“
Neither a borrower, nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine own self be true, 85
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell; my blessing season this in thee!
”
”
William Shakespeare (Hamlet)
“
The secret of high finance...if you really need a loan, you won't qualify. And if you don't need a loan, all the lenders will line up to give you money.
”
”
Joanne Fluke (Peach Cobbler Murder (Hannah Swensen, #7))
“
The borrower is slave to the lender.
”
”
Anonymous (The Holy Bible: King James Version)
“
Most Americans have no real understanding of the operation of the international money lenders. The accounts of the Federal Reserve System have never been audited. It operates outside the control of Congress and manipulates the credit of the United States
”
”
Barry M. Goldwater
“
Give thy thoughts no tongue, Nor any unproportioned thought his act. Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar; Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel, But do not dull thy palm with entertainment Of each new-hatched unfledged comrade. Beware Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in, Bear’t that th’opposèd may beware of thee. Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice; Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgement. Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy, But not expressed in fancy; rich, not gaudy; For the apparel oft proclaims the man, And they in France of the best rank and station Are most select and generous, chief in that. Neither a borrower nor a lender be, For loan oft loses both itself and friend, And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry. This above all: to thine own self be true; And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.
”
”
William Shakespeare (Hamlet)
“
Proverbs 22:7 "The rich rule over the poor and the borrower is slave to the lender."
Galatians 5:1 "do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.
”
”
Anonymous
“
Debt is not a tool; it is a method to make banks wealthy, not you. The borrower truly is slave to the lender.
”
”
Dave Ramsey (The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness)
“
The criminalization of debt, then, was the criminalization of the very basis of human society. It cannot be overemphasized that in a small community, everyone normally was both a lender and borrower. One can only imagine the tensions and temptations that must have existed in a community—and communities, much though they are based on love, in fact because they are based on love, will always also be full of hatred, rivalry and passion—when it became clear that with sufficiently clever scheming, manipulation, and perhaps a bit of strategic bribery, they could arrange to have almost anyone they hated imprisoned or even hanged.
”
”
David Graeber (Debt: The First 5,000 Years)
“
What was to be a relatively innocuous federal government, operating from a defined enumeration of specific grants of power, has become an ever-present and unaccountable force. It is the nation’s largest creditor, debtor, lender, employer, consumer, contractor, grantor, property owner, tenant, insurer, health-care provider, and pension guarantor. Moreover, with aggrandized police powers, what it does not control directly it bans or mandates by regulation.
”
”
Mark R. Levin (The Liberty Amendments: Restoring the American Republic)
“
Banks are nothing but old fashioned money lenders. They encourage you to borrow, to get in debt, and when you can't pay back the loan they take your home away. At least a money lender only breaks your legs.
”
”
Karl Wiggins (100 Common Sense Policies to make BRITAIN GREAT again)
“
I hate debt - except when I’m the lender.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
The most famous lenders in nature are vampire bats. These bats congregate in the thousands inside caves, and every night fly out to look for prey. When they find a sleeping bird or careless mammal, they make a small incision in its skin, and suck its blood. But not all vampire bats find a victim every night. In order to cope with the uncertainty of their life, the vampires loan blood to each other. A vampire that fails to find prey will come home and ask a more fortunate friend to regurgitate some stolen blood. Vampires remember very well to whom they loaned blood, so at a later date if the friend returns home hungry, he will approach his debtor, who will reciprocate the favour. However, unlike human bankers, vampires never charge interest.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
“
My life is on loan, like money borrowed from a bank. God is the lender, and He retains the right to call in the loan any time. Though I am responsible for taking care of it, I do not own this life; it is borrowed. Why should I fear its loss or the loss of anything else in this world when I must surrender it all anyway?
”
”
James Dillehay (Overcoming the 7 Devils That Ruin Success: A Sufi Book of a Student’s Experiences)
“
It is more profitable to be a lender than a spender.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (The Wealth Reference Guide: An American Classic)
“
Proverbs 22:7: “The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is slave to the lender
”
”
Dave Ramsey (The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness)
“
Lenders often consider a company's industry, market conditions, and competitive landscape in their risk assessment. Everything matters.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence - those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste and money-lenders were abolished, you'd collapse.
”
”
Aldous Huxley (Island)
“
There is no such thing as good debt. The credit card is the cigarette of the financial world. The borrower is always a slave to the lender.
”
”
Dave Ramsey
“
The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is slave to the lender” (NIV).
”
”
Dave Ramsey (The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness)
“
Overborrowing or overlending? Lenders encourage indebtedness because it is profitable. Developing country governments are sometimes even pressured to overborrow ... Even without corruption, it is easy to be influenced by Western businessmen and financiers ... Countries that aren't sure that borrowing is worth the rist are told how important it is to establis a credit rating: borrow even if you really don't need the money.
”
”
Joseph E. Stiglitz (Making Globalization Work)
“
Yet here, Laertes? Aboard, aboard, for shame!
The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail,
And you are stay'd for. There, my blessing with thee.
And these few precepts in thy memory
See thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportion'd thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch'd, unfledged comrade. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel; but being in,
Bear't that the opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man,
And they in France of the best rank and station
Are of a most select and generous, chief in that.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell. My blessing season this in thee!
”
”
William Shakespeare
“
Because the lenders sold many—though not all—of the loans they made to other investors, in the form of mortgage bonds, the industry was also fraught with moral hazard. “It was a fast-buck business,” says Jacobs. “Any business where you can sell a product and make money without having to worry how the product performs is going to attract sleazy people.
”
”
Michael Lewis (The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine)
“
The Fed could not create new money to act as the lender of last resort for failing banks, as new money had to be backed by gold.
”
”
Charles Wheelan (Naked Money: A Revealing Look at Our Financial System)
“
The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower becomes the lender’s slave.” - Proverbs 22:7
”
”
Bitcoin and Bible Group (Thank God for Bitcoin: The Creation, Corruption and Redemption of Money)
“
there is a decisive difference between the loans supplied by private lenders and the loans supplied by a government agency. Each private lender risks his own funds.
”
”
Henry Hazlitt (Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics)
“
lenders to trade their long-term income streams for short-term cash. Say
”
”
Matt Taibbi (Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America)
“
the borrower is slave to the lender
”
”
Dave Ramsey (The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness)
“
Its dramatis personae are not so much the worker and the industrialist, but rather the money-owner (and money-lender), the wholesale merchant, the trader and the entrepreneur or ‘functioning capitalist’.
”
”
Karl Marx (Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol 2)
“
Regulatory compliance is crucial in corporate lending, with financial institutions having to adhere to various laws and guidelines. It represents another set of costs and risks that lenders have to consider.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Refinancing options are considered to optimize a business's financial structure, potentially lowering interest costs and improving overall financial health. But it has to be to the advantage of both the borrower and the lender.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Syndicated loans involve multiple lenders sharing the risk and funding a single loan. Sometimes these are good plays for both lenders and borrowers. If you’re a borrower experiencing difficulty getting approvals, maybe consider the syndication route.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Commercial lending is a vital component of the financial industry, supporting businesses in achieving their growth and operational goals. Without corporate lenders, the ability and rate at which businesses are able to grow would likely be considerably less.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
In money-lenders’ capital the form M-C-M is reduced to the two extremes without a mean, M-M , money exchanged for more money, a form that is incompatible with the nature of money, and therefore remains inexplicable from the standpoint of the circulation of commodities. Hence Aristotle: “since chrematistic is a double science, one part belonging to commerce, the other to economic, the latter being necessary and praiseworthy, the former based on circulation and with justice disapproved (for it is not based on Nature, but on mutual cheating), therefore the usurer is most rightly hated, because money itself is the source of his gain, and is not used for the purposes for which it was invented.
”
”
Karl Marx (Das Kapital - Capital)
“
Mezzanine financing combines debt and equity, providing lenders with additional security. If your lender is interested in doing this, just know that’s it’s a way for them to mitigate risk. On the flip side, it may sometimes be smart to come out the gate with this as your offering.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Lenders assess a company's creditworthiness before approving a loan, considering factors like financial health and repayment ability. So if you’re leading a business, it’s really important for you and your team to be proactive about establishing good credit health for the business.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
The “evils of faction” theme recurs throughout our history, from the writings of the “muckrakers” at the turn of the twentieth century to the Democratic presidential primary campaigns of 2008 with talk of Halliburton’s contracts in Iraq and the shady practices of sub-prime mortgage lenders.
”
”
Edward S. Greenberg (The Struggle for Democracy)
“
Banks, credit unions, and non-bank private lenders are common corporate lenders. But when you’re leading a company, it’s important to think carefully about which of these will be the right partner for your lending needs. Having the right lender may be as important as obtaining the right amount of money.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
As economist Thomas Sowell has noted, middleman minorities typically arrive in their host countries with education, skills, or a set of propitious attitudes about work, such as business frugality and the willingness to take risks. Some slave away in lowly menial jobs to raise capital, then swiftly become merchants, retailers, labor contractors, and money-lenders. Their descendants usually thrive in the professions, such as medicine, law, engineering, or finance.
”
”
Iris Chang (The Chinese in America: A Narrative History)
“
We demand for every working man work and bread!
For the people, a place to live. No democrat has the right
to deny these. We want action!
We demand war against the profiteers, peace with the workers!
We demand a solution to the Jewish question. We
Want all foreign races out of German life,
We demand an end to the German parliament. We want a leader above the mob.
We demand death sentences for crimes against the people! To the gallows with the profiteers and money-lenders!
”
”
Joseph Goebbels
“
A serving-man, proud in heart and mind; that curled
my hair; wore gloves in my cap; served the lust of
my mistress' heart, and did the act of darkness with
her; swore as many oaths as I spake words, and
broke them in the sweet face of heaven: one that
slept in the contriving of lust, and waked to do it:
wine loved I deeply, dice dearly: and in woman
out-paramoured the Turk: false of heart, light of
ear, bloody of hand; hog in sloth, fox in stealth,
wolf in greediness, dog in madness, lion in prey.
Let not the creaking of shoes nor the rustling of
silks betray thy poor heart to woman: keep thy foot
out of brothels, thy hand out of plackets, thy pen
from lenders' books, and defy the foul fiend.
Still through the hawthorn blows the cold wind:
Says suum, mun, ha, no, nonny.
Dolphin my boy, my boy, sessa! let him trot by.
Storm still.
”
”
William Shakespeare (King Lear)
“
A man who asks for your time but doesn't value it, will one day ask for your money and won't return it.
”
”
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
“
The Model Will Provide Consistent Value to Your Customers, Employees, Suppliers, and Lenders, Beyond What They Expect
”
”
Michael E. Gerber (The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It)
“
The rich rules over the poor, and the borrower is the slave of the lender.
”
”
Anonymous (Holy Bible: English Standard Version (ESV))
“
Interest rate risk arises when there's potential for interest rates to change, impacting loan costs. It’s a serious consideration for lenders.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Capital Acquisition: Small Business Considerations for How to Get Financing)
“
His dick is an equal opportunity lender.
”
”
Angel Lawson (Princes of Chaos (Royals of Forsyth University, #7))
“
Corporate bonds, Treasury bonds, and municipal bonds all represent nothing more than a loan—or, if you wish, debt—for which the lender will be paid an interest rate,
”
”
Lawrence G. McDonald (A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers)
“
Every lender is interested in the character of their borrowers.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Capital Acquisition: Small Business Considerations for How to Get Financing)
“
In most cases, lenders are not interested in owning the collateral itself – they are only interested in the cash value of the collateral.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Capital Acquisition: Small Business Considerations for How to Get Financing)
“
Your business’ debt is a lenders investment and your business’ liability is a lenders asset.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Capital Acquisition: Small Business Considerations for How to Get Financing)
“
We all really only want to lend our money to people we can trust to pay it back. It’s the same thing with banks and other institutional
lenders.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Capital Acquisition: Small Business Considerations for How to Get Financing)
“
Lenders want to have peace of mind when it comes to getting their money back plus profit – collateral is one thing that gives that peace of mind.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Capital Acquisition: Small Business Considerations for How to Get Financing)
“
If you could really insure banks and other lenders against default risk, that might well unleash a great wave of capital into the economy.
”
”
Gillian Tett (Fool's Gold)
“
When a monarch becomes a moneylender, democracy begins.
”
”
Mantaranjot Mangat (Plotless)
“
The rich rules over the poor, and the borrower is the slave of the lender.
”
”
Anonymous (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version (without Cross-References))
“
collar jobs are gone. Can’t buy a house because the lenders have designated the neighborhood as high-risk—the redlining actually creates the conditions
”
”
Colson Whitehead (Crook Manifesto)
“
These words are my mother’s,
my father’s, my brother’s, my lender’s, my garbage
man’s—the poem runs
like oil on fire
beneath this earth where we know each other.
Witness the black smoke everywhere.
