Free Republic

The only people who pay taxes in this country are consumers who make purchases or pay rent from their own income. Those taxes are paid at the point of purchase and at the time of purchase. Since the middle class comprises the largest group of consumers, they pay the greatest share of taxes regardless of the illusion created by a progressive tax scheme. The wealthy pay more taxes only to the extent that they may consume more. The truth of these statements will become self-evident with a few simple illustrations. That box of corn flakes on your kitchen tables contains...

While some blame the greed of Wall Street investment bankers and the dangers of a totally unregulated system for the current financial crisis, what can’t be denied is that lives, and lifestyles, have been suddenly changed across the social spectrum and careers built up over a lifetime have vanished in an instant. Apart from the revised $700 billion bailout plan, can the U.S. government do enough to restore confidence and assuage the trauma? The real question is: Who is going to compensate the common investors across the world who have lost their wealth in the resultant market meltdown? The...

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac play a dominant role in the housing market by buying up mortgages and reselling them to investors. With approximately 5 trillion dollars of investment portfolios, they owned or guaranteed about 70% of the U.S. mortgage market these banks simply became too large to fail. Throughout the years, Fannie and Freddie have come to play a dominant role in the housing market by buying up mortgages and reselling them to investors. With approximately 5 trillion dollars of investment portfolios, Freddie and Fannie owned or guaranteed about 70% of the U.S. mortgage market - these banks have...

Your mortgage is all screwed up, and you're forced to search for sources of cash for a re-fi. The banks have none to loan, so where do you turn? And what's worse than going to the government for cash? Read today's "Geeks On Caffeine" cartoon and find out! NOTE: The author requests that you visit his website and refrain from pasting a copy of the comic within this thread. Thank you!

Call me “old-fashioned” and call me “retro,” but I remember the time when you had to have a twenty-percent down payment to even consider buying a house. The banks didn’t like it if you borrowed this down-payment either. And they checked to see if you did. The banks also rigorously checked your income and job history to make sure you could pay them back. I remember when people celebrated getting a mortgage - not just because they could buy a house - but because they had been judged responsible and creditworthy by a major American institution. Twenty-five or thirty years...

A decision, made under pressure from Congress and investors, to steer Fannie Mae into dangerous corners of the mortgage market proved to be disastrous.

ROOT CAUSES OF THE ECONOMIC MELTDOWN 1) THE CREATION OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE [FED]. This is centralized banking as practiced in the U.S. The birth of the FED was signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson (D) on Dec. 24, 1913. Reflecting on this he later said, “I am a most unhappy man; unwittingly I have ruined my country….” The FED is a private consortium of bankers the heads of which are appointed by the executive branch of government. Many people believe that their first loyalty lies with bankers—including Wall Street bankers and foreign bankers—more than with the American people....

What few today remember is that one of the government's central goals in undertaking mortgage market reform was to segregate American cities by race. As the insurer of much of the national mortgage industry, the FHA fixated obsessively on fears that racial integration would harm real estate values and leave the government responsible for bailing out legions of failed loans. (snip) Wall Street Street's apologists have tried to blame the subprime crisis on the Community Reinvestment Act, Congress' tepid attempt in 1977 to atone for the FHA's sins. This argument, of course, is completely ludicrous, since the vast majority of...

Charles Elliott Fitzgerald, an admitted architect of one of the largest real estate frauds in California history, was sentenced Friday to 14 years in federal prison for his part in bilking mortgage lenders of more than $40 million. Fitzgerald, 48, pleaded guilty in May to conspiracy, fraud and other charges, acknowledging that he reaped at least $5 million from the scheme, which was based in Beverly Hills and involved high-end house flips. He is the first of 11 defendants to be sentenced in the case, which foreshadowed the wave of foreclosures now washing over the wreckage of California's real estate...

"...Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits...In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980's."

Good Lord. "We're going to forgive the balance she had on the loan and give her the house."

Here is video of Bill O'Reilly tonight in an epic battle with Democrat Barney Frank on The O'Reilly Factor. O'Reilly nailed Frank on his role in the failure of mortgage lending entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. . . .(Watch Video)

Not that long ago, a dollar was worth a half-gallon of gasoline. Just a few days ago, a dollar was worth a little less than one-quarter-gallon of gasoline. When the value of the dollar is expressed this way, the question is did the gasoline become more expensive or did the dollar become worth less? The dollar is a commodity that is bought and sold, borrowed and loaned and not exempt from economic laws. When the government tampers with the value of the money supply and the value of gasoline, we end up with high energy costs that send a shock...

