November 20, 2006

White-Collar Mafia

 
U.S. Government studies report that up to 70% percent of home mortgage loans contain errors!

Accounting errors in home mortgage loans can ange from a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands of dollars!

These so-called “errors” are in many circumstances complex and fraudulent accounting schemes that banks and mortgage companies use
to “play with your money” to generate additional cash flow, income and profits!

Most banks and mortgage companies know that you won’t ask how they “calculated” the “payoff” or principal balance figure they quote you!

A well-known bank once charged a customer over $3000.00 per month for five months [over $15,000] of escrow payments when the annualtaxes were only $2,608.28 and monthly P & I payments were only around $790.00!

A well-known mortgage servicer owned by a major Wall Street investment bank refers to its customers as “smucks” in their policy manuals!

• Some banks and mortgage companies have foreclosed or are foreclosing on homes, notes and deeds of trusts they don’t even own or have a right to!

• Well-known banks and mortgage companies in Florida are lying and providing perjured testimony, false affidavits and frivolous pleadings in cases involving mortgage foreclosure to courts in Florida!

• You or your family members and friends may be unknowingly be contributing to these abuses by having investments in your own IRA’s, stocks,
mutual or pension funds that are holding mortgage backed securities that deal with subprime lending!

For the majority of Americans, their home is the largest single asset they will ever own. Home ownership is part of the American Dream. Yet today, many elderly, minority, disabled, disadvantaged and non-English speaking Americans are living the American Nightmare rather than the American Dream. Their dreams of home ownership and financial security are being stripped away by 21st Century loan sharks backed by a new white collar Mafia. Instead of using guns and knives to intimidate and to rob their victims, the new weapons of choice are phones, computers, computer programs the mail and unscrupulous lawyers. These extortionists, con-artists and predators inflict harsher pain, suffering and injury upon their victims than a local loan shark can.

Instead of breaking bones and knees, this new breed of crooks breaks dreams, lives, livelihoods and families. They illegally take away their victim’s homes, ruin their credit, destroy their families and damage their businesses. Often, the scars left by these criminals last years and even a lifetime that takes longer to heal than a broken bone.

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The Coming Collapse in Housing

By Gary Shilling

I am convinced that the housing bubble is gigantic and will burst before long with massive implications here and abroad. In fact, it’s the key to the global economic outlook.

Setting the Scene

House prices in recent years have leaped well beyond their normal relationships to the CPI.




Even when the increasing size of houses–the McMansion effect–is excluded, inflation-adjusted house prices have jumped as never before in over a century.



Furthermore, for the first time since the 1920s, the bubble is nationwide, and it’s been driven by four national forces. First, the decline in mortgage rates.




Second, the loose lending practices designed to accommodate those who have been priced out of the market under conventional mortgage terms.




We’re referring here to interest-only Adjustable Rate Mortgages as well as option ARMs that allow borrowers to make even lower monthly payments that result in a rising mortgage principle, or "negative amortization." Then there are unrealistically high property appraisals to justify oversized loans and the lack of full documentation that allows borrowers to overstate their ability to make mortgage payments. Lenders also accommodate financially-weak borrowers with high loan-to-value ratio and piggyback loans, which in effect finance more than 100% of the houses’ prices.

The Grand Disconnect

These loose lending practices are a manifestation of the massive speculation that infected stocks in the late 1990s and was never eliminated, despite their 2000-2002 collapse. Substantial ease by the Fed and other central banks, aided and abetted by big tax rebates and cuts and U.S. government spending on homeland security and military needs, kept the 2001 recession short and speculation intact. It simply shifted from dot com stocks to private equity, commodities, emerging market stocks and bonds, hedge funds and, especially, real estate as investors remained convinced that they deserved 20% returns each and every year. If U.S. stocks didn’t do the job, surely other investments would.

So, gigantic levels of speculation remain. But they won’t be eliminated and the yawning Grand Disconnect between the real world of goods and services and the financial world of asset speculation won’t disappear unless forced by significant events. Speculations never end voluntarily or in orderly fashions. Meanwhile, the game continues for five reasons.

Reason A, the world has been awash in liquidity, which amply feeds speculation. It comes from the leap in house values, which have been liquefied by refinancings and home equity loans.

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