”
”
B.J. Ward
“
Now there was great rejoicing at the rumor of Alderic's quest, for all folk knew that he was a cautious man, and they deemed that he would succeed and enrich the world, and they rubbed their hands in the cities at the thought of largesse; and there was joy among all men in Alderic's country, except perchance among the lenders of money, who feared they would soon be paid. And there was rejoicing also because men hoped that when the Gibbelins were robbed of their hoard, they would shatter their high-built bridge and break the golden chains that bound them to the world, and drift back, they and their tower, to the moon, from which they had come and to which they rightly belonged. There was little love for the Gibbelins, though all men envied their hoard.
("The Hoard Of The Gibbelins")
”
”
Lord Dunsany (Monster Mix)
“
Currency risk is a consideration in international corporate lending, given fluctuating exchange rates. It represents another set of costs and risks that lenders have to consider when lending internationally.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Capital Acquisition: Small Business Considerations for How to Get Financing)
“
I see that you have come to the last stage of human life; you are close upon your hundreth year, or even beyond: come now, hold an audit of your life. Reckon how much of your time has been taken up by a money-lender, how much by a mistress, a patron, a client, quarreling with your wife, punishing your slaves, dashing about the city on your social obligations. Consider also the diseases which we have brought on ourselves, and the time too which has been unused. You will find that you have fewer years than you reckon. Call to mind when you ever had a fixed purpose; how few days have passed as you had planned; when you were ever at your own disposal; when your face wore its natural expression; when your mind was undisturbed; what work you have achieved in such a long life; how many have plundered your life when you were unaware of your losses; how much you have lost through groundless sorrow, foolish joy, greedy desire, the seductions of society; how little of your own was left to you. You will realize that you are dying prematurely.
”
”
Seneca (On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It (Penguin Great Ideas))
“
Credit risk is a major concern in business lending, and lenders use credit scoring models specific to businesses. As an entrepreneur, you need to have a clear credit and distinct strategy for your business’s credit.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Cash flow analysis helps lenders assess a business's ability to generate sufficient cash to meet debt obligations. In terms of managing your business’s money, free cash flow is a good metric to keep front and center.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Corporate lenders play a vital role in supporting economic growth by providing capital to businesses. Without corporate lenders, the ability and rate at which businesses are able to grow would likely be considerably less.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Capital Acquisition: Small Business Considerations for How to Get Financing)
“
The bottom line is that the government has artificially mitigated lenders’ risk, and it has done so on the perverse, altruistic premise that “society” has a moral duty to increase home ownership among low-income Americans.
”
”
Yaron Brook (In Pursuit of Wealth: The Moral Case for Finance)
“
The options also were a way of shifting enormous risk from Renaissance to the banks. Because the lenders technically owned the underlying securities in the basket-options transactions, the most Medallion could lose in the event of a sudden collapse was the premium it had paid for the options and the collateral held by the banks. That amounted to several hundred million dollars. By contrast, the banks faced billions of dollars of potential losses if Medallion were to experience deep troubles. In the words of a banker involved in the lending arrangement, the options allowed Medallion to “ring-fence” its stock portfolios, protecting other parts of the firm, including Laufer’s still-thriving futures trading, and ensuring Renaissance’s survival in the event something unforeseen took place. One staffer was so shocked by the terms of the financing that he shifted most of his life savings into Medallion, realizing the most he could lose was about 20 percent of his money.
”
”
Gregory Zuckerman (The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution)
“
Prosperity brings expanded lending, which leads to unwise lending, which produces large losses, which makes lenders stop lending, which ends prosperity, and on and on. . . . Look around the next time there’s a crisis; you’ll probably find a lender.
”
”
Howard Marks (The Most Important Thing: Uncommon Sense for the Thoughtful Investor (Columbia Business School Publishing))
“
On the American Oligarchy
"How about the United States?" a man yelled from the audience.
"And what about it?" Martin retorted. "The thirteen colonies threw off their rulers and formed the Republic so-called. The slaves were their own masters. There were no more masters of the sword. But you couldn't get along without masters of some sort, and there arose a new set of masters–not the great, virile noble men, but the shrewd and spidery traders and money-lenders. And they enslaved you all over again–but not frankly, as the true, noble men would do with weight of their own right arms, but secretly, by spidery machinations and by wheedling and cajoling and lies. They have purchased your slave judges, they have debauched your slave legislatures, and they have forced to worse horrors than chattel slavery your slave boys and girls. Two million of your children are toiling today in this trade-oligarchy of the United States. Ten millions of your slaves are not properly sheltered nor properly fed.
”
”
Jack London (Martin Eden)
“
The infamous Debt-To-Income ratio is the standard formula most lenders use to determine a potential borrowers capacity. Lenders calculate this by adding up a borrower’s total monthly debt payments and dividing that by the borrowers gross monthly income.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Capital Acquisition: Small Business Considerations for How to Get Financing)
“
If you had saved $20 per week for just ten weeks, you could have bought the scratch-and-dent model off the floor at the same Rent-to-Own store for $200! Or you could have bought a used set out of the classifieds or online. It pays to look past the weekend and suffer through going to the Laundromat with your quarters. When you think short term, you always set yourself up for being ripped off by a predatory lender. If the Red-Faced Kid (“I want it, and I want it now!”) rules your life, you will stay broke!
”
”
Dave Ramsey (The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness)
“
Why should not the effects of changing interest rates be divided on some practical and equitable basis between the borrower and the lender? One possibility would be to sell long-term bonds with interest payments that vary with an appropriate index of the going rate.
”
”
Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
“
I conceive that there is in a loan an actual exchange, an actual service rendered by the lender, and which makes the borrower liable to an equivalent service,—two services, whose comparative value can only be appreciated, like that of all possible services, by freedom.
”
”
Frédéric Bastiat (Essays on Political Economy)
“
When you lend someone money, you are in the position of power. But when you want to take your money back, you are powerless. Similarly, when you do the hardwork, you are in power. But when you want result of your hardwork, you are on the mercy of the universe. The result is not in your hand.
The Paramatma - the supreme soul - is on the both side: He is in seeker as well as giver, employee as well as employer, lender as well as debtor. Closer you are to knowing the Paramatma, more powerful you feel in getting the result that you want.
”
”
Shunya
“
From a broader money view perspective, however, September 2008 was the moment when the Fed moved from lender of last resort to dealer of last resort, in effect taking the collapsing wholesale money market onto its own balance sheet. But in the heat of the moment, no one noticed.
”
”
Perry G. Mehrling
“
When individuals are exchanging present goods against future goods they do not take account in their valuations of Variations in the objective exchange-value of money. Lenders and borrowers are not in the habit of allowing for possible future fluctuations in the objective exchange-value of money.
”
”
Ludwig von Mises (The Theory of Money and Credit)
“
Crises, especially severe crises, have a purgative effect. In the business world, insolvent businesses that adopted a bad strategy close down, and bad loans are written off. Then lenders can lend with a new confidence again. This is the process that Joseph Schumpeter celebrated as creative destruction.
”
”
Harold James (The Creation and Destruction of Value: The Globalization Cycle)
“
Power at its worst is the unmaker of humanity—breeding inhumanity in the hearts of those who wield power, denying and denouncing the humanity of the ones who suffer under power. This is the power exercised by the money lender, by the police who ignore or protect him, by the officials who would rather not confront him. This power ultimately will put everything around it to death rather than share abundant life with another. It is also the power of feigned or forced ignorance, the power of complacency and self-satisfaction with our small fiefdoms of comfort. Power, the truest servant of love, can also be its most implacable enemy.
”
”
Andy Crouch (Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power)
“
Serious businesses and lenders will tell you that managing your cash flow is one of the most important aspects in the health of any business. Managing you time flow is key to a healthy and successful life, because, Time is equal to Life. The quality of time expenditure is in direct proportion to the quality of life enjoyed.
”
”
Archibald Marwizi (Making Success Deliberate)
“
To put these complicated matters into very simple terms, you create a cycle virtually anytime you borrow money. Buying something you can’t afford means spending more than you make. You’re not just borrowing from your lender; you are borrowing from your future self. Essentially, you are creating a time in the future in which you will need to spend less than you make so you can pay it back. The pattern of borrowing, spending more than you make, and then having to spend less than you make very quickly resembles a cycle. This is as true for a national economy as it is for an individual. Borrowing money sets a mechanical, predictable series of events into motion.
”
”
Ray Dalio (A Template for Understanding Big Debt Crises)
“
Engaged in a new form of serfdom---only bound now to banks and mortgage lenders instead of to lords---her more highly leveraged neighbors pore over the business section of the newspaper each day looking for some sign that the government will soon step in to “freeze” their mortgage rates where they are before a scheduled adjustment hits.
”
”
Douglas Rushkoff (Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back)
“
Always owe somebody something, then he will be forever praying God to grant you a good, long and blessed life. Fearing to lose what you owe him, he will always be saying good things about you in every sort of company; he will be constantly acquiring new lenders for you, so that you can borrow to pay him back, filling his ditch with other men’s spoil.
”
”
David Graeber (Debt: The First 5000 Years)
“
Bankers throughout time have used what we call ‘‘The Five C’s of Credit’ as a basis of evaluating the worthiness of a potential borrower.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Capital Acquisition: Small Business Considerations for How to Get Financing)
“
The more trustworthy a borrower is, the greater the likelihood that they will return the money lent to them back to the lender with interest. This is why lenders of every kind and size, place a high priority on the character of potential borrowers – it is one of the five key determining factors as to the likelihood of the lender receiving their money back with interest.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Capital Acquisition: Small Business Considerations for How to Get Financing)
“
Second, it is also quite clear that, all things considered, this very high level of public debt served the interests of the lenders and their descendants quite well, at least when compared with what would have happened if the British monarchy had financed its expenditures by making them pay taxes. From the standpoint of people with the means to lend to the government, it is obviously far more advantageous to lend to the state and receive interest on the loan for decades than to pay taxes without compensation. Furthermore, the fact that the government’s deficits increased the overall demand for private wealth inevitably increased the return on that wealth, thereby serving the interests of those whose prosperity depended on the return on their investment in government bonds.
”
”
Thomas Piketty (Capital in the Twenty-First Century)
“
We see money accumulating at the
centers, with difficulty of finding safe
investment for it; interest rates dropping
down lower than ever before;
money available in great plenty for
things that are obviously safe, but not
available at all for things that are in
fact safe, and which under normal conditions
would be entirely safe (and there
are a great many such), but which are
now viewed with suspicion by lenders.
”
”
D.M. Frederikson
“
In winter, everything dies, though preparations continue. The tasks of winter include: • Getting the financials in order; • Squaring accounts with lenders for last years’ crops and lining up next year’s money; • Repairing equipment and getting it ready for next year; • Preparing fields for the upcoming year; and • Reviewing the successes and failures of the past year and tweaking things to do everything better next year.
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Henry Cloud (Necessary Endings: The Employees, Businesses, and Relationships That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Move Forward)
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The ARM, Adjustable Rate Mortgage, was invented in the early 1980s. Prior to that, those of us in the real estate business sold fixed-rate 7 or 8 percent mortgages. What happened? I was there in the middle of that disaster of an economy when fixed-rate mortgages went as high as 17 percent and the real estate world froze. Lenders paid out 12 percent on CDs but had money loaned out at 7 percent on hundreds of millions of dollars in mortgages. They were losing money, and lenders don’t like to lose money. So the Adjustable Rate Mortgage was born, in which your interest rate goes up when the prevailing market interest rates go up. The ARM was born to transfer the risk of higher interest rates to you, the consumer. In the last several years, home mortgage rates have been at a thirty-year low. It is not wise to get something that adjusts when you are at the bottom of rates! The mythsayers always seem to want to add risk to your home, the one place you should want to make sure has stability. Balloon mortgages are even worse. Balloons pop, and it is always strange to me that the popping sound is so startling. Why don’t we expect it? It is in the very nature of balloons to pop. Wise financial people always move away from risk, and the balloon mortgage creates risk nightmares.
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Dave Ramsey (The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness)
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Consider the recent financial crisis and its link to faulty reward systems. President Bill Clinton's objective of increasing homeownership by rewarding potential home buyers and lenders is one example. The Clinton administration "went to ridiculous lengths" to increase homeownership in the United State, promoting "paper-thin down payments" and pushing lenders to give mortgage loans to unqualified buyers according to Business Week editor Peter Coy.
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Max H. Bazerman
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It’s ironic perhaps – but no one wants to lend money to someone or something that has no money or no monetary worth. You wouldn’t plant a seed on barren ground – you plant a seed where there’s already a wealth of resources sufficient to cultivate the seed. It could be a tiny bit of soil in a pot, or the expanse of your front yard. But you’re going to make sure the seed has enough soil to put down roots and a quality of soil that facilitates growth.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Capital Acquisition: Small Business Considerations for How to Get Financing)
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He became the largest individual hog farmer in the North. And, in order not to be victimized by meat packers, he bought controlling interest in an Indianapolis slaughterhouse. In order not to be victimized by steel suppliers, he bought controlling interest in a steel company in Pittsburgh. In order not to be victimized by coal suppliers, he bought controlling interest in several mines. In order not to be victimized by money lenders, he founded a bank.
