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Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suit on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future. Choose life… But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin’ else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you’ve got heroin?
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Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting)
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Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed- interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing sprit- crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing you last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life... But why would I want to do a thing like that?
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John Hodge (Trainspotting: A Screenplay (Based on the Novel by Irvine Welsh))
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And a mortgage used to be something you were expected to repay. But now that every other middle-income family has a mortgage for an amount they couldn't possibly save up in their lifetimes, then the bank isn't lending money anymore. It's offering financing. And then homes are no longer homes. They're investments.
...It means that the poor get poorer, the rich get richer, and the real class divide is between those who can borrow money and those who can't. Because no matter how much money anyone earns, they still lie awake at the end of the month worrying about money. Everyone looks at what their neighbors have and wonders, "How can they afford that?" because everyone is living beyond their means. So not even really rich people ever feel really rich, because in the end the only thing you can buy is a more expensive version of something you've already got. With borrowed money.
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Fredrik Backman (Anxious People)
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The wild pursuit of status and wealth has destroyed our souls and our economy. Families live in sprawling mansions financed with mortgages they can no longer repay. Consumers recklessly rang up Coach handbags and Manolo Blahnik shoes on credit cards because they seemed to confer a sense of identity and merit. Our favorite hobby, besides television, used to be, until reality hit us like a tsunami, shopping. Shopping used to be the compensation for spending five days a week in tiny cubicles. American workers are ground down by corporations that have disempowered them, used them, and have now discarded them
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Chris Hedges (Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle)
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Greece was finally free. But freedom came with a huge debt that the new country had no way of repaying. The Greek economy was mortgaged to British creditors for decades to come.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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When the Goldman Sachs saleswoman called Mike Burry and told him that her firm would be happy to sell him credit default swaps in $100 million chunks, Burry guessed, rightly, that Goldman wasn’t ultimately on the other side of his bets. Goldman would never be so stupid as to make huge naked bets that millions of insolvent Americans would repay their home loans. He didn’t know who, or why, or how much, but he knew that some giant corporate entity with a triple-A rating was out there selling credit default swaps on subprime mortgage bonds. Only a triple-A-rated corporation could assume such risk, no money down, and no questions asked. Burry was right about this, too, but it would be three years before he knew it. The party on the other side of his bet against subprime mortgage bonds was the triple-A-rated insurance company AIG—American International Group, Inc.
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Michael Lewis (The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine)
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Borrowing and spending money never leads to prosperity or happiness. It is advisable to live within our means and avoid debt. Borrowing money is simply one method of deferring absorbing today’s pain in exchange for repaying it with greater pain on a later day. Acceptance of a short period of discomfort is wiser than to mortgage a person’s future.
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Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
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The coach passed by many buildings of this sort, which would no doubt be little palaces to the occupants, who had escaped from Cockbill Street and Pigsty Hill and all the other neighbourhoods where people still dreamed that they could ‘better themselves’, an achievement that might be attained, oh happy day, when they had ‘a little place of their own’. It was an inspiring dream, if you didn’t look too deeply into words like mortgage and repayments and repossession and bankruptcy, and the lower middle classes of Ankh-Morpork, who saw themselves as being trodden on by the class above and illegally robbed by the one below, lined up with borrowed money to purchase, by instalments, their own little Oi Dong
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Terry Pratchett (Raising Steam (Discworld, #40; Moist von Lipwig, #3))
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We tend to believe that if we could just change our workplace, get married, finish writing that novel, buy a new car or repay the mortgage, we would be on top of the world. Yet when we get what we desire we don’t seem to be any happier. Buying cars and writing novels do not change our biochemistry. They can startle it for a fleeting moment, but it is soon back to its set point.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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In fact, war itself could become a commodity, just like opium. In 1821 the Greeks rebelled against the Ottoman empire. The uprising aroused great sympathy in liberal and romantic circles in Britain - Lord Byron, the poet, even went to Greece to fight alongside the insurgents. But London financiers saw an opportunity as well. They proposed to the rebel leaders the issue of tradable Greek Rebellion Bonds on the London stock exchange. The Greeks would promise to repay the bonds, plus interest, if and when they won their independence. Private investors bought bonds to make a profit, or out of sympathy for the Greek cause, or both. The value of Greek Rebellion Bonds rose and fell on the London stock exchange in tempo with military successes and failures on the battlefields of Hellas. The Turks gradually gained the upper hand. With a rebel defeat imminent, the bondholders faced the prospect of losing their trousers. The bondholders' interest was the national interest, so the British organised an international fleet that, in 1827, sank the main Ottoman flotilla in the Battle of Navarino. After centuries of subjugation, Greece was finally free. But freedom came with a huge debt that the new country had no way of repaying. The Greek economy was mortgaged to British creditors for decades to come.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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You may well ask: when the bubble finally burst, why did we not let the bankers crash and burn? Why weren't they held accountable for their absurd debts? For two reasons.
