Subprime bailout

A subprime lender is one who makes loans to borrowers who do not qualify for loans from mainstream lenders. It's a market that has evolved to permit borrowers with poor credit history and an unstable financial situation the opportunity to get home mortgages.

The catch is they pay a higher and typically an adjustable rate mortgage (ARM). Encouraged by the housing bubble, easy credit, along with the expectation housing prices would continue to appreciate, many subprime borrowers took out mortgages they could not afford in the long run, particularly if interest rates rose and housing prices depreciated.

As with most economic problems, we find the hand of government. The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, whose provisions were strengthened during the Clinton administration, is a federal law that mandates lenders to offer credit throughout their entire market and discourages them from restricting their credit services to high-income markets, a practice known as redlining. In other words, the Community Reinvestment Act encourages banks and thrifts to make loans to riskier customers.

According to an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Nov. 4, 2007) titled "Black Atlantans often snared by subprime loans," by Carrie Teegardin, a national study of credit scores, not just mortgage loan applicants, found 52 percent of blacks have credit scores that would classify them as subprime borrowers compared with 16 percent of whites.

This whole thing has been flawed from the git-go. People come along who, for one reason or another, can’t qualify for a mortgage under the rules that banks have developed over a period of several decades. So what do we do, we take these very people and we give them mortgages, BUT we do it requiring even more of what they don’t have than we get from those who do have!

It makes no sense at all. If they can’t afford the monthly payment to start with, giving them a lower payment that is almost certainly going to soon be more, sometimes much more, than the payment would have been had they qualified to start with is setting everyone in the chain up for a fall.

Of course the idea was that the house they couldn’t afford to start with would always be worth more tomorrow than it is today and when the stuff hit the fan the mortgage holder could foreclose, sell the property and still make money. Of course that left the homeowner out in the cold. Poor credit really ruined, etc.

Add to the basic poor business plan to start with the fact that the crush of people getting the loans made it easy to cheat you’re left with the question “What could possibly go wrong?”

There is no easy fix.

A post to me from Calpernia...

(1990) John McCain said on the floor of the Senate: “Mr. President, I am anxious to construct a new relationship with our old adversary (Vietnam)”. He, who was in a Vietnamese prison camps for five and a half years, was pushing hard for normalized relations with Hanoi long before anyone else was.

Between when Clinton said that he would not normalize relations with Vietnam until there was a full accounting of POWs/MIAs and the time he lifted the Trade Embargo only two Americans had been accounted for in Vietnam.

Lifting the embargo opened the door for the multi-billion dollar corporation, Lippo Group with American business partners, such as Stephens Investment of Little Rock, AR to conduct business in Vietnam. Mr A. Vernon Weaver, at that time the Vice-President for Operations in the Pacific Rim of Stephens Investment and a member of the Board of Visitors at the U.S. Naval Academy was instrumental in arranging an upgrade of the position of Commandant of the U.S. Naval Academy from two stars to four stars.

Former U.S. Navy officers, Senators John Kerry and John McCain supported this reorganization.

http://www.usvetdsp.com/billbell.htm

An indication of just how deep and subtle Red Chinese roots run in U.S. business and government affairs deals with McCain and Kerry. Both McCain and Kerry fought long and hard to provide the political cover Clinton needed when he made the controversial decision to normalize relations with Vietnam. McCain’s wife, Cindy, is the daughter of James Hensley, who is the second largest Anheuser-Busch distributor in the United States. McCain is an officer in Hensley & Co. and Cindy is a vice president. The McCain family owns several million dollars in Anheuser-Busch stock.

As a part of an aggressive campaign to enhance its international standing in the beer market, Anheuser-Busch has had signned contracts and invested hundreds of millions building brewery operations in China and Vietnam. I can’t link any of those contracts involve Lippo. Some docs retrieved from the net revealed that Riady’s Lippo is the holder of a license for Sea World in Indonesia and that Anheuser-Busch owns all the Sea World themeparks in the United States as well as some overseas.

Is there a connection between Anheuser-Busch and Lippo?
http://www.usvetdsp.com/billbell.htm

SeaWorld/Lippo Connection:

Old URL: http://www.lippo.co.id/Main.htm

Internet Cache: http://web.archive.org/web/19980530014836/http://www.lippo.co.id/Main.htm

Net cache shows Lippo holds/held the license on Sea World in Indonesia.