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater)
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Forcing new loans upon the bankrupt on condition that they shrink their income is nothing short of cruel and unusual punishment. Greece was never bailed out. With their ‘rescue’ loan and their troika of bailiffs enthusiastically slashing incomes, the EU and IMF effectively condemned Greece to a modern version of the Dickensian debtors’ prison and then threw away the key.
Debtors’ prisons were ultimately abandoned because, despite their cruelty, they neither deterred the accumulation of new bad debts nor helped creditors get their money back. For capitalism to advance in the nineteenth century, the absurd notion that all debts are sacred had to be ditched and replaced with the notion of limited liability. After all, if all debts are guaranteed, why should lenders lend responsibly? And why should some debts carry a higher interest rate than other debts, reflecting the higher risk of going bad? Bankruptcy and debt write-downs became for capitalism what hell had always been for Christian dogma – unpleasant yet essential – but curiously bankruptcy-denial was revived in the twenty-first century to deal with the Greek state’s insolvency. Why? Did the EU and the IMF not realize what they were doing?
They knew exactly what they were doing. Despite their meticulous propaganda, in which they insisted that they were trying to save Greece, to grant the Greek people a second chance, to help reform Greece’s chronically crooked state and so on, the world’s most powerful institutions and governments were under no illusions. […]
Banks restructure the debt of stressed corporations every day, not out of philanthropy but out of enlightened self-interest. But the problem was that, now that we had accepted the EU–IMF bailout, we were no longer dealing with banks but with politicians who had lied to their parliaments to convince them to relieve the banks of Greece’s debt and take it on themselves. A debt restructuring would require them to go back to their parliaments and confess their earlier sin, something they would never do voluntarily, fearful of the repercussions. The only alternative was to continue the pretence by giving the Greek government another wad of money with which to pretend to meet its debt repayments to the EU and the IMF: a second bailout.
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Yanis Varoufakis (Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europe's Deep Establishment)
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there are now methods that produce unbiased results according to several plausible and desirable definitions of fairness.39 The mathematical analysis of these definitions of fairness shows that they cannot be achieved simultaneously and that, when enforced, they result in lower prediction accuracy and, in the case of lending decisions, lower profit for the lender. This is perhaps disappointing, but at least it makes clear the trade-offs involved in avoiding algorithmic bias.
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Stuart Russell (Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control)
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The parables of Jesus reveal a God who is consistently overgenerous with His forgiveness and grace. He portrays God as the lender magnanimously canceling a debt, as the shepherd seeking a strayed sheep, as the judge hearing the prayer of the tax collector. In Jesus’ stories, divine forgiveness does not depend on our repentance or on our ability to love our enemies or on our doing heroic, virtuous deeds. God’s forgiveness depends only on the love out of which He fashioned the human race.
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Brennan Manning (The Relentless Tenderness of Jesus)
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I would like to fasten on someone from the older generation and say to him: ‘I see that you have come to the last stage of human life; you are close upon your hundredth year, or even beyond: come now, hold an audit of your life. Reckon how much of your time has been taken up by a money-lender, how much by a mistress, a patron, a client, quarrelling with your wife, dashing about the city on your social obligations. Consider also the diseases which we have brought on ourselves, and the time too which has been unused.
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Seneca (On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It (Penguin Great Ideas))
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I found myself listening to Walter Bjork's fascinating radio program Bible Questionnaire (WFME, Orange, N.J.), and a caller asked where in the Bible one would find the statement "Neither borrower nor lender be." The poor host flipped like mad through his concordance without success. Naturally, since the quote is not from the Bible at all, but from Shakespeare's Hamlet! But it sounded biblical, so caller and host alike attributed it to scripture. Can it have been much more difficult to naively attribute wise sayings to Jesus?
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Robert M. Price (The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man: How Reliable Is the Gospel Tradition?)
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understand that there are rules to follow if you are to win: 1. The model will provide consistent value to your customers, employees, suppliers, and lenders, beyond what they expect. 2. The model will be operated by people with the lowest possible level of skill. 3. The model will stand out as a place of impeccable order. 4. All work in the model will be documented in Operations Manuals. 5. The model will provide a uniformly predictable service to the customer. 6. The model will utilize a uniform color, dress, and facilities code.
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Michael E. Gerber (The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It)
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How exactly did the Dutch win the trust of the financial system? Firstly, they were sticklers about repaying their loans on time and in full, making the extension of credit less risky for lenders. Secondly, their country’s judicial system enjoyed independence and protected private rights – in particular private property rights. Capital trickles away from dictatorial states that fail to defend private individuals and their property. Instead, it flows into states upholding the rule of law and private property. Imagine that you are the
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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Most of the crime-ridden minority neighborhoods in New York City, especially areas like East New York, where many of the characters in Eric Garner’s story grew up, had been artificially created by a series of criminal real estate scams.
One of the most infamous had involved a company called the Eastern Service Corporation, which in the sixties ran a huge predatory lending operation all over the city, but particularly in Brooklyn.
Scam artists like ESC would first clear white residents out of certain neighborhoods with scare campaigns. They’d slip leaflets through mail slots warning of an incoming black plague, with messages like, “Don’t wait until it’s too late!” Investors would then come in and buy their houses at depressed rates. Once this “blockbusting” technique cleared the properties, a company like ESC would bring in a new set of homeowners, often minorities, and often with bad credit and shaky job profiles. They bribed officials in the FHA to approve mortgages for anyone and everyone. Appraisals would be inflated. Loans would be approved for repairs, but repairs would never be done.
The typical target homeowner in the con was a black family moving to New York to escape racism in the South. The family would be shown a house in a place like East New York that in reality was only worth about $15,000. But the appraisal would be faked and a loan would be approved for $17,000. The family would move in and instantly find themselves in a house worth $2,000 less than its purchase price, and maybe with faulty toilets, lighting, heat, and (ironically) broken windows besides. Meanwhile, the government-backed loan created by a lender like Eastern Service by then had been sold off to some sucker on the secondary market: a savings bank, a pension fund, or perhaps to Fannie Mae, the government-sponsored mortgage corporation.
Before long, the family would default and be foreclosed upon. Investors would swoop in and buy the property at a distressed price one more time. Next, the one-family home would be converted into a three- or four-family rental property, which would of course quickly fall into even greater disrepair.
This process created ghettos almost instantly. Racial blockbusting is how East New York went from 90 percent white in 1960 to 80 percent black and Hispanic in 1966.
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Matt Taibbi (I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street)
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In short, there is no question that a country can run a stable paper currency without a gold standard, a central bank, a lender of last resort, or much regulation; and not only avoid disaster, but perform well. Bottom–up monetary systems – known as free banking – have a far better track record than top–down ones. Walter Bagehot, the great nineteenth-century theorist of central banking, admitted as much. In his influential book Lombard Street, he effectively conceded that the only reason a central bank needed to be a lender of last resort was because of the instability introduced by the existence of a central bank. The
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Matt Ridley (The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge)
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Here are my simple rules for identifying market tops and bottoms: 1. Market tops are relatively easy to recognize. Buyers generally become overconfident and almost always believe “this time is different.” It’s usually not. 2. There’s always a surplus of relatively cheap debt capital to finance acquisitions and investments in a hot market. In some cases, lenders won’t even charge cash interest, and they often relax or suspend typical loan restrictions as well. Leverage levels escalate compared to historical averages, with borrowing sometimes reaching as high as ten times or more compared to equity. Buyers will start accepting overoptimistic accounting adjustments and financial forecasts to justify taking on high levels of debt. Unfortunately most of these forecasts tend not to materialize once the economy starts decelerating or declining. 3. Another indicator that a market is peaking is the number of people you know who start getting rich. The number of investors claiming outperformance grows with the market. Loose credit conditions and a rising tide can make it easy for individuals without any particular strategy or process to make money “accidentally.” But making money in strong markets can be short-lived. Smart investors perform well through a combination of self-discipline and sound risk assessment, even when market conditions reverse.
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Stephen A. Schwarzman (What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence)
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The most famous lenders in nature are vampire bats. These bats congregate in the thousands inside caves, and every night fly out to look for prey. When they find a sleeping bird or careless mammal, they make a small incision in its skin, and suck its blood. But not all vampire bats find a victim every night. In order to cope with the uncertainty of their life, the vampires loan blood to each other. A vampire that fails to find prey will come home and ask a more fortunate friend to regurgitate some stolen blood. Vampires remember very well to whom they loaned blood, so at a later date if the friend returns home hungry, he will approach his debtor, who will reciprocate the favour.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow)
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Give thy thoughts no tongue, nor any unproportioned thought his act. Be thou familiar but by no means vulgar. Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel, but do not dull thy palm with entertainment of each new-hatched, unfledged comrade. Beware of entrance to a quarrel, but being in, bear 't that th' opposed may beware of thee. Give every man thy ear but few thy voice. Take each man's censure but reserve thy judgement... Neither a borrower nor a lender be, for loan oft loses both itself and friend, and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry. This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.
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William Shakespeare (Hamlet)
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From 2000, Fannie and Freddie’s appetite for sub-prime loans increased markedly every year, encouraging a rich harvest of increasingly crazy loans by mortgage originators to supply this appetite. House-builders, lenders, mortgage brokers, Wall Street underwriters, legal firms, housing charities and pressure groups like ACORN all benefited. Taxpayers did not. By the early 2000s, Fannie and Freddie were well intertwined with politicians, donating rich campaign contributions especially to Congressional Democrats, and giving rewarding jobs to politicians – Clinton’s former Budget Director Franklin Raines would pocket $100 million from his brief spell in charge of Fannie. Between 1998 and 2008, Fannie and Freddie spent $175 million lobbying Congress.
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Matt Ridley (The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge)
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The danger, of course, is that it is not always easy to distinguish between a default that was inevitable—in the sense that a country is so highly leveraged and so badly managed that it takes very little to force it into default—and one that was not—in the sense that a country is fundamentally sound but is having difficulties sustaining confidence because of a very temporary and easily solvable liquidity problem. In the heat of a crisis, it is all too tempting for would-be rescuers (today notably multilateral lenders such as the IMF) to persuade themselves that they are facing a confidence problem that can be solved with short-term bridge loans, when in fact they are confronting a much more deeply rooted crisis of solvency and willingness to pay
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Carmen M. Reinhart (This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly)
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Greece’s economic problems weren’t new. For decades, the country had been plagued by low productivity, a bloated and inefficient public sector, massive tax avoidance, and unsustainable pension obligations. Despite that, throughout the 2000s, international capital markets had been happy to finance Greece’s steadily escalating deficits, much the same way that they’d been happy to finance a heap of subprime mortgages across the United States. In the wake of the Wall Street crisis, the mood grew less generous. When a new Greek government announced that its latest budget deficit far exceeded previous estimates, European bank stocks plunged and international lenders balked at lending Greece more money. The country suddenly teetered on the brink of default.
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Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
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Give every man thy ear but few thy voice. Take each man’s censure but reserve thy judgment. 70 Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy, But not expressed in fancy—rich, not gaudy, For the apparel oft proclaims the man, And they in France of the best rank and station Are of a most select and generous chief in that. 75 Neither a borrower nor a lender be, For loan oft loses both itself and friend, And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry. This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, 80 Thou canst not then be false to any man. Farewell. My blessing season this in thee. LAERTES Most humbly do I take my leave, my lord. POLONIUS The time invites you. Go. Your servants tend. LAERTES Farewell, Ophelia, and remember well 85 What I have said to you.
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William Shakespeare (Hamlet: No Fear Shakespeare Side-by-Side Plain English (Volume 3))
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homeowner, and come away with $20,000 or $30,000 cash in pocket. Success in real estate required skills that Rob believed were some of his strongest: the work ethic to locate those homes, the social skills to negotiate with people ranging from rich lenders to working-class contractors to poor renters, and the desire to make money in crafty but fundamentally honest ways. And, at least in Rob’s idealized vision, he would be making a positive mark in the world. Because a house meant shelter. It meant heat. It meant security. Above all, it meant family. Some friends who knew about Skeet’s passing felt that something equally powerful drove him: Rob had lost not only his father but also the goal of releasing his father in which he’d invested so much work since high school. He’d achieved almost every objective he’d ever laid out
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Jeff Hobbs (The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League)
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How can HOW help us repair our faltering global economy?
Only by getting our "hows" right can we ensure that we are sustainable. This can only be achieved when we are rooted in, and inspired by, sustainable values. The global economic meltdown supplied a perfect, but painful, example of how sustainability cannot be guided by situational values. The economic crash occurred because too many financial companies became disconnected from fundamental values and long-term sustainable thinking. Instead of nurturing sustainable collaborations, banks, lenders, borrowers and shareholders pursued short-term relationships founded on situational values. More than ever we need to get out of this cycle of crises and build long-term success and deep human connections so that we achieve enduring significance in today's globally interconnected world.