First because the payment system - the simple means of transferring money from one account to another and on which every transaction relies - is monopolised by the very same bankers who were making the bets. Imagine having gifted your arteries and veins to a gambler. The moment he loses big at the casino, he can blackmail you for anything you have simply by threatening to cut off your circulation.
Second, because the financiers' gambles contained deep inside the title deeds to the houses of the majority. A full-scale financial market collapse could therefore lead to mass homelessness and a complete breakdown in the social contract.
Don't be surprised that the high and mighty financiers of Wall Street would bother financialising the modest homes of poor people. Having borrowed as much as they could off banks and rich clients in order to place their crazy bets, they craved more since the more they bet, the more they made.
So they created more debt from scratch to use as raw materials for more bets. How? By lending to impecunious blue collar worker who dreamed of the security of one day owning their own home.
What if these little people could not actually afford their mortgage in the medium term? In contrast to bankers of old, the Jills and the Jacks who actually leant them the money did not care if the repayments were made because they never intended to collect. Instead, having granted the mortgage, they put it into their computerised grinder, chopped it up literally into tiny pieces of debt and repackaged them into one of their labyrinthine derivatives which they would then sell at a profit.
By the time the poor homeowner had defaulted and their home was repossessed, the financier who granted the loan in the first place had long since moved on.
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Yanis Varoufakis (Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism)
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Posterity can pay for its ancestors’ lives because posterity can be richer through innovation. If somebody somewhere takes out a mortgage, which he will repay in three decades’ time, to invest in a business that invents a gadget that saves his customers time, then that money, brought forward from the future, will enrich both him and those customers to the point where the loan can be repaid to posterity. That is growth. If, on the other hand, somebody takes out a loan just to support his luxury lifestyle, or to speculate on asset markets by buying a second home, then posterity will be the loser.
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Matt Ridley (The Rational Optimist)
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This cult of distraction, as Rojek points out, masks the real disintegration of culture. It conceals the meaninglessness and emptiness of our own lives. It seduces us to engage in imitative consumption. It deflects the moral questions arising from mounting social injustice, growing inequalities, costly imperial wars, economic collapse, and political corruption. The wild pursuit of status and wealth has destroyed our souls and our economy. Families live in sprawling mansions financed with mortgages they can no longer repay. Consumers recklessly rang up Coach handbags and Manolo Blahnik shoes on credit cards because they seemed to confer a sense of identity and merit. Our favorite hobby, besides television, used to be, until reality hit us like a tsunami, shopping. Shopping used to be the compensation for spending five days a week in tiny cubicles. American workers are ground down by corporations that have disempowered them, used them, and have now discarded them.
