Posted on 06/14/2008 10:29:21 PM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
The Bubble
How homeowners, speculators and Wall Street dealmakers rode a wave of easy money with crippling consequences.
By Alec Klein and Zachary A. Goldfarb
The Washington Post
Sunday, June 15, 2008; A01
Part I · Boom
The black-tie party at Washington's swank Mayflower Hotel seemed a fitting celebration of the biggest American housing boom since the 1950s: filet mignon and lobster, a champagne room and hundreds of mortgage brokers, real estate agents and their customers gyrating to a Latin band.
On that winter night in 2005, the company hosting the gala honored itself with an ice sculpture of its logo. Pinnacle Financial had grown from a single office to a national behemoth generating $6.5 billion in mortgages that year. The $100,000-plus party celebrated the booming division that made loans largely to Hispanic immigrants with little savings. The company even booked rooms for those who imbibed too much.
Kevin Connelly, a loan officer who attended the affair, now marvels at those gilded times. At his Pinnacle office in Virginia, colleagues were filling the parking lot with BMWs and at least one Lotus sports car. In its hiring frenzy, the mortgage company turned a busboy into a loan officer whose income zoomed to six figures in a matter of months.
"It was the peak. It was the embodiment of business success," Connelly said. "We underestimated the bubble, even though deep down, we knew it couldn't last forever."
Indeed, Pinnacle's party would soon end, along with the nation's housing euphoria. The company has all but disappeared, along with dozens of other mortgage firms, tens of thousands of jobs on Wall Street and the dreams of about 1 million proud new homeowners who lost their houses.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Ping!
Two questions: One, were these illegal immigrants? And two, are we really to assume these lending companies just lost their minds and lent to anyone with a heartbeat?
I meant did the loan companies lend to just anyone without being under pressure to do so?
It wasn’t only ‘losing their minds.’ Some of the no-doc loans were given to people who had enough of a down payment to make the deal worthwhile. I don’t know why so many people talk about no-docs as if they were only given to illegal immigrants.
There is a phrase that has become popular in the last 15 years or so. A phrase that describes something that was conspicuously and some might even say criminally absent from these board rooms when the buying and selling mania was going on.
Due Diligence.
Let them take their lumps. They sure didn’t seem too put out when they were yucking it up over their $300,000 dollar bonuses, did they? And when tens of thousands of folks ended up losing their homes, why should it be that the banks are able to make it out like they’re the ones who are the victims?
Don't fall for this BS.The rate of foreclosures on residences owned by folks with good credit is very low. The foreclosures are on investment properties (Flip This House), illegal aliens and people with bad credit who wouldn't have qualified for a mortgage 10 yrs ago.
That is certainly what this article intimates! They made a loan to a jailbird the day he got out and a $500,000 loan to a McDonald’s worker who made $35,000 a year......
Yes, I’d say anything with a heartbeat.
Compelling reading, though difficult. Difficult because I know how it ends. Or rather, how the bubble ends so abruptly and how housing sales and prices plunge so quickly. I don’t know how the whole episode ends, whether peacefully or weimar or depression. Nobody knows that answer right now.
Good article so far. I’m looking forward to the rest of it. It doesn’t state much I didn’t already know but we’ll see how the next installments go...
Thanks for posting.
You can probably blame legal immigrants more than illegal immigrants here. Both participated but never believe the legal ones are angels. In my opinion they less fearful of breaking the law than I am because they can always scoot back home. While the only country I have is the USA
Plenty of legal immigrants are poor and uneducated. Don’t speak much English. They are greedy too so they resort to scams and criminality in this housing bubble
“They made a loan to a jailbird the day he got out and a $500,000 loan to a McDonald’s worker who made $35,000 a year...”
While now you and I and every other honest, working American is on the hook for it.....
They didn’t loose their minds. They were always going to sell the paper they issued. They weren’t dumb enough to hold it.
Why do folks not want to finger the real culprits, the Federal Reserve and the regulatory agencies (including the FR) that oversaw this mess. The banking system under the watch of a lose monetary policy created a lot of money that was there for the taking if you were in this line of business. Bush had a policy of home ownership for everybody. Imprudence was in the political air.
No these folks didn't lose their minds. They picked up money lying around for the taking.
BINGO!!!!!
SO WHO BOUGHT the BAD PAPER??? I NEVER could figure that out!
Good reminders. Also, our own federal government put pressure on the companies to give more mortgages to minorities. They wanted the rejection rate to be equal for whites, blacks, and hispanics.
Pension agencies, bond funds, money market funds, hedge funds and foreigners to name a few. In the case of bonds funds and money market funds the hints to whether they had the toxic paper was in the prospectus.
We would think out loud "how in the hell did they get a loan for that house? They are illegal and barely have any furniture?"
Don’t forget Fannie and Freddie
They help secure hefty year-end bonus for those trading mortgage-related securities.
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