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Dov Seidman
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Treating the cause of high prices and interest rates in low-income neighborhoods as the product of personal greed or exploitation, and attempting to remedy the problem through the imposition of price controls and interest rate caps. , it only ensures that people living in low-income neighborhoods have even less chance of accessing these services in the future. Just as rent control reduces the supply of housing, price and interest rate control can reduce the number of stores, pawn shops, local finance companies, and check-paying agencies willing to operate in costly neighborhoods. higher, when those costs cannot be recovered through legally permitted prices and interest rates. The only alternative for many residents of low-income neighborhoods may end up being to exit the legal market of financial institutions and ask for money from usurious lenders, who set even higher interest rates and have their own collection methods.
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Thomas Sowell (Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy)
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Instead, the battle is joined at the level of pure abstraction. The issue, the newest Right tells us, is freedom itself, not the doings of the subprime lenders or the ways the bond-rating agencies were compromised over the course of the last decade. Details like that may have crashed the economy, but to the renascent Right they are almost completely irrelevant. What matters is a given politician’s disposition toward free markets and, by extension, toward the common people of the land, whose faithful vicar the market is. Now, there is nothing really novel about the idea that free markets are the very essence of freedom. What is new is the glorification of this idea at the precise moment when free-market theory has proven itself to be a philosophy of ruination and fraud. The revival of the Right is as extraordinary as it would be if the public had demanded dozens of new nuclear power plants in the days after the Three Mile Island disaster; if we had reacted to Watergate by making Richard Nixon a national hero.
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Thomas Frank (Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right)
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Up until around 1350, lending with an interest rate was prohibited by both Christianity and Islam—and in Judaism it was banned within the Jewish community—because of the terrible problems it caused, with human nature leading people to borrow more than they could pay back, which created tensions and often violence between borrowers and lenders. As a result of this lack of lending, currency was “hard” (gold and silver). A century or so later, in the Age of Exploration, explorers went around the world collecting gold and silver and other hard assets to make more money. That’s how the greatest fortunes were built at the time. The explorers and those who backed them split the profits. It was an effective incentive-based system for getting rich. The alchemy of lending as we know it today was first created in Italy around 1350. Rules for lending changed and new types of money were made: cash deposits, bonds, and stocks that looked pretty much like we know them today. Wealth became promises to deliver money—what I call “financial wealth.
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Ray Dalio (Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail)
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So far as variations in the objective exchange-value of money are foreseen, they influence the terms of credit transactions. If a future fall in the purchasing power of the monetary unit has to be reckoned with, lenders must be prepared for the fact that the sum of money which a debtor repays at the conclusion of the transaction will have a smaller purchasing power than the sum originally lent. Lenders, in fact, would do better not to lend at all, but to buy other goods with their money. The contrary is true for debtors. If they buy commodities with the money they have borrowed and sell them again after a time, they will retain a surplus over and above the sum that they have to pay back. The credit transaction results in a gain for them. Consequently it is not difficult to understand that, so long as continued depreciation is to be reckoned with, those who lend money demand higher rates of interest and those who borrow money are willing to pay the higher rates. If, on the other hand, it is expected that the value of money will increase, then the rate of interest will be lower than it would otherwise have been.
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Ludwig von Mises (The Theory of Money and Credit)
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The subprime market tapped a segment of the American public that did not typically have anything to do with Wall Street: the tranche between the fifth and the twenty-ninth percentile in their credit ratings. That is, the lenders were making loans to people who were less creditworthy than 71 percent of the population. Which of these poor Americans were likely to jump which way with their finances? How much did their home prices need to fall for their loans to blow up? Which mortgage originators were the most corrupt? Which Wall Street firms were creating the most dishonest mortgage bonds? What kind of people, in which parts of the country, exhibited the highest degree of financial irresponsibility? The default rate in Georgia was five times higher than that in Florida, even though the two states had the same unemployment rate. Why? Indiana had a 25 percent default rate; California, only 5 percent, even though Californians were, on the face of it, far less fiscally responsible. Why? Vinny and Danny flew down to Miami, where they wandered around empty neighborhoods built with subprime loans, and saw with their own eyes how bad things were. “They’d
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Michael Lewis (The Big Short)
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Which meant, if somehow GameStop did start to go up, the people who had shorted the company would begin to feel pressure to buy; the more the stock went up, the heavier that pressure became. As the shorts began to cover, buying shares to return them to their lenders, the stock would rise even higher.
In financial parlance, this was something called a 'short squeeze.' It didn't happen often, but when it did, it could be spectacular. Most famously, in 2008, a surprise takeover attempt of the German automaker Volkswagen by rival Porsche drove Volkswagen's stock price up by a factor of 5 — briefly making it the most valuable company in the world — in two quick days of trading, as short selling funds struggled to cover their positions. Similarly, a battle between two hedge fund titans — Bill Ackman, of Pershing Square Capital Management, and Carl Icahn — led to a squeeze involving supplement maker — and alleged pyramid marketer — Herbalife, which cost Ackman a reported $1 billion. And perhaps the first widely reported short squeeze dated back a century, to 1923, when grocery magnate Clarence Saunders successfully decimated short sellers who had targeted his nascent chain of Piggly Wiggly grocery stores.
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Ben Mezrich (The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees)
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Rent-to-Own is one of the worst examples of the little Red-Faced Kid in “I want it now!” mode. The Federal Trade Commission continues to investigate this industry because the effective interest rates in rent-to-own transactions are over 1,800 percent on average. People rent items they can’t possibly afford to buy because they look only at “how much a week” and think, I can afford this. Well, when you look at the numbers, no one can afford this. The average washer and dryer will cost you just $20 per week for ninety weeks. That is a total of $1,800 for a washer and dryer you could have bought new at full retail price for $500 and slightly used for $200. As my old professor used to say about the “own” part of Rent-to-Own, “You should live so long!” If you had saved $20 per week for just ten weeks, you could have bought the scratch-and-dent model off the floor at the same Rent-to-Own store for $200! Or you could have bought a used set out of the classifieds or online. It pays to look past the weekend and suffer through going to the Laundromat with your quarters. When you think short term, you always set yourself up for being ripped off by a predatory lender. If the Red-Faced Kid (“I want it, and I want it now!”) rules your life, you will stay broke!
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Dave Ramsey (The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness)
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From Smith's principle that labor is the true measure of price—or, as Warren phrased it, that cost is the proper limit of price—these three men (Josiah Warren, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Karl Marx) made the following deductions: that the natural wage of labor is its product; that this wage, or product, is the only just source of income (leaving out, of course, gift, inheritance, etc.); that all who derive income from any other source abstract it directly or indirectly from the natural and just wage of labor; that this abstracting process generally takes one of three forms, interest, rent, and profit; that these three constitute the trinity of usury, and are simply different methods of levying tribute for the use of capital; that, capital being simply stored-up labor which has already received its pay in full, its use ought to be gratuitous, on the principle that labor is the only basis of price; that the lender of capital is entitled to its return intact, and nothing more; that the only reason why the banker, the stockholder, the landlord, the manufacturer, and the merchant are able to exact usury from labor lies in the fact that they are backed by legal privilege, or monopoly; and that the only way to secure to labor the enjoyment of its entire product, or natural wage, is to strike down monopoly.
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Frank H Brooks (The Individualist Anarchists: Anthology of Liberty, 1881-1908)
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Your true savage, reserved, dignified, and courteous, knows how to mask his feelings, even in the face of the most desperate assault upon them; your civilized man is forever yielding to them. Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. Wars are no longer waged by the will of superior men, capable of judging dispassionately and intelligently the causes behind them and the effects flowing out of them. They are now begun by first throwing a mob into a panic; they are ended only when it has spent its ferine fury. Here the effect of civilization has been to reduce the noblest of the arts, once the repository of an exalted etiquette and the chosen avocation of the very best men of the race, to the level of a riot of peasants. All the wars of Christendom are now disgusting and degrading; the conduct of them has passed out of the hands of nobles and knights and into the hands of mob-orators, money-lenders, and atrocity-mongers. To recreate one’s self with war in the grand manner, as Prince Eugene, Marlborough and the Old Dessauer knew it, one must now go among barbarian peoples.
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H.L. Mencken (In Defense of Women)
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It was the German powerhouse Deutsche Bank AG, not my fictitious RhineBank, that financed the construction of the extermination camp at Auschwitz and the nearby factory that manufactured Zyklon B pellets. And it was Deutsche Bank that earned millions of Nazi reichsmarks through the Aryanization of Jewish-owned businesses. Deutsche Bank also incurred massive multibillion-dollar fines for helping rogue nations such as Iran and Syria evade US economic sanctions; for manipulating the London interbank lending rate; for selling toxic mortgage-backed securities to unwitting investors; and for laundering untold billions’ worth of tainted Russian assets through its so-called Russian Laundromat. In 2007 and 2008, Deutsche Bank extended an unsecured $1 billion line of credit to VTB Bank, a Kremlin-controlled lender that financed the Russian intelligence services and granted cover jobs to Russian intelligence officers operating abroad. Which meant that Germany’s biggest lender, knowingly or unknowingly, was a silent partner in Vladimir Putin’s war against the West and liberal democracy. Increasingly, that war is being waged by Putin’s wealthy cronies and by privately owned companies like the Wagner Group and the Internet Research Agency, the St. Petersburg troll factory that allegedly meddled in the 2016 US presidential election. The IRA was one of three
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Daniel Silva (The Cellist (Gabriel Allon, #21))
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The American share of the crisis began with grossly improper mortgages provided to wholly unqualified borrowers, all directly caused and encouraged by government distortion of and interference in the market. The government’s market deformation and market intervention was in turn the result of two factors: political favouritism and Leftist ideology, on the one hand; and upon the other, corruption: the blatant cooption of such Friends of Angelo as Mr Dodd and of such bien-pensant Lefties as Mr Frank. The stability and efficiency of any market is directly proportional to the amount and trustworthiness of market information. The Yank Congress, for blatantly partisan and ideological reasons, gave out false information to the market, pushing lenders into making bad loans and giving out, with the appropriate winks and nudges, that Fannie (will Americans ever realise how that sounds) and Freddie, imperfectly quangoised, were ‘really just as good as the Treasury’ and were in any case ‘too big to [be let] fail’: which, as it happens, was untrue. Similarly, this moronic mantra of ‘too big to fail’ was chanted desperately and loudly to drown out the warning sounds of various financial institutions on the brink and of the automobile industry. Incomprehensible sums of public money were thrown at these corporations so that they could avoid bankruptcy, and have succeeded only in privatising profit whilst socialising risk.
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G.M.W. Wemyss
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Equity financing, on the other hand, is unappealing to cooperators because it may mean relinquishing control to outside investors, which is a distinctly capitalist practice. Investors are not likely to buy non-voting shares; they will probably require representation on the board of directors because otherwise their money could potentially be expropriated. “For example, if the directors of the firm were workers, they might embezzle equity funds, refrain from paying dividends in order to raise wages, or dissipate resources on projects of dubious value.”105 In any case, the very idea of even partial outside ownership is contrary to the cooperative ethos. A general reason for traditional institutions’ reluctance to lend to cooperatives, and indeed for the rarity of cooperatives whether related to the difficulty of securing capital or not, is simply that a society’s history, culture, and ideologies might be hostile to the “co-op” idea. Needless to say, this is the case in most industrialized countries, especially the United States. The very notion of a workers’ cooperative might be viscerally unappealing and mysterious to bank officials, as it is to people of many walks of life. Stereotypes about inefficiency, unprofitability, inexperience, incompetence, and anti-capitalism might dispose officials to reject out of hand appeals for financial assistance from co-ops. Similarly, such cultural preconceptions may be an element in the widespread reluctance on the part of working people to try to start a cooperative. They simply have a “visceral aversion” to, and unfamiliarity with, the idea—which is also surely a function of the rarity of co-ops itself. Their rarity reinforces itself, in that it fosters a general ignorance of co-ops and the perception that they’re risky endeavors. Additionally, insofar as an anti-democratic passivity, a civic fragmentedness, a half-conscious sense of collective disempowerment, and a diffuse interpersonal alienation saturate society, this militates against initiating cooperative projects. It is simply taken for granted among many people that such things cannot be done. And they are assumed to require sophisticated entrepreneurial instincts. In most places, the cooperative idea is not even in the public consciousness; it has barely been heard of. Business propaganda has done its job well.106 But propaganda can be fought with propaganda. In fact, this is one of the most important things that activists can do, this elevation of cooperativism into the public consciousness. The more that people hear about it, know about it, learn of its successes and potentials, the more they’ll be open to it rather than instinctively thinking it’s “foreign,” “socialist,” “idealistic,” or “hippyish.” If successful cooperatives advertise their business form, that in itself performs a useful service for the movement. It cannot be overemphasized that the most important thing is to create a climate in which it is considered normal to try to form a co-op, in which that is seen as a perfectly legitimate and predictable option for a group of intelligent and capable unemployed workers. Lenders themselves will become less skeptical of the business form as it seeps into the culture’s consciousness.
