Stop Oil Speculation Now!

[TXplt]

Originally Posted by troy2000

In one case cited as an example, they lent to an elderly man with dementia so bad he could barely sign his name.

If accurate, this wouldn't legally be a valid contract, no matter which state you lived in.

[TXplt]

Originally Posted by soonerborn

As far as the home mortgage thing goes. It is my responsibility to know what I can afford and what I cant, its my responsibility to read the small print and make sure I know what I am getting into when I borrow money. It is not my responsibility to be responsible for people who are irresponsible and pick up their tab for them when they rush out and buy a house that is 4 or 5 times their annual salary and pay interest only on the note.

Should government step hard on banks that make fraudulent claims and clearly mislead borrowers? Absolutely. Do I want the government involved at any level in deciding what I can afford to borrow or not? Absolutely not!

People that took advantage of these easy interest only arent / ARM loans arent victims, they are idiots. Idiots that should pay their own way out of the self inflicted pit of stupidity they have dug themselves into.

Banks that took advantage of these idiots arent victims either. They, like any business, should pay for the mistakes they make. Let them fail, there are plenty of good banks waiting to take their business, banks that made good decisions on who loan how much money to.

If you dont let people and business fail then you only show responsible people and business that there are no consequences for being stupid and soon everyone will be stupid. Then whos gonna bail us out when we are all stupid?

+1

[troy2000]

Originally Posted by TXplt

How many of the folks signed that little contract that depicted the terms of the loan in no uncertain terms ? -- there's two to tango here. I've borrowed money on many occasions, always read the contract, and never had the contract say something different from the lender, when it came to the specifics of the loan--and it is painful to read. If we throw a bunch of more rules in it'll get only worse. If your argument is for a concise statement of the terms of the loan that are understandable, I agree. If you can verify a lender stated different terms than was signed in the contract (which always should have been read anyway), then, yes, that's fraud and not legal. I have sincere doubts that this occurred frequently--I do believe there was alot of wishful thinking. Also, someone had to buy the "shaky" loans (and I seriously doubt they had no knowledge of the terms of the loans)--how about we don't bail them out ? If lenders don't verify income and assets, guess what--their mortgage company loses money when they make bad loans and suffers the consequences--just like a poorly managed industry. I'll not shed a tear if these companies go bankrupt and gov't shouldn't be using any of my money to save them.
Regulation doesn't fix this, Troy. If you told me I could afford a $1M house as a lender I'd concede that I could, but wouldn't want to--it's a very basic premise of finance that the cheapest money is your own and you should never borrow more than you can pay back. Ever. If you are naive enough to believe different, well, you've just learned an expensive lesson--investing in booming real estate is no different than throwing your money into any other investment with risk--industry, oil, gold, platinum, horses. I don't believe false assurances from lenders, car dealers, investment advisors, infomercials, or realtors. Again, this is common sense and part of the lessons of life. I certainly consider a company that is 9 Trillion dollars in debt ill advised to give me financial advice or to attempt to write regulations to fix this.

To begin with, I'm not suggesting any new laws and regulations. I'm suggesting they start actually enforcing the ones we have. When fraud is as pervasive and blatant as it was at Indymac, a few people should have been on their way to prison long before the house of cards came tumbling down. And they would have been, had government auditors and regulators of one sort or another been doing their jobs properly. Over 80% of Indymac's home loans were based on unverified income, and that simple fact alone didn't raise any red flags?

And when people get taken by con men, it's easy to say, "well, it's their own fault for not knowing better." That doesn't make it right.

Case in point: our home is in my wife's name. It was that way when we married, and we never got around to changing it. She's a bright woman, but inexperienced in financial matters. I came home from working out of town one day, and there was a copy of a freshly-signed loan on the kitchen table. A sales rep from Ameriquest had gotten her name, cold-called her, and talked her into refinancing the house by promising her several thousand dollars cash.

I asked my wife how she even qualified for a loan without my signature. It turned out the gal had asked how much I made, inflated it a few thousand dollars, and listed it as my wife's stated (but unverified) income. She came up with a few comps (imaginary or exaggerated, I suspect) that also inflated the value of our home.

I sat down and compared the worksheets she and my wife had used with the actual signed loan documents. It turned out there were extra points and fees added in, and the interest rate was higher than she had been told it would be. To give my wife some credit, she had noticed that and been told, "oh, just go ahead and sign it to get the ball rolling; we'll straighten out any mistakes before the loan closes." Rrrrrriiiiiight...

Fortunately, California has a grace period during which you can rescind any deal made during a house call. So we cancelled the loan. But if I had been a day or two later getting home, my wife (along with me as her husband) would have been stuck with a loan obtained with fraudulent information, and charging her a lot more money than she had been told.