The government kicked off a program Wednesday that aims to prevent foreclosures by letting an estimated 400,000 troubled U.S. homeowners swap their mortgages for more affordable loans.

Todd Kruse has an interesting “observation and question to the CDA’s representative stating, “since there is already an oversupply of housing on the market today your development plans, using our tax dollars, would simply add more housing stock to an already saturated market. This will further reduce our homes’ values don’t you think?”

"Mortgage applications in the U.S. fell last week with fewer Americans refinancing their mortgages even as interest rates declined." ---snip-- "The average rate on a 30-year fixed-rate loan dropped to 6.07 percent from 6.09 percent the prior week, the report showed." --snip--- "Even as borrowing costs dropped, fewer homeowners sought to refinance out of adjustable-rate mortgages into longer-term fixed loans."

Bakersfield residents — qualified ones — can still get home, car and business loans, local lenders say, despite Wall Street’s throes. “We are open for lending in Kern County,” said Neil Marshall, chief financial officer at Kern Federal Credit Union. As with other credit unions, home and car loans are a staple for Kern Federal, a $270 million-asset institution that opened in 1949. San Joaquin Bank, meanwhile, a business bank headquartered in Bakersfield, is also making loans and maintaining lines of credit. “We’re accommodating all of the credit requests of our customers,” said Bart Hill, chief executive officer of the...

In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders. The action, which will begin as a pilot program involving 24 banks in 15 markets -- including the New York metropolitan region -- will encourage those banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good enough to qualify for conventional loans. Fannie Mae officials say they hope to make it a nationwide program by next spring.

To test Nancy Pelosi’s hypothesis that after eight years of President Bush the economy is in far worse shape than it was under President Clinton at a time of “budget surpluses,” I went to Lending Tree to see what kind of mortgage terms I could get to buy my first home today. It was the spring of 1996 and I was newly stationed at Fort Hood, Texas along with my very pregnant wife who was one month away from delivering our first child. We found the home we wanted to buy in Harker Heights, just a few miles east of...

She was only 21 when she decided to become a mortgage broker. A newlywed, Michelle LaPiana felt that her own broker had misled her and her husband during the daunting purchase of their first home in Hialeah. She claims she fell prey to a bait and switch. The closing costs were nearly double what the couple previously had been told. By the time they sat with a title agent to sign the loan documents, it was too late to walk away without losing thousands of dollars. ''The closing costs were $9,680,'' recalled LaPiana, now 38 and divorced. ``I remember everything....

I have just sent this appeal to my representatives in Washington. Feel free to copy and paste and send to your representatives. Dear Representative, Please do NOT support the $700 Billion Bailout Plan until the Banks and the Lending institutions indentify the Toxic Loans and DE-BUNDLE them. It would take very little effort on their part to identify each loan based on a computer search of their existing loans: 1. Full Default = no payments in 3+ months (Toxic) 2. Partial Default = no payments in 1-3 months (Potential Toxic) 3. Good Standing = on-time payments

This was not the first thing I wanted to hear this morning, yet perhaps I don't understand the context of President Bush's speech nor his intentions back then. What I heard this morning reminded me of President Johnson's Great Society programs. Again, and hopefully I have misunderstood the background on this. The following is my partial transcription of audio clips aired 7:00 a.m. - 9:00 a.m. on 790 KABC Talk Radio September 30, 2008. I also found the text of President Bush's 2002 speech and I posted it following my partial transcript of the audio segments. President Bush's 2002...

In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders. The action, which will begin as a pilot program involving 24 banks in 15 markets -- including the New York metropolitan region -- will encourage those banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good enough to qualify for conventional loans. Fannie Mae officials say they hope to make it a nationwide program by next spring. Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest...

Sorry for the vanity... but I've got a question that I hope someone can help me understand. A caller to the Wells Report on KLIF in Dallas/Fort Worth just brought up an interesting thought... what happened to the PMI that people who put down less than 20% are required to purchase when they obtain a mortgage? Shouldn't these companies be paying off on some of the mortgages that have defaulted? Is this what got AIG in trouble? Anyone have insight on this?