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Chris Wright (Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States)
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One extreme possibility might be the situation the French anthropologist Jean-Claude Galey encountered in a region of the eastern Himalayas where as recently as the 1970s, the low-ranking castes—they were referred to as “the vanquished ones,” since they were thought to be descended from a population once conquered by the current landlord caste many centuries before—lived in a situation of permanent debt dependency. Landless and penniless, they were obliged to solicit loans from the landlords simply to find a way to eat—not for the money, since the sums were paltry, but because poor debtors were expected to pay back the interest in the form of work, which meant they were at least provided with food and shelter while they cleaned out their creditors’ outhouses and reroofed their sheds. For the “vanquished”—as for most people in the world, actually—the most significant life expenses were weddings and funerals. These required a good deal of money, which always had to be borrowed. In such cases it was common practice, Galey explains, for high-caste moneylenders to demand one of the borrower’s daughters as security. Often, when a poor man had to borrow money for his daughter’s marriage, the security would be the bride herself. She would be expected to report to the lender’s household after her wedding night, spend a few months there as his concubine, and then, once he grew bored, be sent off to some nearby timber camp, where she would have to spend the next year or two working as a prostitute to pay off her father’s debt. Once accounts were settled, she return to her husband and begin her married life.6
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David Graeber (Debt: The First 5,000 Years)
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In his job as a financial educator, Keith had spent a fair amount of time breaking down the act — and sometimes art — of short selling, in a way that less savvy customers could understand. When a trader believed a company was in trouble, and its stock was overvalued, they could 'borrow' shares, sell them, and then when the stock went down as they'd predicted, rebuy the shares at a lower price, return them to whoever they'd borrowed them from, and pocket the difference. If GameStop was trading at 5, you could borrow 100 shares, sell them for $500; when the stock hit 1, you bought back the 100 shares for $100, returned them, pocketing $400 for yourself. You paid a little fee to the lender for their trouble and came out with a tidy profit.
But what happened if the stock went up instead of down? What happened if GameStop figured out how to capitalize on its millions of nostalgic customers, who spent billions on video games every year? What if the stock went to 10 instead of 1?
What happened was, the short seller was royally screwed. He'd borrowed those 100 shares and sold them at 5. Now the stock was at 10, but he still needed to return his 100 shares. Buying them on the market at 10 meant spending $1000. And what was worse, when he'd borrowed the shares, he'd agreed on a timeline to return them. There was a ticking clock hanging over his head, so he had a choice — buy the shares back at 10 now, losing $500 on the deal — or wait a little longer, hoping the stock went back down before his time limit was up.
And what if he waited, and the stock kept going up? Sooner or later, he had to buy those shares back. Even if the stock went to 15, 20 — he was on the hook for those 100 shares. Theoretically, there was no limit to how much he could lose.
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Ben Mezrich (The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees)
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Collateral Capacity or Net Worth?
If young Bill Gates had knocked on your door asking you to invest $10,000 in his new company, Microsoft, could you get your hands on the money? Collateral capacity is access to capital. Your net worth is irrelevant if you can’t access any of the money. Collateral capacity is my favorite wealth concept. It’s almost like having a Golden Goose! Collateral can help a borrower secure loans. It gives the lender the assurance that if the borrower defaults on the loan, the lender can repossess the collateral. For example, car loans are secured by cars, and mortgages are secured by homes. Your collateral capacity helps you to avoid or minimize unnecessary wealth transfers where possible, and accumulate an increasing pool of capital providing accessibility, control and uninterrupted compounding. It is the amount of money that you can access through collateralizing a loan against your money, allowing your money to continue earning interest and working for you. It’s very important to understand that accessibility, control and uninterrupted compounding are the key components of collateral capacity. It’s one thing to look good on paper, but when times get tough, assets that you can’t touch or can’t convert easily to cash, will do you little good.
Three things affect your collateral capacity:
① The first is contributions into savings and investment accounts that you can access. It would be wise to keep feeding your Golden Goose. Often the lure of higher return potential also brings with it lack of liquidity. Make sure you maintain a good balance between long-term accounts and accounts that provide immediate liquidity and access. ② Second is the growth on the money from interest earned on the money you have in your account. Some assets earn compound interest and grow every year. Others either appreciate or depreciate. Some accounts could be worth a great deal but you have to sell or close them to access the money. That would be like killing your Golden Goose. Having access to money to make it through downtimes is an important factor in sustaining long-term growth. ③ Third is the reduction of any liens you may have against these accounts. As you pay off liens against your collateral positions, your collateral capacity will increase allowing you to access more capital in the future. The goose never quit laying golden eggs – uninterrupted compounding.
Years ago, shortly after starting my first business, I laughed at a banker that told me I needed at least $25,000 in my business account in order to borrow $10,000. My business owner friends thought that was ridiculously funny too. We didn’t understand collateral capacity and quite a few other things about money.
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Annette Wise
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If we take God’s Word seriously, we should avoid debt when possible. In those rare cases where we go into debt, we should make every effort to get out as soon as we can. We should never undertake debt without prayerful consideration and wise counsel. Our questions should be, Why go into debt? Is the risk called for? Will the benefits of becoming servants to the lender really outweigh the costs? What should we ask ourselves before going into debt? Before we incur debt, we should ask ourselves some basic spiritual questions: Is the fact that I don’t have enough resources to pay cash for something God’s way of telling me it isn’t his will for me to buy it? Or is it possible that this thing may have been God’s will but poor choices put me in a position where I can’t afford to buy it? Wouldn’t I do better to learn God’s lesson by foregoing it until—by his provision and my diligence—I save enough money to buy it? What I would call the “debt mentality” is a distorted perspective that involves invalid assumptions: • We need more than God has given us. • God doesn’t know best what our needs are. • God has failed to provide for our needs, forcing us to take matters into our own hands. • If God doesn’t come through the way we think he should, we can find another way. • Just because today’s income is sufficient to make our debt payments, tomorrow’s will be too (i.e., our circumstances won’t change). Those with convictions against borrowing will normally find ways to avoid it. Those without a firm conviction against going into debt will inevitably find the “need” to borrow. The best credit risks are those who won’t borrow in the first place. The more you’re inclined to go into debt, the more probable it is that you shouldn’t. Ask yourself, “Is the money I’ll be obligated to repay worth the value I’ll receive by getting the money or possessions now? When it comes time for me to repay my debt, what new needs will I have that my debt will keep me from meeting? Or what new wants will I have that will tempt me to go further into debt?” Consider these statements of God’s Word: • “True godliness with contentment is itself great wealth. After all, we brought nothing with us when we came into the world, and we can’t take anything with us when we leave it. So if we have enough food and clothing, let us be content” (1 Timothy 6:6-8). • “Those who love money will never have enough. How meaningless to think that wealth brings true happiness!” (Ecclesiastes 5:10). • “My child, don’t lose sight of common sense and discernment. Hang on to them, for they will refresh your soul. They are like jewels on a necklace. They keep you safe on your way, and your feet will not stumble. You can go to bed without fear; you will lie down and sleep soundly. You need not be afraid of sudden disaster or the destruction that comes upon the wicked, for the LORD is your security. He will keep your foot from being caught in a trap” (Proverbs 3:21-26). • “Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect” (Romans 12:2).
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Randy Alcorn (Managing God's Money: A Biblical Guide)
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Prosperity brings expanded lending, which leads to unwise lending, which produces large losses, which makes lenders stop lending, which ends prosperity, and on and on.
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Howard Marks (Mastering The Market Cycle: Getting the Odds on Your Side)
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Because equity owners get paid after corporations satisfy all other claimants, equity ownership represents a residual interest. As such, stockholders occupy a riskier position than, say, corporate lenders who enjoy a superior position in a company’s capital structure.
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David F. Swensen (Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment)
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One day in 1998, a real estate broker called Offit: “Would you make a loan to Donald Trump?” Trump at the time was a casino magnate known for his occasional showbiz hijinks and his on-and-off dealings with organized crime figures. He also was a deadbeat, having defaulted on loans to finance his Atlantic City casinos and stiffing lenders, contractors, and business partners in other projects. Quite a few banks—including
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David Enrich (Dark Towers)
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Citigroup, Manufacturers Hanover (a predecessor of JPMorgan), the British lender NatWest, and of course Bankers Trust—had endured hundreds of millions of losses at the hands of Trump.
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David Enrich (Dark Towers)
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One day in 1998, a real estate broker called Offit: “Would you make a loan to Donald Trump?” Trump at the time was a casino magnate known for his occasional showbiz hijinks and his on-and-off dealings with organized crime figures. He also was a deadbeat, having defaulted on loans to finance his Atlantic City casinos and stiffing lenders, contractors, and business partners in other projects. Quite a few banks—including Citigroup, Manufacturers Hanover (a predecessor of JPMorgan), the British lender NatWest, and of course Bankers Trust—had endured hundreds of millions of losses at the hands of Trump.
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David Enrich (Dark Towers)
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but as a new investor it is advisable to reach out to several lenders. Doing so will give you some leverage. Make them compete against each other, and see who can offer you the best terms!
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Manny Khoshbin (Manny Khoshbin's Contrarian PlayBook)
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Provide documents that show your investment experience and your financial readiness. When I submit my letter of intent (LOI) with my initial offer on a property, I also send a pre-approval letter from my lender, a brief bio, a schedule of my real estate holdings (Buyer’s Resume), references from brokers I have closed deals with, a current savings account statement and the first two pages of my most recent tax returns (with all confidential information blacked out, of course). If you are not in a position to submit all of this information, just provide what you can. The idea is to speak to your strengths as a buyer. Try to at least submit a pre-approval letter from your lender, as this will go a long way towards setting yourself apart from the average buyer.
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Manny Khoshbin (Manny Khoshbin's Contrarian PlayBook)
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Experience brings acceptance of the fact you cannot do everything yourself. I find people who start business later in life understand the value in surrounding themselves with people who are better than them at some things. Experience shows you the benefit of accepting advice from others.
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Sheila Holt (Trust is the New Currency: How to build trust, attract the right partners and create wealth through business and investments)
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The three main players in the MBS market are: • Government National Mortgage Association, or GNMA (pronounced “Ginnie Mae”), is backed by a federal agency and guarantees mortgage payments on loans issued through federal loan programs (like the VA and the FHA). Unlike other MBS, bonds guaranteed by GNMA are backed by the full faith and credit of the US government, just like Treasury bonds. • Federal National Mortgage Association, or FNMA (“Fannie Mae”), is a private corporation that buys mortgages from large commercial banks, repackages them into bonds, and sells those bonds to investors. FNMA is not backed by the federal government (even though the government created it), so these bonds carry higher credit risk (the risk that you won’t get your money back). • Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, or FHLMC (commonly called “Freddie Mac”), works almost the same way as FNMA. It buys up mortgages from smaller lenders, like savings and loan banks or credit unions, then packages them to create MBS. Freddie Mac bonds are not backed by the US government.
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Michele Cagan (Real Estate Investing 101: From Finding Properties and Securing Mortgage Terms to REITs and Flipping Houses, an Essential Primer on How to Make Money with Real Estate (Adams 101 Series))
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Stronger regulation and supervision aimed at problems with underwriting practices and lenders’ risk management would have been a more effective and surgical approach to constraining the housing bubble than a general increase in interest rates.
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Charles Wheelan (Naked Money: A Revealing Look at Our Financial System)
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Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India by J. S. Furnivall
Quoting page 85-87:
Lower Burma when first occupied … was a vast deltaic plain of swamp and jungle, with a secure rainfall; when the opening of the canal created a market for rice, this wide expanse of land was rapidly reclaimed by small cultivators … Formerly, the villager in Lower Burma, like peasants in general, cultivated primarily for home consumption, and it has always been the express policy of the Government to encourage peasant proprietorship. Land in the delta was abundant … The opening of the canal provided a certain and profitable market for as much rice as people could grow. … men from Upper Burma crowded down to join in the scramble for land. In two or three years a labourer could save out of his wages enough money to buy cattle and make a start on a modest scale as a landowner. … The land had to be cleared rapidly and hired labour was needed to fell the heavy jungle. In these circumstances newly reclaimed land did not pay the cost of cultivation, and there was a general demand for capital. Burmans, however, lacked the necessary funds, and had no access to capital. They did not know English or English banking methods, and English bankers knew nothing of Burmans or cultivation. … in the ports there were Indian moneylenders of the chettyar caste, amply provided with capital and long accustomed to dealing with European banks in India. About 1880 they began to send out agents into the villages, and supplied the people with all the necessary capital, usually at reasonable rates and, with some qualifications, on sound business principles. … now the chettyars readily supplied the cultivators with all the money that they needed, and with more than all they needed. On business principles the money lender preferred large transactions, and would advance not merely what the cultivator might require but as much as the security would stand. Naturally, the cultivator took all that he could get, and spent the surplus on imported goods. The working of economic forces pressed money on the cultivator; to his own discomfiture, but to the profit of the moneylenders, of European exporters who could ensure supplies by giving out advances, of European importers whose cotton goods and other wares the cultivator could purchase with the surplus of his borrowings, and of the banks which financed the whole economic structure. But at the first reverse, with any failure of the crop, the death of cattle, the illness of the cultivator, or a fall of prices, due either to fluctuations in world prices or to manipulation of the market by the merchants, the cultivator was sold up, and the land passed to the moneylender, who found some other thrifty labourer to take it, leaving part of the purchase price on mortgage, and with two or three years the process was repeated. … As time went on, the purchasers came more and more to be men who looked to making a livelihood from rent, or who wished to make certain of supplies of paddy for their business. … Others also, merchants and shopkeepers, bought land, because they had no other investment for their profits. These trading classes were mainly townsfolk, and for the most part Indians or Chinese. Thus, there was a steady growth of absentee ownership, with the land passing into the hands of foreigners. Usually, however, as soon as one cultivator went bankrupt, his land was taken over by another cultivator, who in turn lost with two or three years his land and cattle and all that he had saved. [By the 1930s] it appeared that practically half the land in Lower Burma was owned by absentees, and in the chief rice-producing districts from two-thirds to nearly three-quarters. … The policy of conserving a peasant proprietary was of no avail against the hard reality of economic forces…
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J. S. Furnivall
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Data sharing,” for instance, sounds like a positive development, streamlining the bulky bureaucracies of government so the public can access goods and services faster. But access goes both ways. If someone is marked “risky” in one arena, that stigma follows him around much more efficiently, streamlining marginalization. A leading Europe-based advocate for workers’ data rights described how she was denied a bank loan despite having a high income and no debt, because the lender had access to her health file, which showed that she had a tumor.
