Posted on 03/04/2009 11:05:18 AM PST by NormsRevenge
CALABASAS, Calif. — Fairly or not, Countrywide Financial and its top executives would be on most lists of those who share blame for the nation’s economic crisis. After all, the banking behemoth made risky loans to tens of thousands of Americans, helping set off a chain of events that has the economy staggering.
So it may come as a surprise that a dozen former top Countrywide executives now stand to make millions from the home mortgage mess.
Stanford L. Kurland, Countrywide’s former president, and his team have been buying up delinquent home mortgages that the government took over from other failed banks, sometimes for pennies on the dollar. They get a piece of what they can collect.
“It has been very successful — very strong,” John Lawrence, the company’s head of loan servicing, told Mr. Kurland one recent morning in a glass-walled boardroom here at PennyMac’s spacious headquarters, opened last year in the same Los Angeles suburb where Countrywide once flourished.
“In fact, it’s off-the-charts good,” he told Mr. Kurland, who was leaning back comfortably in his leather boardroom chair, even as the financial markets in New York were plunging.
As hundreds of billions of dollars flow from Washington to jump-start the nation’s staggering banks, automakers and other industries, a new economy is emerging of businesses that hope to make money from the various government programs that make up the largest economic rescue in history.
They include big investors who are buying up failed banks taken over by the federal government and lobbyists. And there is PennyMac, led by Mr. Kurland, 56, once the soft-spoken No. 2 to Angelo R. Mozilo, the perpetually tanned former chief executive of Countrywide and its public face.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
chris dodd seems to have profited.
Sheesh! Wonder how many of these jerks are “friends” to the obozo admin?
They need to be hurt so bad that this sort of thing is as risky as gun and ski mask type work.
Banks panic-sold good loans. That’s stupid.
I’ve been buying bundled loans located in recourse states where the bubble did not hit (e.g., rural Texas).
May be hard to re-sell, but the coupon we’ve been raking in is amazing.
I reckon somebody with nothing left to lose will take care of that soon.
Maybe so.
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