Proposal Uses Private Equity to Keep Government from Buying Mortgage Assets, Assures Wall Street Won’t Get Rich While Taxpayers Get Stuck with Trillion Dollar Bill September 27, 2008 Washington, DC – Rep. Darrell Issa, a businessman and entrepreneur before coming to Congress, today offered a new proposal to protect the economy without a taxpayer-funded bail out of Wall Street. Under Rep. Issa’s plan, private investors would provide the capital for a Rescue Fund through the purchase of government issued Guaranteed Recovery Bonds. The Rescue Fund would be managed by the Treasury Department and would offer troubled financial firms interest accruing...

Having difficulty coping with financial stress? Forget Bernanke and Paulson. Think Rogers & Hammerstein. In the excellent production of South Pacific at the Lincoln Center in New York (something tells me tickets there will be easier to get soon), one of the highlights is the song "Happy Talk." "Happy talk, keep talking happy talk," sings Bloody Mary. "Talk about things you like to do." Elsewhere in New York, there's a sense afoot that the real problems we face aren't the crippled financial system or the slowing economy, but rather all the bad stuff people are saying about them. In other...

President Bush will speak in a few minutes. Get to a TV and watch it, if you have the stomach for it.

The roots of today's mortgage-based financial crisis can be traced back to the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), which Jimmy Carter signed in 1977. Seeking to address complaints from anti-poverty activists and housing advocates about banks allegedly discriminating against minority borrowers and "redlining" inner-city neighborhoods, the CRA decreed that banks had "an affirmative obligation" to meet the credit needs of victims of discrimination in borrowing. To add a government stick to the process, the CRA decreed that federal banking regulators would consider how well banks were doing in meeting the goal of more multiculturalism in loaning when considering requests by banks...

<p>There are two things my father wishes I would never discuss on this blog. My love life, and my finances.</p> <p>I'm cool with avoiding my love life. Not much to report there. I hope it stays that way.</p> <p>But with finances, I feel obligated to speak up. But before we enter into that discussion, visit this link to understand what happened with the mortgage industry to cause the current situation.</p>

Regarding the Great Mortgage Bailout, I see that the Joint Congressional Horse Design Committee has once again produced its camel. This one, perhaps, will prove acceptable enough to be enacted. I have just three points to make about it: (1) The initial near train-wreck of the enterprise was yet further evidence of the Bush Administration’s ineptitude for preemptive action, and especially for necessary preemptive action. In 1933, the first Franklin Delano Roosevelt Administration passed a raft of financial legislation the length of the Unabridged Oxford English Dictionary in the twinkling of an eye (well, very quickly within the first hundred...

Most everybody here rails against the Farm Bill, Corporate welfare etc.. However the one industry that has always enjoyed a tax break is the housing and mortgage industry. Why should home owners (of which I am one) get relief for their mortgage payment, but renters get no relief? Is that not the same as a marriage tax, inheritance tax, basically behavior driven tax relief. I understand that home ownership is a major driver for the economy, and in many people's minds, it brings some ingrained satisfaction that you are accomplishing the American Dream. However, there are many people that should...

Sarah Barracuda could win this election on Friday night for the Republicans. All she needs is the courage to tell the truth in her debate with human gaffe machine Joe Biden -- with John McCain's permission and support -- to tell it like it is. If the great American middle class ever figures out the trillion dollar phony mortgage scam from Freddie and Fannie, they will finally rise up in wrath and throw the liberal bums out. Let it start hitting their pocket books, their ATM cards and credit cards, let their home prices fall like a rock -- and...

Financial crisis: Bradford & Bingley to be nationalised by Treasury The stricken mortgage lender Bradford & Bingley is to be nationalised by the Government, it has been reported. Last Updated: 9:00AM BST 28 Sep 2008 The biggest buy-to-let operator has run out time in its attempts to find a private buyer and an announcement by the Treasury is expected later. According to a BBC report, the Government will nationalise B&B using the special legislation passed to take Northern Rock into public ownership earlier this year. Taxpayers face a multi-billion-pound bill as part of a plan to rescue the lender. Senior...