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Ruha Benjamin (Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code)
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Pure science is divinely inspired. It is a godsend, a blessing from spirit, a sacred mandate, an act of divine providence. It is a heavenly gift to the people. It does not belong to the corrupt merchants, money lenders and Pharisees, who have turned the temple of science into a den of thieves.
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Anthon St. Maarten
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When you have debt, you don’t get to decide what you do with your money. Your lenders decide that for you. You can’t choose to take your money and save it, invest it, spend it, or even give it away. You lose the ability to make choices about your money when you have debt.
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Rachel Cruze (NOT A BOOK: Love Your Life, Not Theirs: 7 Money Habits for Living the Life You Want)
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LTV stands for “loan-to-value,” a ratio that determines the maximum loan amount based on the value of the property. For example, if a property was worth $100,000 and the lender’s maximum LTV was 75 percent, the borrower could not get more than $75,000 of financing.
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Michele Cagan (Real Estate Investing 101: From Finding Properties and Securing Mortgage Terms to REITs and Flipping Houses, an Essential Primer on How to Make Money with Real Estate (Adams 101 Series))
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Role-playing exercises allow students to step into the shoes of different financial personas, such as a borrower, a lender, or an investor.
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Linsey Mills (Teach Your Child About Money Through Play: 110+ Games/Activities, Tips, and Resources to Teach Kids Financial Literacy at an Early Age)
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Bastiat was having none of this. Interest wasn’t theft, he maintained, but a fair reward for a mutual exchange of services. The lender provides the use of capital for a period of time, and time has value. Bastiat cites the famous lines from Benjamin Franklin’s Advice to a Young Tradesman (1748): ‘Time is precious. Time is money – Time is the stuff of which life is made.’8
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Edward Chancellor (The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest)
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As the modern era came into being, the avarice of the usurer was supplanted by interest in the broader and more abstract sense of a share or stake. This new concept of interest was ethically wide-ranging: it ‘came to cover virtually the entire range of human actions, from the narrowly self-centered to the sacrificially altruistic, and from the prudently calculated to the passionately compulsive’.49 The seventeenth-century English statesman and philosopher Lord Shaftesbury summed up the new thinking with his comment that ‘Interest governs the World.’50 In his Fable of the Bees (1714), Bernard Mandeville exposed the paradox at the heart of the modern world, namely that private vices brought public benefits. Adam Smith incorporated Mandeville’s wicked insights into his political economy. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith describes the individual as one who ‘By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.’51 A similar thought is expressed in another famous line, in which Smith writes that ‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.’ The spirit of capitalism was transmitted across networks of credit that connected lenders and borrowers through bonds of mutual self-interest.52 Daniel Defoe described credit as a ‘stock’, synonymous with capital, while the French in Defoe’s day referred to capital as ‘interest’, in the sense of taking a stake.fn6 From a technical viewpoint, capital consists of a stream of future income discounted to its present value. Without interest, there can be no capital. Without capital, no capitalism. Turgot, a contemporary of Adam Smith’s, understood this very well: ‘the capitalist lender of money,’ he wrote, ‘ought to be considered as a dealer in a commodity which is absolutely necessary for the production of wealth, and which cannot be at too low a price.’53 (Turgot exaggerated. As we shall see, interest at ‘too low a price’ is the source of many evils.)
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Edward Chancellor (The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest)
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Dulles helped engineer a scheme under which U.S. and foreign banks made new loans to the Reichsbank (the German state bank), which used the funds to pay reparations to Britain, France, and other European powers, who in turn paid off their own war loans from the U.S.7 This financial merry-go-round generated millions of dollars in interest payments for international lenders and kept billions of dollars worth of loans current just a bit longer.
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Christopher Simpson (The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Forbidden Bookshelf Book 24))
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The HOLC created color-coded maps of every metropolitan area in the nation, with the safest neighborhoods colored green and the riskiest colored red.”41 Neighborhoods with any black people, even if the residents had stable middle-class incomes, were coded red, and lenders were unlikely to give loans in these areas. This practice became known as redlining. The HOLC policy was a form of government-sponsored racism.
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Jemar Tisby (The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism)
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Bear Stearns wasn’t a commercial bank. It didn’t hold deposits for regular people and wasn’t supposed to be able to borrow from the Fed. But the Fed invoked a legal provision that said it could lend to anyone in “unusual and exigent circumstances,” and loaned $13 billion to Bear. The Fed was following Walter Bagehot’s nineteenth-century advice to “lend to merchants, to minor bankers, to ‘this man and that man.’” The central bank was pouring money into the shadow bank run, acting as lender of last resort.
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Jacob Goldstein (Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing)
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The president’s next sentence was boring but extraordinarily important: “The Federal Reserve is also taking steps to provide additional liquidity to money-market mutual funds, which will help ease pressure on our financial markets.” This was the other half of the money bargain, previously only available to banks: the Fed as lender of last resort. Now, the president was saying, the Fed stood ready to lend against the commercial paper that the money-market funds held and that nobody, but nobody, wanted to buy.
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Jacob Goldstein (Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing)
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Do not ever, to anyone, for any reason, get into debt, my queens, she’d said, more than once. A kind-hearted soul can be a lender, but a borrower you should never be. Debt is a string. Strings tie you down. And I want my queens to fly free.
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Kristen Ashley (The Slow Burn (Moonlight and Motor Oil, #2))
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I noticed that they rarely mentioned that German and French banks were some of Greece’s biggest lenders, or that much of the Greeks’ accumulated debt had been racked up buying German and French exports—facts that might have made clear to voters why saving the Greeks from default amounted to saving their own banks and industries. Maybe they worried that such an admission would turn voter attention away from the failures of successive Greek governments and toward the failures of those German and French officials charged with supervising bank lending practices. Or maybe they feared that if their voters fully understood the underlying implications of European integration—the extent to which their economic fates, for good and for ill, had become bound up with those of people who were “not like us”—they might not find it entirely to their liking.
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Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
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What Valuable Thing Would You Do With The One Borrowed World Life You Have Today Before Returning It To The Lender.
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Mike Ssendikwanawa
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1978 also saw an ominous sign of a coming wave of deregulation when a Supreme Court decision interpreted the National Bank Act to mean if a lender was in one of the few states without any limits on interest rates, it could lend without limits nationwide, effectively invalidating thirty-seven states’ consumer protections—and Congress declined to amend the law. That’s why, today, most of your credit card statements come from South Dakota and Delaware, states with lax lending laws.
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Heather McGhee (The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (One World Essentials))
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A common misperception then and now is that subprime loans were being sought out by financially irresponsible borrowers with bad credit, so the lenders were simply appropriately pricing the loans higher to offset the risk of default. And in fact, subprime loans were more likely to end up in default. If a Black homeowner finally answered Mario Taylor’s dozenth call and ended it possessing a mortgage that would turn out to be twice as expensive as the prime one he started with, is it any wonder that it would quickly become unaffordable? This is where the age-old stereotypes equating Black people with risk—an association explicitly drawn in red ink around America’s Black neighborhoods for most of the twentieth century—obscured the plain and simple truth: what was risky wasn’t the borrower; it was the loan.
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Heather McGhee (The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (One World Essentials))
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Individual racism, whether conscious or unconscious, gives greedy people the moral permission to exploit others in ways they never would with people with whom they empathized. Institutional racism of the kind that kept the management ranks of lenders and regulators mostly white furthered this social distance. And then structural racism both made it easy to prey on people of color due to segregation and eliminated the accountability when disparate impacts went unheeded. Lenders, brokers, and investors targeted people of color because they thought they could get away with it. Because of racism, they could.
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Heather McGhee (The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (One World Essentials))
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Depending on the level of coverage your lender requires, you should be able to insure your property for about $100 per unit per year on average.
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Steve Berges (The Complete Guide to Buying and Selling Apartment Buildings)
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Jesus himself was so obviously a rebel and an anarchist. He spoke out against the state and the money lenders, and was clearly a threat to the Roman Empire. He was basically crucified for the crime of extremism!
If some homeless vagabond (no disrespect to homeless vagabonds intended; I’ve been one myself!) were to appear on the scenes today, sharing Divine wisdom with the world, and gaining hoards of followers, he would soon be denounced by the church and locked up by the government. If he made the outrageous claim of being the unique son of God, they would probably have him institutionalised! Anyone who can draw a crowd is seen as a threat to the status quo, as history has shown that doing so, has always been one of the first steps to social change, so naturally it’s a practice that all tyrants rightly fear and seek to thwart,
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Mango Wodzak (Topsy-Turvy World - Vegan Anarchy)
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At Silence Hurn, we have an expert team who deliver progressive building consultancy and chartered surveying services for all of our clients. Our skilled team has a wealth of knowledge and expertise in advising developers, landlords, private investors, lenders and homeowners on the entire property life cycle. From acquisition to completion, through design and development, our range of services ensure that you get the best value from your property portfolio.
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Party Wall Surveyor Hampshire
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Any democratically elected government that listens more to its campaign financiers than its citizens, takes the demands of financial lenders sine qua non and those of its impoverished citizenry non exitus, is a failed government, corrupt and incompetent. It's not a government for the people and by the people, it is a government by the Whores for power!
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Njau Kihia
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GoMoney® is an online platform that helps you find a lender easily and get money quickly to cover urgent expenses. No upfront fees, no obligation, no worries, and no hard credit check.
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gomoney
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The average borrower stays indebted for five months, paying $520 in fees to borrow $375. Keeping people indebted is, of course, the ideal outcome for the payday lender. It’s how they turn a $15 profit into a $150 one.
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Matthew Desmond (Poverty, by America)
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When a loan officer complains about “inventory” or “their clients losing out on offers,” a humble suggestion. Hand the loan officer Census data and a mirror.
Why build a home loan origination platform as a mortgage lender to service only a small fraction of the market - I.e.: new home construction - comparing sales of newly-built homes to sales of existing homes (resales)?
Three answers.
1. Lower inventory = lower commission checks for loan officers, 2. Financing what the market actually needs is usually a good idea for salespeople, 3. Less competition - the loan officer’s job will not succumb to automation.
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Ted Ihde
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The highly abnormal is becoming uncomfortably normal. Claudio Borio, 2014 As we have seen in Chapter 3, David Hume held that money was a mere representation of things. A loan may be denominated in money, but what is actually lent is a certain quantity of labour or stock, he maintained. Given money’s fictitious value, Hume believed that a change in the amount of money would affect prices but not interest. In his view, interest was determined by frugality (savings) and industry (the return on capital). The Scottish philosopher imagined what would happen if money dropped like manna from Heaven: For, suppose that, by miracle, every man in GREAT BRITAIN should have five pounds slipt into his pocket in one night; this would much more than double the whole money that is at present in the kingdom; yet there would not next day, nor for some time, be any more lenders, nor any variation in the interest … this money, however abundant … would only serve to encrease the prices of every thing, without any farther consequence … The overplus of borrowers above that of lenders continuing still the same, there will follow no reduction of interest. That depends upon another principle; and must proceed from an encrease of industry and frugality, of arts and commerce.
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Edward Chancellor (The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest)
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The practice of marking neighborhoods according to the race of its inhabitants dates back to the 1930s, when the federal government decided it wanted to evaluate various residential areas across the country according to their “riskiness” for mortgage lenders. Bureaucrats at the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation sat down and decided to color-code neighborhoods according to the “danger” posed by borrowers to lenders. Neighborhoods that were considered the highest risk were marked in red—and banks were duly alerted that it was not going to be a good idea to lend money to people in those areas. These redlined areas also happened to be the parts of the country with the highest populations of Black people and other people of color and immigrants.
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Uché Blackstock (Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine)
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7jThe rich rules over the poor, and the borrower is the slave of the lender.