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Chris Hedges (Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle)
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They proposed to the rebel leaders the issue of tradable Greek Rebellion Bonds on the London stock exchange. The Greeks would promise to repay the bonds, plus interest, if and when they won their independence. Private investors bought bonds to make a profit, or out of sympathy for the Greek cause, or both. The value of Greek Rebellion Bonds rose and fell on the London stock exchange in tempo with military successes and failures on the battlefields of Hellas. The Turks gradually gained the upper hand. With a rebel defeat imminent, the bondholders faced the prospect of losing their trousers. The bondholders’ interest was the national interest, so the British organised an international fleet that, in 1827, sank the main Ottoman flotilla in the Battle of Navarino. After centuries of subjugation, Greece was finally free. But freedom came with a huge debt that the new country had no way of repaying. The Greek economy was mortgaged to British creditors for decades to come. 40.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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Recognizing how most great fortunes had been built up in predatory ways, through usury, war lending and political insider dealings to grab the Commons and carve out burdensome monopoly privileges led to a popular view of financial magnates, landlords and hereditary ruling elite as parasitic by the 19th century, epitomized by the French anarchist Proudhon’s slogan “Property as theft.” Instead of creating a mutually beneficial symbiosis with the economy of production and consumption, today’s financial parasitism siphons off income needed to invest and grow. Bankers and bondholders desiccate the host economy by extracting revenue to pay interest and dividends. Repaying a loan – amortizing or “killing” it – shrinks the host. Like the word amortization, mortgage (“dead hand” of past claims for payment) contains the root mort, “death.” A financialized economy becomes a mortuary when the host economy becomes a meal for the financial free luncher that takes interest, fees and other charges without contributing to production.
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Michael Hudson (Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy)
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bank gives some poor schmuck a mortgage at 100% the value of his property. No deposit. The bank sells the debt off to a larger bank in return for instant cash. The larger bank bundles up a hundred crappy mortgages like this and sells insurance policies for ten cents on the dollar – because their analysts tell them it’s a sure thing. They do this with thousands of loans. The mortgage securities market grows. Nothing can go wrong, right?” “Until the homeowner can’t make his repayments.
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Nick Stephenson (Paydown (Leopold Blake Thriller #0.5))
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I had made no preparation for leaving Christie’s; I had told very few outside the firm of my intention; I had made no overtures and had no inkling of another job; I had not done what most leavers did – taken a copy of the catalogue subscription list, an invaluable record of names, addresses, telephone numbers and interest all over Britain, America and Europe. A cleverer man than I would have prepared his ground and not left the firm so precipitately. I had no money, having recently bought a large, ugly and near derelict house in Barnes, inconveniently south of the narrowest and most fragile bridge over the Thames, had been defrauded by an incompetent builder who had set fire to it, and was burdened with mortgage repayments that must monthly be settled
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Brian Sewell (Outsider II: Always Almost: Never Quite)
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The idea, in the wake of the savings-and-loans disaster, was to spread risk outward from those immediately involved in lending to mortgage borrowers and to attract investors by turning mortgages into securities that offered a wide range of yield-risk profiles. And it worked. In 1980, 67 percent of American mortgages had been held directly on the balance sheets of depository banks. By the end of the 1990s, the risks involved in America’s system of long-term, fixed interest, easy repayment mortgages were securitized and spread across a much wider segment of the financial system
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Adam Tooze
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How to Save on Your Mortgage - Money and Investing with Andrew Baxter How to Save on Your Mortgage Low interest rates have offered a great opportunity to investors to enter the market cheaply over the last few years, but that is about to change. In this week’s Money and Investing Show, tune in as host Andrew Baxter runs through some nifty ways to keep up on your repayments with higher interest rates:
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Andrew Baxter
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At the very least, a mortgage had to be pooled with other mortgages of other homeowners. Traders and investors would trust statistics and buy into a pool of several thousand mortgage loans made by a Savings and Loan, of which, by the laws of probability, only a small fraction should default. Pieces of paper could be issued that entitled the bearer to a pro-rata share of the cash flows from the pool, a guaranteed slice of a fixed pie. There could be millions of pools, each of which held mortgages with particular characteristics, each pool in itself homogeneous. It would hold, for example, home mortgages of less than one hundred and ten thousand dollars paying an interest rate of 12 per cent. The holder of the piece of paper from the pool would earn 12 per cent a year on his money plus his share of the repayments of principal from the homeowners. Thus standardised, the pieces of paper could be sold to an American pension fund, to a Tokyo trust company, to a Swiss bank, to a tax-evading Greek shipping tycoon living in a yacht in the harbour of Monte Carlo, to anyone with money to invest. Thus standardised, the pieces of paper could be traded. All the trader would see was the bond. All the trader wanted to see was the bond. A bond he could whip and drive. A line which would never be crossed could be drawn down the centre of the market. On one side would be the homeowner, on the other, investors and traders. The two groups would never meet; this is curious in view of how personal it seems to lend a fellow man the money to buy his home. The homeowner would only see his local Savings and Loan manager from whom the money came, and to whom it was, over time, returned. Investors and traders would see paper. Bob
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Michael Lewis (Liar's Poker)
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Several months earlier Shara and I had bought a home together. Well, to be more accurate it was a barge, moored on the Thames in central London.