Talk all you want about personal responsibility. My wife was a victim, not an accomplice; she got hunted down and talked into that loan by a professional thief, who was working on commission for a thieving company. She didn't go out looking for a way to screw a mortgage broker out of a loan she didn't qualify for, and I'll be damned if I think I should have had to pay on it for the next twenty years and consider it an expensive lesson.

And your last shot about a company that's nine trillion in debt advising you what to do? Totally irrelevent. To begin with, the USA isn't any for-profit corporation, and it certainly wasn't bank regulators who piled up that debt.

[SoDakHunter]

Two words. Nuclear Reactors. Much more safe, reliable and efficient than the previous ones. Too bad the governments Propaganda war on nuclear power in the 70's - 80's worked.

[zseese]

My vote is for a combination of Solar and Wind power, nothing has to be altered or used to create energy, but that wind cant be used everywhere so nuclear is always a good idea too, right on about the current superior technology.

[TXplt]

I'm not going to throw darts or second guess your personal situation, Troy, but I do stand by my previous statements including the individual responsibility portion. I've been offered bad deals in my past, some of which I fell for most of which I didn't. The ones I fell for were well within the bounds of the law, and I made a bad investment. I was fairly po'd at the advice, but the final choice was mine. If there was bona-fide fraud involved in your case then you'd have recourse. If not, then you wouldn't. I've not had, nor have my friends or co workers had, personal or professional hustling by lenders in our past where the terms and conditions of the loans weren't clearly discernable. I do agree, like I've said, that these terms be clearly and concisely presented and understandable to all parties. Likewise for our credit cards--I know if I choose not to pay these off every month like I should I'm going to accumulate all kinds of bad debt quickly. And I do consider it relevant that an entity that can spend everything we send it and still wind up 9T in debt attempts to regulate many different private markets which are more successful (and function much better) on their own.

[troy2000]

Originally Posted by TXplt

I'm not going to throw darts or second guess your personal situation, Troy, but I do stand by my previous statements including the individual responsibility portion. I've been offered bad deals in my past, some of which I fell for most of which I didn't. The ones I fell for were well within the bounds of the law, and I made a bad investment. I was fairly po'd at the advice, but the final choice was mine. If there was bona-fide fraud involved in your case then you'd have recourse. If not, then you wouldn't. I've not had, nor have my friends or co workers had, personal or professional hustling by lenders in our past where the terms and conditions of the loans weren't clearly discernable. I do agree, like I've said, that these terms be clearly and concisely presented and understandable to all parties. Likewise for our credit cards--I know if I choose not to pay these off every month like I should I'm going to accumulate all kinds of bad debt quickly. And I do consider it relevant that an entity that can spend everything we send it and still wind up 9T in debt attempts to regulate many different private markets which are more successful (and function much better) on their own.

And I'll stand by mine, that when people get hunted down, targeted and taken by professional cons in the mortgage business, they're victims of predatory lending. They aren't accomplices.

Here's an excerpt from a Wikipedia article on Ameriquest, the company that hustled my wife:

In 1996, the company agreed to pay $3 million into an "educational fund" to settle a Justice Department lawsuit accusing it of gouging and predatory lending practices against older, female, and minority borrowers. Prosecutors accused it of allowing mortgage brokers and its employees to charge these customers an additional a fee of as much as 12% of the loan amount. As part of the settlement, Ameriquest (then still known as Long Beach Mortgage) agreed to use the educational fund to train its employees in proper mortgage techniques (training which most observers agree never actually occurred to any substantial degree), and to refrain from utilizing predatory lending techniques (such as "bicycling"), but only within the State of California. It was shortly after entering into this settlement agreement, that the company "switched" names with its subsidiary, and began aggressively seeking refinance mortgage business throughout the United States.

In 2001, after being investigated by the Federal Trade Commission, the company settled a dispute with ACORN, a national organization of community groups, promising to offer $360 million in low-cost loans.

On 1 August 2005, Ameriquest announced that it would set aside $325 million to settle attorney-general investigations in 30 states. In at least five of those states—California, Connecticut, Georgia, Massachusetts, and Florida—Ameriquest had already settled multimillion-dollar suits.

In May, 2006, Ameriquest Mortgage announced it was closing all of its retail offices, and in the future would make its loans through mortgage brokers, a channel that is not covered by the predatory-lending settlement with the Attorneys General.

On June 13th, 2007, lawyers for borrowers, who are seeking to combine 20 suits into one class action suit, asserted in a filing in Illinois Northern District Court that "Assets of the Ameriquest entities were transferred to (the owner of Ameriquest) Arnall with the actual intent to hinder, delay, or defraud the plaintiffs in this action."

Incidentally, this company sidestepped a $250,000 cap on contributions to Bush's second inauguration by also having each of three subsidiaries contribute the max, for a total of one million dollars.