““SEC. 1338. Housing Trust Fund. “(a) Establishment and purpose.—The Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (in this section referred to as the ‘Secretary’) shall establish and manage a Housing Trust Fund, which shall be funded with amounts allocated by the enterprises under section 1337 and any amounts as are or may be appropriated, transferred, or credited to such Housing Trust Fund under any other provisions of law. The purpose of the Housing Trust Fund under this section is to provide grants to States for use— “(1) to increase and preserve the supply of rental housing for extremely low- and...

"You can't be for capitalism on the way up and socialism on the way down." — Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Sept. 21, 2008. From 1960-95, the U.S. homeownership rate was 63 percent, give or take a point or two. For most of that period, liberal politicians and others browbeat financial institutions about redlining unqualified borrowers. During the Clinton administration, liberals finally prevailed, and lenders were forced to relax their rules. By 2005, the rate was 69 percent. Then the housing bubble burst, foreclosures rose, and the rate retreated, albeit unevenly, toward its historically sustainable level. Back in the day,...

Katie Allison Granju blogs for the Knoxville News Sentinel and is, I’m sure, a very nice person. She has those sincere glasses. But she's a total ditz. Someone who feels for the poor and downtrodden and is willing to set the fuse for the next subprime crisis before we know how much damage this one will eventually do. So far Granju’s love for her fellow man has blown up in our faces and we can’t begin to count the cost because the damage assessment is not over. Let’s count the casualties this far. It has cost us AIG (the largest...

STIGLITZ CALLS BUSH BAILOUT PLAN "MONSTROUS" Wednesday, 24 September 2008 (Ed. Note: Everybody has an opinion about the current Wall Street meltdown and how best to deal with it, but perhaps the opinion of a Nobel Prize winner in economics should carry special weight. So it is interesting that recent remarks by Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz to European reporters did not get much play in the U.S. media. Could it be that the U.S. media, so comfortable with Wall Street’s crony capitalists, is part of the problem, too? This report on Stiglitz’s analysis is reprinted from MercoPress .) Economy...

The single-biggest mistake in the Paulson bank-rescue-plan marketing effort has been the failure to explain clearly how taxpayers are going to recoup $700 billion used to buy toxic assets at auction in order to unfreeze the banking system. In other words, folks don’t understand how taxpayers will be paid back, and may actually make profits, which will enable the new government debt to be erased after the Treasury bank-rescue is completed. Here’s the key point: Any loan package bought by the Treasury will be 100 percent taxpayer owned. Period. Let’s walk through this hypothetical for a moment. Through a market-driven...

NewsBusters caught a segment from a video shown over at ABC's Political Radar in an article titled "Bill Clinton: Don't 'Overly Parse' McCain Request to Delay Debate," and within the video embedded at the article, at the 2 minute 45 second mark in the discussion dealing with the economy, ABC's Chris Cuomo asked Bill Clinton if Nancy Pelosi's recent statements were "playing politics," and Bill Clinton's answer has taken many by surprise. Chris Cuomo, ABC News: A little surprising for you to hear the Democrats saying, "This came out of nowhere, this is all about the Republicans. We had nothing...

Kill the bailout: Illegal immigration and the mortgage mess By Michelle Malkin  •  September 24, 2008 07:49 AM My syndicated column today tackles the bailout angle no one wants to talk about: Open borders and the home loan debacle. You’ve heard a lot about Fannie/Freddie and the minority lending shakedowns, but you haven’t heard most commentators/analysts on either the left or the right talk about the massive illegal alien mortgage racket — a topic I’ve reported on for the past five years. That’s because fault lies at the feet of the crime-enabling banking industry and the ethnic lobbyists and the illegal alien-enabling...

There's a BIG IDEA AT STAKE in the Democrat-Caused Financial Crisis September 22, 2008 BEGIN TRANSCRIPTRUSH: Okay, as to the bailout here, folks, a lot of people over the e-mail are very confused about this, even some of my closest circle, because they think, "Well, the bailout's a bad idea, but what if we don't? Is everything going to crash around it? This is more nuance than, you know, just cut-and-dried, up-or-down, liberal-versus-conservatism." I think, folks, a lot of people say, "You know, we're beyond the point of assigning blame here. That's not the problem. What we have to...

