because otherwise the Tea Party wins or something?
Help me understand. I’m boggling. Look at me, you can tell: boggled.
- I’m curious, what do I think? Tell me my opinion that I may know it.
No, I quoted the Wall Street Journal piece in response to Jeffd’s comment. In your first thread link, your posts mostly deal with stated income loans which don’t say what you think they say if you believe that it somehow supports what you’ve put in this thread. Second, that same thread is full of you projecting your assumptions about the motivations and mindsets of borrowers onto rather dry articles and in the one instance where you passingly acknowledge the issue of dishonest tactics and hard sells on the part of lenders, you end it with a backhanded attack on the borrower based purely on on your biases… like so:
That sucks to be sure, but it your intense desire to buy a BIGGER MORE XXXTREME home that made you get two mortgages you couldn’t afford, instead of one you could. Oh, and that you must have agreed to put “adjusted” info on your unverified loan app. It’s hard for me to put more than half the blame on the salesma^H^H^H^Hreal estate professional here.
After that, I’m not going to sift through the rest of your supposed evidence for your hyperbolic statement in this thread. If all you wanted to point out was that subprime loans were often used for speculation and that stated income loans are often used in a fraudulent manner, I don’t disagree.
When you abandon any lending standards, unscrupulous people will take advantage of it. And institutions abandoned standards not only with borrowers, but internally, and with each other. It’s your belief that the foreclosure crisis was built on unemployed bums and deadbeats reaching too far above their station that I’m criticizing as a myopic view of what happened. You seem to have taken all this supposed “evidence” and then synthesized it into some knee jerk emotional argument with regard to borrowers.
If that was just an info dump of all your posts on the housing crisis, hoping somewhere in there is something that supports your hyperbole, well… that speaks for itself.
And here I am, I went through every single one of those threads, looking for my name to see my “nuh uh” point of view. I don’t appear in most of them in relation to what you’re talking about here. In 2 or so of them I ask for the evidence for similar hyperbolic statements you make in those threads, where you retreat to… “I’ve posted my proof before!” and that amounts to our entire interaction and most of my participation (one or two posts).
My most significant (as in numbers) posting that actually deals with the larger financial crisis sparked by the housing bubble popping here.
Of course my posts there are full of willful ignorance about the real culprits. I’ve seen the light Shift6! eye roll