tagged w/ subprime lending crisis
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Want a movie that tells the true story of the financial crisis? Forget that documentary by Michael Moore. Try "Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs."
It’s the movie everyone’s talking about: the story of a nation sucked in by a deal too good to be true. Huge short-term gains followed by a stunning fall. And a solution that requires the architects of the disaster to step back in and pick up the pieces.
No, not Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story, which skewers Wall Street and the free market economy for creating an epic real estate boom and bust.
It's the animated surprise hit Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs (in 3-D!) whose cartoon characters – coming to the big screen one year after the fall of Lehman — end up telling us more about the perils of unchecked economic growth than do all the real people in Moore’s documentary.Want a movie that tells the true story of the financial crisis? Forget that... more
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The Born supremacy, and other meltdown myths.
At the October 7 Presidential debate, John McCain said that Barack Obama had encouraged Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to make risky loans, and that Mr. Obama was the second largest recipient of campaign cash from the government mortgage giants.
[Review & Outlook] AP
Mr. Obama replied that he "never promoted Fannie Mae" and that "two years ago I said that we've got a subprime lending crisis that has to be dealt with." And that's not all. "I wrote to Secretary Paulson, I wrote to Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke, and told them this is something we have to deal with, and nobody did anything about it," said the Illinois Senator.
There's more. Mr. Obama's March 2007 letter included a stirring call to "assess options" and boldly suggested that the two men "facilitate a serious conversation" about housing. He was even brave enough to suggest that "the relevant private sector entities and regulators" might be able to provide "targeted responses." Then in paragraph four, the Harvard-trained lawyer dropped his bombshell: a suggestion that various interest groups get together to "consider" best practices in mortgage lending.
Some may find it hard to believe that Mr. Obama had nothing to show for this herculean effort to shake up Washington. They may be shocked as well that such passionate language didn't move the Fed and Treasury to action. For our part, we note that nowhere in his letter did Mr. Obama suggest that the government should stop subsidizing loans to people who can't repay them.
This is the latest fad among Beltway liberals who spent years encouraging noneconomic mortgage loans. They now proudly announce that at critical moments they issued a press release, or wrote someone, suggesting that somebody do something. Since soured mortgage loans are a root cause of this panic, and since Democrats did so much to encourage mortgage lending, the most politically useful of these archived warnings are the ones blaming something other than housing.
For example, recent media reports have lauded the prescience of Edward Markey, the Massachusetts Democrat who has long called for increased regulation of financial derivatives. Not that this says much about derivatives. Mr. Markey has also called for increased regulation of the Internet, cable TV, telephones, prescription drugs, nuclear plants, natural gas facilities, oil drilling, air cargo containers, chlorine, carbon dioxide, accounting, advertising and amusement parks, among other things.
But derivatives are the irresistible story now, because they offer the opportunity to shift the blame from bad housing policy, and they suggest that a lack of financial regulation was the problem. While lauding Mr. Markey, the media also cast Brooksley Born, Bill Clinton's Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, as the ultimate heroine in this drama. Like Horatio at the bridge, she tried to regulate the derivatives market over the objections of such dummies as Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, SEC chief Arthur Levitt, and Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan.
cont...The Born supremacy, and other meltdown myths.
At the October 7 Presidential debate,... more
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Eerily familiar, uh? Except we don't have much to export but corn.
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The housing crisis can be very confusing. Who understands sub-prime loans and mortgages anyhow? The Explanotions team right here at Current TV does and to bring you up to speed on why the housing market is down they've created this special lil' animation pod just for you.The housing crisis can be very confusing. Who understands sub-prime loans and... more
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Neither Honest Nor Trustworthy: The 10 Worst Corporations of 2007
by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
The U.S. public holds Big Business in shockingly low regard.
A November 2007 Harris poll found that less than 15 percent of the population believes each of the following industries to be "generally honest and trustworthy:" tobacco companies (3 percent); oil companies (3 percent); managed care companies such as HMOs (5 percent); health insurance companies (7 percent); telephone companies (10 percent); life insurance companies (10 percent); online retailers (10 percent); pharmaceutical and drug companies (11 percent); car manufacturers (11 percent); airlines (11 percent); packaged food companies (12 percent); electric and gas utilities (15 percent). Only 32 percent of adults said they trusted the best-rated industry about which Harris surveyed, supermarkets.
With the 10 Worst Corporations of 2007, we aim to show - again - that Big Business is out of control and to connect comparable abuses to the failure of government overseers, regulators and enforcers.
Presented alphabetically, here are the 10 Worst Corporations of 2007:
http://www.multinationalmonitor.org/mm2007/112007/mokhiber.htmlNeither Honest Nor Trustworthy: The 10 Worst Corporations of 2007
by Russell... more
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One in every 519 U.S, households received a foreclosure filing in April.
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On the campaign trail, Democrats Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama have proposed cracking down on the predatory lending that they say helped fuel the foreclosure crisis.
Both presidential candidates, however, rely on close advisers who had oversight roles at financial institutions that went bust because of subprime loans.
Clinton's campaign manager, Maggie Williams, earned at least $175,000 serving from 2000-07 on the board of Long Island-based Delta Financial, which filed for bankruptcy last year after a history of high-cost loans to low-income borrowers, according to public records.
Obama's national finance chairwoman, Penny Pritzker, was chairwoman of the board of a Chicago-area bank in 1993 when it adopted a subprime business strategy that regulators say ultimately led it to collapse in 2001.
Superior's board and managers "ignored sound risk-management principles and failed to adequately oversee Superior's operations," the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's (FDIC) Inspector General concluded in 2002.
"Superior was effectively facilitating very sleazy lending," said Bert Ely, a Washington, D.C., banking consultant who testified before Congress on the Superior failure.
"Delta was one of the bad guys," said Irv Ackelsberg, a legal aid lawyer in Philadelphia who represented subprime borrowers. A lawyer for Delta did not return calls.
"I joined the board because I ... understood that the subprime option, for all its challenges, was the only chance for many people to own a home," Williams said.
Clinton told USA TODAY, "We all have friends, associates and staff members who have private sector involvement … I don't see any connection at all between her prior employment and what I'm saying" about the loan debacle.
Superior, co-owned by Pritzker family trusts, began focusing on subprime loans in 1993, according to the FDIC Inspector General's report. At the time, Pritzker was the board's chair. She left the board in 1994 and continued as a director of the bank's holding company. In 2002, the Pritzkers agreed to pay, through trusts, $460 million in a settlement with the government relieving them of liability.
"I regret that Superior Bank failed," Pritzker told USA TODAY. "My family voluntarily agreed to pay the FDIC $460 million … without litigation or any allegation by federal regulators of wrongdoing. I am proud of how my family responded to this situation."
Pritzker, a key player in Obama's fundraising network since his 2004 Senate run, has helped him raise more than $190 million for the presidential race.
In a statement, the Obama campaign noted that Pritzker was not accused of wrongdoing, and said: "Sen. Obama believes that the current housing crisis was caused by lax regulation and a system that put the interests of corporations before the interests of homeowners and investors."
A top economic adviser to Republican candidate John McCain, former senator Phil Gramm, also has ties to the subprime problems.
Gramm is vice chairman of UBS, which recently disclosed $19 billion in losses on investments in subprime mortgages. UBS, however, did not make subprime loans, UBS spokesman Doug Morris said.
Gramm, McCain's general co-chairman, was traveling and unavailable for comment, Morris said.
On the campaign trail, Democrats Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama have proposed... more
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