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Anonymous (The Lutheran Study Bible: English Standard Version)
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Renter's Insurance This is a must for every tenant. NO EXCEPTIONS in today's world. Try to get them to buy from your insurance agent and have your real estate company listed as additional insured, just like lenders do on your insurance policies now.
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Mike Butler (Landlording on AutoPilot: A Simple, No-Brainer System for Higher Profits, Less Work and More Fun (Do It All from Your Smartphone or Tablet!))
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Table 8.1 indicates that two-thirds of the households living in nine Tuscan towns and hundreds of nearby villages were involved in credit transactions (as lenders, borrowers, or both)—an indication that credit was a vital part of the medieval economy. Most households actively participated in credit market transactions. People borrowed for various purposes (to buy seeds and working tools, to provide their daughters with dowries at the time of the marriage, to buy food while awaiting the next harvest). One-third of the loans to peasant households were advanced by fellow peasant households subject to correlated shocks (table 8.2
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Maristella Botticini (The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70-1492 (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World Book 42))
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Minsky’s extension was to add the financial theory of investment, stressing that modern investment is expensive and must be financed—and it is the financing that generates structural fragility. During an upswing, profit-seeking firms and banks become more optimistic, taking on riskier financial structures. Firms commit larger portions of expected revenues to debt service. Lenders accept smaller down payments and lower quality collateral.
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L. Randall Wray (Why Minsky Matters: An Introduction to the Work of a Maverick Economist)
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E’re thou goest read this which I have carved beneath the lid of my token box. It applies equally to the borrower and the lender: Better a little caution than a great regret.
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George S. Clason (The Richest Man in Babylon)
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the FHA does require an additional payment, called "Private Mortgage Insurance." This "PMI" insurance protects the lender and is required when the down payment on an FHA loan is less than 20%. The extra PMI payment can make your monthly payment slightly higher, thus reducing your cashflow.
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Joshua Dorkin (BiggerPockets Presents: The Ultimate Beginner's Guide to Real Estate Investing)
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What are you trying to buy? Asset type? Size? Price? To determine the answer to the first question, do the following: Start with your own net worth. Add in friends and family. The total team net worth is your starting point. Choose a market. Consider travel time and expense. You must be able to be in your market to look at deals at least once a month. Determine the viability of your market. Job growth? Population growth? Get deal flow from the market. Real estate agents Find all commercial realty companies in the city. Get on all their mailing lists. Analyze deals online from realtors in the area. Call the realtors about their listings. Direct to owners Get lists of owners. Create a system to reach owners directly. Mail Text Cold calling Analyze deals. Income approach Income – Expenses = Net operating income Net operating income – Debt service = Cash flow Check with lenders for current terms on debt. What is the CoC return? Cap rate? Debt ratio? Comparable data Check the analyzed cap rate against cap rates in the area for similar properties. Check comparable sale prices. Comps should be close in size and age to the subject property. Comps should have similar amenities. Comps should be within a few miles of the subject property. Exit Hold and operate. Refinance. Sell or flip. Consider upcoming market conditions. Debt Check with lenders or a mortgage broker to determine the availability of loans for this type of property. What are the terms and conditions? Is this the information you used to analyze the deal originally? Make the offer. Use an LOI to submit the offer in writing. The LOI will summarize the main deal points. If your offer is less than 15 percent of the asking price, speak with the realtor before you submit the offer. Once the offer is accepted, send the LOI to your attorney and have them draft the purchase agreement. Draft the purchase and sale agreement. Now that you have a fully executed contract, the clock starts. Earnest money goes into escrow. Do your due diligence. Financial inspection Physical inspection Lease audit Begin your loan application. The lender will complete three inspections. Appraisal Environmental inspection Physical engineer inspection of the buildings Do your closing. The lender will wire the loan proceeds to the closing escrow. Wire your down payment funds to the closing escrow. You own a new property! Engage property management for takeover of operations.
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Bill Ham (Real Estate Raw: A step-by-step instruction manual to building a real estate portfolio from start to finish)
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Consider that, since 2005, the online platform Kiva has already been crowdfunding micro loans to entrepreneurs in many developing countries around the world. By early 2021, it had arranged about $1.5 billion in loans from nearly two million lenders (who can put up as little as $25) to about four million borrowers in seventy-seven countries. The total value of loans is small, but Kiva’s screening and monitoring technologies are not automated and seem antiquated compared with those of newer Fintech lending platforms, which have far greater potential for such matching of borrowers and lenders.
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Eswar S. Prasad (The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance)
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SJD Financial Services are financial advisers, specialising in helping all kinds of buyers in the UK. We are able to obtain mortgages through nearly every lender in the UK, finding the best mortgage for each individual from over 3000 products that are updated daily.
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SJD Financial Services
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The real question isn’t why predatory lenders in the early 2000s lent money to a bunch of borrowers who had poor credit scores; it’s why bad predatory lenders had all that money to give out in the first place. Answer: bad government policy. That ought to be one of our key lessons from the 2008 financial crisis: socially driven economic policy risks creating asset bubbles.
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Vivek Ramaswamy (Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam)
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But this work paled in comparison to the force and impact of A Monetary History of the United States. What had begun as a favor to Arthur Burns had become a book that would turn the conventional wisdom of academic economists, policy-makers, and politicians alike upside down. The American Historical Review put it simply: “This is one of the most important books of our time.”39 Friedman and Schwartz presented voluminous data on nearly a century of U.S. history; but beyond piling up facts, they also advanced a theory of how money worked in the economy. How did money affect business cycles? Friedman and Schwartz had an answer they considered definitive: money mattered. It was the hidden force behind the ups and downs, the breadlines and the bubbles. Friedman knew the book would make an impact. He knew it was the best work he had ever done, or would ever do. He knew that for all his deviationist politics, for all the force of Keynesian assumption, for all the habitual scorn heaped upon the quantity theory of money, their book would have to be answered. It would compel conversation. The book’s centerpiece was its stunning analysis of the Great Depression. Friedman and Schwartz’s data showed a precipitous 33 percent decline in the quantity of money during what they called “the great contraction.” They convincingly argued that this lack of money transformed an unremarkable dip in the business cycle into a crisis of global proportions. Here was a provocative new explanation for a disaster that continued to cast its shadow across the century. But threaded through the economic argument was another thesis. In 1914, the United States had created a central bank system designed expressly to stabilize the economy. As the lender of last resort, the Federal Reserve Board could have opened the spigots and flooded the economy with cash. Why did it fail to do so?
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Jennifer Burns (Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative)
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We rarely use much debt and, when we do, we attempt to structure it on a long-term fixed basis. We will reject interesting opportunities rather than over-leverage our balance sheet. This conservatism has penalized our results but it is the only behavior that leaves us comfortable, considering our fiduciary obligations to policyholders, depositors, lenders and the many equity holders who have committed unusually large portions of their net worth to our care. Warren Buffett, annual letter to shareholders, 1983
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Pulak Prasad (What I Learned About Investing from Darwin)
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How could a well-known Spanish lender, an institution with a proud ninety-year history, which owned another bank in the United States and had offices as far afield as Shanghai, Dubai, and Rio de Janeiro, just disappear overnight?
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Gareth Gore (Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy inside the Catholic Church)
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The property owner, contractors, subcontractors, investors, the lender, project stakeholders, the architect, as well as project managers are each individually able to stay updated on the progress of the home-build through the Schedule of Values. Inasmuchas the Schedule of Values relates to billable work performed - and to tasks completed - during each draw period in the project. As each phase of the home build is completed - i.e.: as one draw period progresses to the next draw period - the project's Schedule of Values is updated. The updating of the S.O.V. in subsequent draw periods is directly relatable to forthcoming draw requests. For each new draw request, line items in the Schedule of Values - as per project progression in each draw period - are revised.
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Ted Ihde, Thinking About Becoming A Real Estate Developer?
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European parliament and EU states finally settled terms for the unified system to handle crises. Lenders will be policed by the European Central Bank, the EU’s top bank supervisor, and wound down by a central authority – if necessary against the wishes of its home state
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Anonymous
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Greece can balance its books without killing democracy Alexis Tsipras | 614 words OPINION Greece changes on January 25, the day of the election. My party, Syriza, guarantees a new social contract for political stability and economic security. We offer policies that will end austerity, enhance democracy and social cohesion and put the middle class back on its feet. This is the only way to strengthen the eurozone and make the European project attractive to citizens across the continent. We must end austerity so as not to let fear kill democracy. Unless the forces of progress and democracy change Europe, it will be Marine Le Pen and her far-right allies that change it for us. We have a duty to negotiate openly, honestly and as equals with our European partners. There is no sense in each side brandishing its weapons. Let me clear up a misperception: balancing the government’s budget does not automatically require austerity. A Syriza government will respect Greece’s obligation, as a eurozone member, to maintain a balanced budget, and will commit to quantitative targets. However, it is a fundamental matter of democracy that a newly elected government decides on its own how to achieve those goals. Austerity is not part of the European treaties; democracy and the principle of popular sovereignty are. If the Greek people entrust us with their votes, implementing our economic programme will not be a “unilateral” act, but a democratic obligation. Is there any logical reason to continue with a prescription that helps the disease metastasise? Austerity has failed in Greece. It crippled the economy and left a large part of the workforce unemployed. This is a humanitarian crisis. The government has promised the country’s lenders that it will cut salaries and pensions further, and increase taxes in 2015. But those commitments only bind Antonis Samaras’s government which will, for that reason, be voted out of office on January 25. We want to bring Greece to the level of a proper, democratic European country. Our manifesto, known as the Thessaloniki programme, contains a set of fiscally balanced short-term measures to mitigate the humanitarian crisis, restart the economy and get people back to work. Unlike previous governments, we will address factors within Greece that have perpetuated the crisis. We will stand up to the tax-evading economic oligarchy. We will ensure social justice and sustainable growth, in the context of a social market economy. Public debt has risen to a staggering 177 per cent of gross domestic product. This is unsustainable; meeting the payments is very hard. On existing loans, we demand repayment terms that do not cause recession and do not push the people to more despair and poverty. We are not asking for new loans; we cannot keep adding debt to the mountain. The 1953 London Conference helped Germany achieve its postwar economic miracle by relieving the country of the burden of its own past errors. (Greece was among the international creditors who participated.) Since austerity has caused overindebtedness throughout Europe, we now call for a European debt conference, which will likewise give a strong boost to growth in Europe. This is not an exercise in creating moral hazard. It is a moral duty. We expect the European Central Bank itself to launch a full-blooded programme of quantitative easing. This is long overdue. It should be on a scale great enough to heal the eurozone and to give meaning to the phrase “whatever it takes” to save the single currency. Syriza will need time to change Greece. Only we can guarantee a break with the clientelist and kleptocratic practices of the political and economic elites. We have not been in government; we are a new force that owes no allegiance to the past. We will make the reforms that Greece actually needs. The writer is leader of Syriza, the Greek oppositionparty
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Anonymous
“
But now I also understand, firsthand, the meaning of what the caregivers who work in that system do every day. They do achieve amazing things, and when it’s your life or your child’s life or your mother’s life on the receiving end of those amazing things, there is no such thing as a runaway cost. You’ll pay anything, and if you don’t have the money, you’ll borrow at any mortgage rate or from any payday lender to come up with the cash. Which is why 60 percent of the nearly one million personal bankruptcies filed in the United States last year resulted from medical bills.
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Steven Brill (America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System)
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In the November 2010 issue of Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi reported on the special courts established around the country for the express purpose of streamlining and accelerating foreclosure actions. Presided over by retired judges who were unfamiliar with the complexities involved in the mortgage fraud, these courts were not set up “to decide right and wrong, but to clear cases and blast human beings out of their homes with ultimate velocity.” The whole process was designed to transfer the property of ordinary citizens to the nation’s largest banks regardless of entitlement. As Taibbi wrote: The judges, in fact, openly admit that their primary mission is not justice but speed. One Jacksonville [Florida] judge, the Honorable A. C. Soud, even told a local newspaper that his goal is to resolve 25 cases per hour. Given the way the system is rigged, that means His Honor could well be throwing one ass on the street every 2.4 minutes. The following month, the Washington Post reported that similar courts in Virginia were “making it easier for lenders to defend themselves when accused of giving homeowners too little warning of impending foreclosures.” Indeed, “the process moves so quickly in Virginia…that homeowners can receive less than two weeks’ notice that their house is about to be sold on the courthouse steps.” The design of the courts guaranteed that even banks with no legal foreclosure entitlement had an almost insurmountable advantage. In the very short time they were accorded, homeowners seeking to stop foreclosure had to “gather evidence, file a lawsuit and potentially post a bond with the court that could total thousands of dollars.” These arduous requirements, combined with the near-impossible deadlines, meant that many borrowers simply ran out of time when trying to fight invalid foreclosure proceedings. It
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Glenn Greenwald (With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law is Used To Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful)
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Jacksonville [Florida] judge, the Honorable A. C. Soud, even told a local newspaper that his goal is to resolve 25 cases per hour. Given the way the system is rigged, that means His Honor could well be throwing one ass on the street every 2.4 minutes. The following month, the Washington Post reported that similar courts in Virginia were “making it easier for lenders to defend themselves when accused of giving homeowners too little warning of impending foreclosures.” Indeed, “the process moves so quickly in Virginia…that homeowners can receive less than two weeks’ notice that their house is about to be sold on the courthouse steps.” The design of the courts guaranteed that even banks with no legal foreclosure entitlement had an almost insurmountable advantage. In the very short time they were accorded, homeowners seeking to stop foreclosure had to “gather evidence, file a lawsuit and potentially post a bond with the court that could total thousands of dollars.” These arduous requirements, combined with the near-impossible deadlines, meant that many borrowers simply ran out of time when trying to fight invalid foreclosure proceedings. It is hard to imagine a purer expression of two-tiered justice than special courts created for the sole purpose of helping large banks take people’s homes more expeditiously. Such courts show that the legal system not only fails to protect Americans from societal injustice and inequality, but also serves as a tool of injustice and inequality in its own right. Prisons
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Glenn Greenwald (With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law is Used To Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful)
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A government offering such bounty to builders and lenders could have required compliance with a nondiscrimination policy. Instead, the FHA adopted a racial policy that could well have been culled from the Nuremberg laws.