Neil had spotted it for us, and we looked around it straight away. I instantly loved it.
We had previously been quite close to putting in an offer on a tiny, poky studio flat in London--but deep down I was concerned.
For a start, I couldn’t really afford it. Dad had offered to help me secure a mortgage if I could make the repayments, but I knew it would be a stretch to make those every month.
The barge, on the other hand, was less than half the price--and way cooler.
It was pretty sparse, cold, and damp when we looked around it, and Shara and her family were definitely a little tentative at first.
But I got to work on the PR front.
“Hey, it will be fun. We can do it up together--it will be a challenge. We can then make it all cozy and a home.”
Shara tilted her head at me in her way.
“I’m a little nervous about the ‘challenge’ bit. Can we focus on the homely and cozy part of the plan instead, sweetheart?” she replied, still looking concerned.
(Sure enough, she totally changed after we got to live on our barge for a while, and nowadays, wild horses couldn’t force her to sell the boat. I love that in her. Shara always takes such a lot of convincing, and then once she makes something “hers,” it is hers forever. Me included.)
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Bear Grylls (Mud, Sweat and Tears)
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Take a typical three-hundred-million-dollar CMO. It would be divided into three tranches, or slices of a hundred million dollars each. Investors in each tranche received interest payments. But the owners of the first tranche received all principal repayments from all three hundred million dollars of mortgage bonds held in trust. Not until first tranche holders were entirely paid off did second tranche investors receive any prepayments. Not until both first and second tranche investors had been entirely paid off did the holder of a third tranche certificate receive prepayments.
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Michael Lewis (Liar's Poker)
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The Ten Commandments As Interpreted by Robin Palmetier
1. Don’t lie. Unless it’s to the police.
2. Don’t cheat your customers. Robin always made sure her dime bags were just a bit larger than any other dealers’ in the area, insuring loyalty in her clientele.
3. Always be polite. Especially to people who don’t like you, as it will piss them off.
4. Don’t steal from anyone. Anyone meaning people, leaving corporations and the IRS fair game.
5. Don’t kill. This one was also on the Bible’s list but, like many Christians, Robin had a long list of exceptions to this rule. It was okay to kill
sexual predators (unless they were born-again while serving time), liberal commentators, and anyone described as a "bad guy" by the greatest journalist and political leader of all time, Box News commentator Malcolm Wright. Unless, of course, Mr. Wright happened to be talking about one of her
personal friends, which, on occasion, he had.
6. Do not take the Lord’s name in vein. Shit, fuck, cock, pussy, bitch, bastard and their ilk were just fine. Goddamn’s and Jesus Christ’s were no-no’s.
7. Always repay a favor with a favor. Someone does something nice for you, do something nice right back. Being in someone’s debt is a dangerous thing.
8. Affirm that every word in the Bible is true, except the parts that clearly aren’t. Like that thing about eating shellfish—though supposedly an
abomination on par with adultery, murder, poly-cotton blends and paying interest on a mortgage—it could not possibly be God’s will. Robin loved
scallops and knew the good Lord would not wish to deny her this pleasure.
9. Discuss all decisions with God directly and listen closely to his advice. Sadly, when Praline tried this
himself he got nothing but an extended silence, while his mother always seemed to get very detailed instructions.
