A clear plastic plaque on William Komperda’s desk memorializes a 1990 deal that helped launch the made-in-Orange County subprime lending bonanza.
Komperda, a former investment banker now living in Connecticut, calls the plaque a "tombstone," financial speak for a securities offering notice. But the "tombstone" symbolizes an industry that rocked financial markets around the world in 2007.
The mortgage and real estate industry has resembled a battlefield marred with carnage and destruction with what appears to have no end in sight. 210 imploded lenders and thousands of mortgage, real estate professionals and anything related to these professions in one way, shape or form, litter the path of no jobs and no hope.
WHILE critics of today’s mortgage crisis call for government intervention to suppress subprime lending, few are aware that government intervention created subprime mortgages in the first place.
The National Housing Act of 1968, part of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, provided government-subsidized loans to expand home ownership for poor Americans. Liberal policymakers hoped that these loans, called Section 235 loans, would enable poor Americans — urban blacks in particular — to buy their own homes.
The number of mortgage fraud cases has grown so fast that government agencies that investigate and prosecute them cannot keep up, lenders and law enforcement officials have said.
Reports of suspected mortgage fraud have doubled since 2005 and increased eightfold since 2002. Banks filed 47,717 reports this year, up from 21,994 two years ago, according to statistics from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network of the Treasury Department. In 2002, banks filed 5,623 reports.
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