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Charles Abrams
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In Chicago and across the country, whites looking to achieve the American dream could rely on a legitimate credit system backed by the government. Blacks were herded into the sights of unscrupulous lenders who took them for money and for sport.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates (Un conto ancora aperto)
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Comprehensive reform of bankruptcy laws—from the treatment of derivatives to underwater homes and to student loans. Bankruptcy law offers another example of how the basic rules of the game that determine how markets work have strong distributional consequences, as well as effects on efficiency. As in many other areas, the rules have increasingly favored those at the top. Every loan is a contract between a willing borrower and a willing lender, but one side is supposed to understand the market far better than the other; there is a massive asymmetry in information and bargaining power. Accordingly, the lender should bear the brunt of the consequences of a mistake, not the borrower. Making bankruptcy law more debtor-friendly would give banks an incentive to be more careful in lending. We would have fewer credit bubbles and fewer Americans deeply in debt. One of the most egregious examples of bad lending, as we’ve noted, is the student loan programs; and bad lending there has been encouraged by the nondischargeability of the debt. In
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Joseph E. Stiglitz (The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future)
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Oddly, the United States came rather late into the picture. It was only in 1913, thanks to the efforts of J. P. Morgan, that it got its own central bank, and called it the Federal Reserve Board or the Fed. The Fed would be the ‘lender of last resort’—to save greedy banks which had gone bust—something that happened all too often then.
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T.C.A. Srinivasa Raghavan (A Crown of Thorns: The Governors of the RBI)
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I think so. Look, I'm here to let you know I'm selling La Bella Luna," Kane began, and the shock showed on Rodney's face. He started to speak, but Kane stopped him, raising a hand. "And I want you to buy it." "Kane, man, I can't afford this place. And I don't have the credit to get this kind of money," Rodney said. He was up and on his feet, panic now replaced the shock. "Trust me, you can afford it. And I'll carry the note. Avery's firm can draw up the papers," Kane said, realizing for the first time in a long time his super-calm facade was back in place. "I want you to have the place. It's the only way I can let it go." That stopped Rodney in his tracks. His face again went through a variety of changes, until uncertainty settled in. "Can I handle it?" "I think you can. You already do most of the work now. I can stay on as your consultant. Talk you through anything you need help with. I'll also handle the paperwork transfer and be your lender. Paulie would want you to have it," Kane added, nodding his head now.
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Kindle Alexander (Always (Always & Forever #1))
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#Private_lenders can help you get a first mortgage or second mortgage. If you are looking for #private #lender then you must come to Tempbridge Inc. Tempbridge Inc is Canada's leading Private Lenders.
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Tempbridge Inc
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ÆLF (ÆLF) (which, according to various dialects, is pronounced ulf, welph, hulph, hilp, helfe, and, at this day, helpe) implies assistance. So Ælfwin is victorious, and Ælfwold, an auxiliary governour; Ælfgisa, a lender of assistance: with which Boetius, Symmachus, Epicurus, &c. bear a plain analogy.Gibson’sCamden.
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Samuel Johnson (A Dictionary of the English Language (Complete and Unabridged in Two Volumes), Volume One)
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The instability of a white neighborhood under pressure from the very possibility of integration put the neighborhood into a kind of real estate purgatory. It set off a downward cycle of anticipation, in which worried whites no longer bought homes in white neighborhoods that might one day attract colored residents even if none lived there at the time. Rents and purchase prices were dropped “in a futile attempt to attract white residents,” as Hirsch put it. With prices falling and the neighborhood’s future uncertain, lenders refused to grant mortgages or made them more difficult to obtain. Panicked whites sold at low prices to salvage what equity they had left, giving the homeowners who remained little incentive to invest any further to keep up or improve their properties.
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Isabel Wilkerson (The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration)
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Mortgage lending is often a common service used by people who cannot afford to make the full payment of a mortgage.
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LegalMatch
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Many banks do not advertise they are portfolio lenders and many people working at the bank may not even know what a portfolio lender is. If you are calling up a bank and they say they aren’t a portfolio lender, don’t give up! Ask to talk to a loan officer and ask specific questions about what type of investor programs they offer. Here are some good questions to ask; Do you loan to investors who already have four mortgages? Do you sell your loans or keep them in-house? Do you allow investors with four or more mortgages to do cash out refinance? What terms and loan programs do you offer investors? ARM, 15, 30 year fixed, balloon? What interest rates are you charging and what are the initial costs for your loans? What
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Mark Ferguson (How to Get Financing on Multiple Investment Properties)
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When you have debt, you’re required to go out and serve the lender month after month with a portion of your most valuable asset, the one asset you can never get back once gone – your time – so that you can make money to make the payments.
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Steve Cook (Lifeonaire: Real Prosperity)
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Debtors’ prisons were ultimately abandoned because, despite their cruelty, they neither deterred the accumulation of new bad debts nor helped creditors get their money back. For capitalism to advance in the nineteenth century, the absurd notion that all debts are sacred had to be ditched and replaced with the notion of limited liability. After all, if all debts are guaranteed, why should lenders lend responsibly? And why should some debts carry a higher interest rate than other debts, reflecting the higher risk of going bad? Bankruptcy and debt write-downs became for capitalism what hell had always been for Christian dogma – unpleasant yet essential – but curiously bankruptcy-denial was revived in the twenty-first century to deal with the Greek state’s insolvency.
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Yanis Varoufakis (Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europe's Deep Establishment)
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After the Black Death in the mid-1300s, the persecution of Jews intensified, and many Jews in Europe moved farther east. Some left because life at home had become too dangerous. Others headed east because they were forced from their homes. Increasingly, whenever a ruler decided that his debts were overwhelming or that he no longer needed the services Jews provided, he expelled them—no matter how long they and their families had lived in the country. In every instance, the ruler claimed their property and took charge of all money owed to them. Borrowers then had to pay their debts to the ruler instead of to the Jewish lenders.
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Phyllis Goldstein (A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism)
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British kings could not repudiate national debts-and this in turn made Britain a more attractive country for lenders.71
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Thomas Sowell (Conquests and Cultures: An International History)
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With Hitler, too, we see a dedicated socialist who, shortly after assuming the leadership of the German Workers’ Party, changed its name to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP). In statement after statement, Hitler could not be clearer about his socialist commitments. He said, for example, in a 1927 speech, “We are socialists. We are the enemies of today’s capitalist system of exploitation . . . and we are determined to destroy this system under all conditions.”36 The Nazi Party at the outset offered a twenty-five point program that included nationalization of large corporations and trusts, government control of banking and credit, the seizure of land without compensation for public use, the splitting of large landholdings into smaller units, confiscation of war profits, prosecution of bankers and other lenders on grounds of usury, abolition of incomes unearned by work, profit sharing for workers in all large companies, a broader pension system paying higher benefits, and universal free health care and education. If you read the Nazi platform without knowing its source, you could easily be forgiven for thinking you were reading the 2016 platform of the Democratic Party. Or at least a Democratic platform drafted jointly by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Sure, some of the language is out of date. The Democrats can’t talk about “usury” these days; they’d have to substitute “Wall Street greed.” But otherwise, it’s all there. All you have to do is cross out the word “Nazi” and write in the word “Democrat.
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Dinesh D'Souza (The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left)
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Before the Obama administration’s reform, most student lending was done through the ill-advised Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) Program, under which the federal government backed an intricate private system of dispersed lending agencies at a totally unnecessary cost to taxpayers. There was no sense in the government using its credit rating to support private lenders while the fat cats profited off students.
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Malcolm Harris (Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials)
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The way societies have coped with this deepening indebtedness should be the starting point of financial theorizing. Money is not a “factor of production.” It is a claim on the output or income that others produce. Debtors do the work, not the lenders. Before a formal market for wage labor developed in antiquity, money lending was the major way to obtain the services of bondservants who were compelled to work off the interest that was owed.
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Michael Hudson (Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy)
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Home mortgage—If you pay one extra month’s mortgage (write, “Principal only” on the check and send a note to the lender), you will take seven years off a thirty-year mortgage.
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Cary Siegel (Why Didn't They Teach Me This in School?: 99 Personal Money Management Principles to Live By)
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What are the benefits of a Consolidation Loan?
Direct Consolidation Loans allow borrowers to combine one or more of their Federal education loans into a new loan that offers several advantages.
One Lender and One Monthly Payment
With only one lender and one monthly bill, it is easier than ever for borrowers to manage their debt. Borrowers have only one lender, the U.S. Department of Education, for all loans included in a Direct Consolidation Loan.
Flexible Repayment Options
Borrowers can choose from multiple plans to repay their Direct Consolidation Loan, including an Income Contingent Repayment Plan. These plans are designed to be flexible to meet the different and changing needs of borrowers. With a Direct Consolidation Loan, borrowers can switch repayment plans at anytime.
No Minimum or Maximum Loan Amounts
There is no minimum amount required to qualify for a Direct Consolidation Loan!
Varied Deferment Options
Borrowers with Direct Consolidation Loans may qualify for renewed deferment benefits. If borrowers have exhausted the deferment options on their current Federal education loans, a Direct Consolidation Loan may renew many of those deferment options. In addition, borrowers may be eligible for additional deferment options if they have an outstanding balance on a FFEL Program loan made before July 1, 1993, when they obtain their first Direct Loan.
Reduced Monthly Payments
A Direct Consolidation Loan may ease the strain on a borrower’s budget by lowering the borrower’s overall monthly payment. The minimum monthly payment on a Direct Consolidation Loan may be lower than the combined payments charged on a borrower’s Federal education loans.
Retention of Subsidy Benefits
There are two (2) possible portions to a Direct Consolidation Loan: Subsidized and Unsubsidized. Borrowers retain their subsidy benefits on loans that are consolidated into the subsidized portion of a Direct Consolidation Loan.
Temporary In-School Consolidation Authority
During a one (1) year period, borrowers who meet certain requirements may consolidate loans that are in an in-school status into a Direct Consolidation Loan. Direct Consolidation Loans may be made under this temporary provision to borrowers whose consolidation applications are received on or after July 1, 2010 and before July 1, 2011.
Borrowers will lose the grace period on a FFEL Subsidized/Unsubsidized Stafford Loan or Direct Subsidized/Unsubsidized Loan by consolidating the loan while it is in an in-school status. Similarly, PLUS borrowers who consolidate a Federal PLUS Loan or Direct PLUS Loan that was first disbursed on or after July 1, 2008 will lose the six (6) month post-enrollment deferment period. Parent PLUS borrowers who consolidate a Federal PLUS Loan or Direct PLUS Loan that was first disbursed on or after July 1, 2008 will lose eligibility to defer repayment while the student for whom the loan was obtained is in school. Click here for information on the eligibility requirements for this temporary provision.
For more Questions you can contact The Student Loan Help Center.
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The Student Loan Help Center
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It is no gift I tender,
A loan is all I can;
But do not scorn the lender;
Man gets no more from man.
Oh, mortal man may borrow
What mortal man can lend;
And ‘twill not end to-morrow,
Though sure enough ‘twill end.
If death and time are stronger,
A love may yet be strong;
The world will last for longer,
But this will last for long.
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A.E. Housman
“
I worked for one of those who pushed back against the majority. He was the lone member of the FOMC who voted against the professor’s theories at that fateful meeting. He fought the good but lonely fight, and I, in my capacity as trusted adviser, waged many a battle with him. But the sad truth is we lost the people’s war. In a world rendered unsafe by banks that were too big to fail, we came to understand the Fed was simply too big to fight. I wrote this book to tell from the inside the story of how the Fed went from being lender of last resort to savior—and then destroyer—of America’s economic system.
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Danielle DiMartino Booth (Fed Up: An Insider's Take on Why the Federal Reserve is Bad for America)
“
The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender.” I gave further thought to the life of what we traditionally think of as a slave. Visions of overworked, underpaid people came to mind.
”
”
Gary Keesee (Fixing the Money Thing)