10. Always remember your mama loves you.
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Marshall Thornton (The Perils of Praline)
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Mortgage Workouts Even if you don’t qualify for any of the government loan modification programs or your lender doesn’t agree to participate, you may be able to arrange a “mortgage workout.” A workout is any agreement you make with the lender that changes how you pay the delinquency on your mortgage or otherwise keeps you out of foreclosure. Many lenders require this formal process even for short-term fixes. Here are some workout options your lender might agree to: • Spread repayment of missed payments over a few months. For example, if your monthly payment is $1,000 and you missed two payments ($2,000), the lender might let you pay $1,500 for four months. • Reduce or suspend your regular payments for a specified time, and then add a portion of your overdue amount to your regular payments later on. • Extend the length of your loan and add the missed payments at the end. • For a period of time, suspend the amount of your monthly payment that goes toward the principal and only require payment of interest, taxes, and insurance. • Let you sell the property for less than you owe the lender and waive the rest. This is called a “short sale.” It’s best to start the workout negotiations as early as possible. But before you contact the lender about a workout, you should prepare information about your situation, including: • a reasonable budget for the
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Robin Leonard (Solve Your Money Troubles: Debt, Credit & Bankruptcy)
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Although the federal government had been trying to persuade middle-class families to buy single-family homes for more than fourteen years, the campaign had achieved little by the time Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933. Homeownership remained prohibitively expensive for working- and middle-class families: bank mortgages typically required 50 percent down, interest-only payments, and repayment in full after five to seven years, at which point the borrower would have to refinance or find another bank to issue a new mortgage with similar terms. Few urban working- and middle-class families had the financial capacity to do what was being asked.
The Depression made the housing crisis even worse. Many property-owning families with mortgages couldn't make their payments and were subject to foreclosure. With most others unable to afford homes at all, the construction industry was stalled. The New Deal designed one program to support existing homeowners who couldn't make payments, and another to make first-time homeownership possible for the middle class.
In 1933, to rescue households that were about to default, the administration created the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC). It purchased existing mortgages that were subject to imminent foreclosure and then issued new mortgages with repayment schedules of up to fifteen years (later extended to twenty-five years). In addition, HOLC mortgages were amortized, meaning that each month's payment included some principal as well as interest, so when the loan was paid off, the borrower would own the home. Thus, for the first time, working- and middle-class homeowners could gradually gain equity while their properties were still mortgaged. If a family with an amortized mortgage sold its home, the equity (including any appreciation) would be the family's to keep.
HOLC mortgages had low interest rates, but the borrowers still were obligated to make regular payments. The HOLC, therefore, had to exercise prudence about. its borrowers' abilities to avoid default. to assess risk, the HOLC wanted to know something about the condition of the house and of surrounding houses in the neighborhood to see whether the property would likely maintain its value. The HOLC hired local real estate agents to make the appraisals on which refinancing decisions could be based. With these agents required by their national ethics code to maintain segregation, it's not surprising that in gauging risk HOLK considered the racial composition of neighborhoods. The HOLC created color-coded maps of every metropolitan area in the nation, with the safest neighborhoods colored green and the riskiest colored red. A neighborhood earned a red color if African Americans lived in it, even if it was a solid middle-class neighborhood of single-family homes.
For example, in St. Louis, the white middle-class suburb of Ladue was colored green because, according to an HOLC appraiser in 1940, it had 'not a single foreigner or negro.' The similarly middle-class suburban area of Lincoln Terrace was colored red because it had 'little or no value today . . . due to the colored element now controlling the district.' Although HOLC did not always decline to rescue homeowners in neighborhoods colored red on its maps (i.e., redlined neighborhoods), the maps had a huge impact and put the federal government on record as judging that African Americans, simply because of their race, were poor risks.
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Richard Rothstein (The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America)
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The party for those addicted to markets has been the “make it rain” free-money printing game run since 1971. They may call it “Quantitavive Easing”, (QE) or “monetary policy” or “Asset purchases by the Fed”, or any number of terms which cause 99% of humans to stop listening. I urge everyone to demand better from governments, professionals and public servants. To demand real “service” from those who claim to be in this role. Right now we are letting those addicted to money, play with “self” accountability, which is creating addicts and poverty at a faster rate than our western economies can create prosperity. “Asset purchases” means the Fed printing money, to give this money to banks in exchange for some of the banks bad assets that need to be purged. How wealthy would your family be if each losing investment could simply be taken off your hands…using borrowed money that the taxpayer must then repay? How poor would your neighbors be if they did not have this money pipeline working for them? The newly printed money for asset purchases, is backed by US Treasury IOU’s, or similar notes and borrowings, for which the public must now repay through income taxes…forever. Banks thus get billions in freshly created cash, while the US public gets the bad assets, or gets stuck with the bill to pay back the money created to purchase the bad assets. I could probably refine that description a bit, but for now I am going to let it lay here. Any corrections are welcomed with gratitude. Dousing the flames of the 2008 mortgage bubble disaster, using government money issued in this manner, was said to be needed to prevent complete financial system meltdown. A better choice would have been to let those with a gambling addiction, suffer the consequences of their addiction, like we demand of every addict in Downtown LA. But the Fed is the perfect tool for dumping bank gambling losses and bad assets upon the taxpayer, and to make taxpayers pay to give the banks a clean-money start each time. The only thing left to do for the recipients of some of those newly printed billions, is to “launder it”, to get
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Larry Elford (Farming Humans: Easy Money (Non Fiction Financial Murder Book 1))
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Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC). It purchased existing mortgages that were subject to imminent foreclosure and then issued new mortgages with repayment schedules of up to fifteen years (later extended to twenty-five years).