Countrywide Financial Corp., the biggest U.S. mortgage lender, made large, previously undisclosed home loans to two additional executives of Fannie Mae, the government-chartered firm at the center of the U.S. credit crisis. One of Countrywide's previously undisclosed customers at Fannie was Jamie Gorelick, an influential Democratic Party figure whose $960,000 mortgage refinancing in 2003 was handled through a program reserved for influential figures and friends of Countrywide's chief executive at the time, Angelo Mozilo. Ms. Gorelick was Fannie Mae's vice chairman at the time. Another Countrywide client was recently ousted Fannie Mae Chief Executive Daniel Mudd, though it isn't clear...

UPDATE 2-US Democrats claim Wall St. bailout breakthroughWed Sep 24, 2008 10:50pm EDT By Richard Cowan and Thomas Ferraro WASHINGTON, Sept 24 (Reuters) - Democratic Rep. Barney Frank said on Wednesday Democrats had reached an agreement to stem one of the worst U.S. financial disasters in decades, and that there would be enough votes to pass the measure and send it to President George W. Bush to sign into law. "We now have between House and Senate Democrats an agreement on what we think should be in the bill, and we have a meeting scheduled at 10 a.m. tomorrow to...

The mainstream media and Democratic politicians-is there a difference between the two any more?-have been trying to exploit the mortgage crisis to convince the public that free markets have been discredited. A particularly obnoxious writer with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution even goes to far as to demand to know, "What happened to ...[those] who denounced government regulation and read from the holy scriptures as recorded by Ayn Rand?" Well, here we are-or at least, here I am-and I am not impressed by the bluster of the anti-capitalists, because they are the ones who are getting this story completely wrong.

<p>I just saw this on Fox News by Carl Cameron.</p>

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Treasury's proposed $700 billion bailout for financial firms could yield a profit of at least 7 percent to 8 percent and benefit taxpayers, Bill Gross, who manages the world's biggest bond fund, wrote in an opinion piece in The Washington Post on Wednesday. Gross, the chief investment officer of Pacific Investment Management Co., or Pimco, estimates the average price of distressed mortgages that pass from "troubled financial institutions" to the Treasury at auction will be 65 cents on the dollar. That will represent a loss of one-third of the original purchase price to the seller,...

As panicked politicians prepare to fork over $1 trillion to rescue Wall Street......one villain has slipped notice: illegal immigration, crime-enabling banks and open-borders Bush policies.......cities hardest hit by the foreclosure wave happen to be some of the nation's largest illegal alien sanctuaries. Half of the mortgages to Hispanics are subprime. A quarter of all those subprime loans are in default and foreclosure. The National Council of La Raza and its Development Fund received millions in federal funds to "counsel" on obtaining mortgages with little to no money down; the group almost succeeded in attaching a $10M earmark for itself in...

A decade ago, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the United States' two mortgage financing behemoths, were flying high. They were among the most profitable companies in the world, had political connections to the White House and Congress, earned enormous bonuses for their corporate chieftains, and did not have to play by the same rules as other corporations. For all that, they could thank their congressional charters, which established them as Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs).....Yet amid all the turmoil, lawsuits, and financial uncertainty befalling the companies, the current management teams at Fannie and Freddie have something to be thankful for in...

Following a landmark lending discrimination settlement, U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno recently issued a stern warning to all banks which practice red-lining--you're breaking the law and face possible litigation. Reno's warning came on the heels of a recent settlement of an unprecedented lending-bias case against Chevy Chase Federal Savings Bank, a suburban Washington, D.C., bank that was accused of bias in marketing services to predominantly Black and minority areas. It was revealed that until recently, Chevy Chase had no branches located in predominantly Black neighborhoods.

Assault on the mortgage lenders: in the name of racial justice, the Clintonites want the power to decide who gets a home of his own - efforts to impose regulations on banks to make loans even if applicants are not creditworthy National Review, Dec 27, 1993 by Robert Stowe England QUIETLY, behind the scenes, the Clinton Administration is preparing for the biggest regulatory crackdown of recent years. Attorney General Janet Reno is linking up with banking regulators and with HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros to end the supposed epidemic of discrimination against minorities in making home loans. The implications for society...