“Today I am lifting the trade embargo against Vietnam because I am absolutely convinced it offers us the best way to resolve the fate of those who remain missing and about whom we are not sure.” Two things happened between November 1992 and February 1994 which bear on this issue. One was that Senators John Kerry and John McCain lobbied the president to drop the embargo. The second thing was that in September 1993 the head of the Lippo Group, Mochtar Riady, led a trade mission of Asian bankers on a trip to Vietnam to (in his words) “size up business opportunities there.” Lippo helps, among other things, to finance trade deals. It therefore stood to benefit enormously from expanded trade between Vietnam and the United States;

Old URL: http://www.empower.org/html/policy/misc/roadmap3.htm

See Internet Cache:

http://web.archive.org/web/20000816001233/http://www.empower.org/html/policy/misc/roadmap3.htm

California Foreclosures, Mortgage Defaults Soar ^

Posted by garylmoore to Sir Francis Dashwood
On News/Activism ^ 01/22/2008 11:09:04 PM PST · 20 of 22 ^

John McCain is a maverick senator and former Vietnam veteran and prisoner of war for 5 years in North Vietnam.

1. Here are some negative allegations:

- McCain was one of the Keating Five, congressmen investigated on ethics charges for strenuously helping convicted racketeer Charles Keating after he gave them large campaign contributions and vacation trips.
Charles Keating was convicted of racketeering and fraud in both state and federal court after his Lincoln Savings & Loan collapsed, costing the taxpayers $3.4 billion. His convictions were overturned on technicalities; for example, the federal conviction was overturned because jurors had heard about his state conviction, and his state charges because Judge Lance Ito (yes, that judge) screwed up jury instructions. Neither court cleared him, and he faces new trials in both courts.)
Though he was not convicted of anything, McCain intervened on behalf of Charles Keating after Keating gave McCain at least $112,00 in contributions. In the mid-1980s, McCain made at least 9 trips on Keating’s airplanes, and 3 of those were to Keating’s luxurious retreat in the Bahamas. McCain’s wife and father-in-law also were the largest investors (at $350,000) in a Keating shopping center; the Phoenix New Times called it a sweetheart deal.
- Mafia ties: In 1995, McCain sent birthday regards, and regrets for not attending, to Joseph Joe Bananas Bonano, the head of the New York Bonano crime family, who had retired to Arizona. Another politician to send regrets was Governor Fife Symington, who has since been kicked out of office and convicted of 7 felonies relating to fraud and extortion.
- At least one veteran’s group (U.S. Veteran’s Dispatch) really hates him, and accuses McCain of cooperating with the North Vietnamese while he was their prisoner. They also sketch McCain’s ties, through his wealthy father-in-law, to various Arizona scandals including the murder of reporter Don Bolles.
Check out their version at the US Veteran’s Dispatch web site.
- Family troubles: McCain has a reputation as a politician who has difficulty keeping his pants zipped, according to Republican sources. He acknowledges that his adultery broke up his first marriage. His second wife Cindy, the daughter of a wealthy Budweiser beer distributor, was addicted to prescription narcotics and even stole hard drugs from a medical charity that she ran. McCain acknowledges that she didn’t want him to run, and only agreed once he promised that she doesn’t have to go to New Hampshire or Iowa.

Quotes:
- Do you know why Chelsea Clinton is so ugly? Because Janet Reno is her father. — John McCain

Sources:

The Pampered Politician , by Amy Silverman, The Phoenix New Times, May 15, 1997
See John Run Off at the Mouth , Phoenix New Times, October 1, 1998
Opiate for the Mrs. , Phoenix New Times, September 8, 1994
Flashes: What’s Up, Murdoch? , Phoenix New Times, September 17, 1998
the US Veteran’s Dispatch web site.
Symington Gets Slammer , Phoenix New Times, February 2, 1998
Election 98: Arizona Governor, Fox News web site, 1998 coverage (no longer on web)
Keating Gets New Trial , CNNfn Web Site, December 2, 1996
No More Wagging, , (editorial) by Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, January 3, 1999
John McCain, rock-and-roll dad , by Andrew Essex, The New Yorker Magazine, December 6, 1999 p52
Unmasking Darth McCain , by William Cleeland, The Daily Illini, March 9, 2001

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.