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Richard Rothstein (The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America)
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The key to understanding the subprime-mortgage distributed control fraud is to think about early repayment.
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Dan Davies (Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World)
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If the Fed had curbed leverage and raised interest rates in the mid 2000s, there would have been less craziness up and down the chain. American households would not have increased their borrowing from 66 percent of GDP in 1997 to 100 percent a decade later. Housing finance companies would not have sold so many mortgages regardless of borrowers’ ability to repay. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government-chartered home lenders, would almost certainly not have collapsed into the arms of the government. Banks like Citigroup and broker-dealers like Merrill Lynch would not have gorged so greedily on mortgage-backed securities that ultimately went bad, squandering their capital. The Fed allowed this binge of borrowing because it was focused resolutely on consumer-price inflation, and because it believed it could ignore bubbles safely. The carnage of 2007–2009 demonstrated how wrong that was. Presented with an opportunity to borrow at near zero cost, people borrowed unsustainably.
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Sebastian Mallaby (More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite)
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If you sell someone a prime-rate, 5 percent annual percentage rate (APR) thirty-year mortgage in the amount of $200,000, they’ll pay you back an additional $186,512—93 percent of what they borrowed—for the privilege of spreading payments out over thirty years. If you can manage to sell that same person a subprime loan with a 9 percent interest rate, you can collect $379,328 on top of the $200,000 repayment, nearly twice over what they borrowed. The public policy justification for allowing subprime loans was that they made the American Dream of homeownership possible for people who did not meet the credit standards to get a cheaper prime mortgage. But the subprime loans we started to see in the early 2000s were primarily marketed to existing homeowners, not people looking to buy—and they usually left the borrower worse off than before the loan. Instead of getting striving people into homeownership, the loans often wound up pushing existing homeowners out. The refinance loans stripped homeowners of equity they had built up over years of mortgage payments. That’s why these diseased loans were tested first on the segment of Americans least respected by the financial sector and least protected by lawmakers: Black and brown families.
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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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Where to find the borrowers with high FICO scores? Here the Wall Street bond trading desks exploited another blind spot in the rating agencies’ models. Apparently the agencies didn’t grasp the difference between a “thin-file” FICO score and a “thick-file” FICO score. A thin-file FICO score implied, as it sounds, a short credit history. The file was thin because the borrower hadn’t done much borrowing. Immigrants who had never failed to repay a debt, because they had never been given a loan, often had surprisingly high thin-file FICO scores. Thus a Jamaican baby nurse or Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 looking to borrow three-quarters of a million dollars, when filtered through the models at Moody’s and S&P, became suddenly more useful, from a credit-rigging point of view. They might actually improve the perceived quality of the pool of loans and increase the percentage that could be declared triple-A. The Mexican harvested strawberries; Wall Street harvested his FICO score.
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Michael Lewis
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Mortgages were short-term, usually for three to five years, and they were not amortized. In other words, people paid interest, but did not repay the sum they had borrowed (the principal) until the end of the loan’s term, so that they ended up facing a balloon-sized final payment. The average difference (spread) between mortgage rates and high-grade corporate bond yields was about two percentage points during the 1920s, compared with about half a per cent (50 basis points) in the past twenty years.
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Niall Ferguson (The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World: 10th Anniversary Edition)