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Ordinary Americans were thrown out of their homes so that those same homes can be sold to various speculators and Wall Street crooks.
To be fair, both ordinary and extraordinary Americans lost their houses because they failed to pay their mortgages. Most of those who failed couldn't pay their mortgages, while some could but just didn't.
Yes, I know -- some of those people were victims of unscrupulous mortgage brokers and mortgage originators who falsified loan documents on behalf of the borrowers and without the borrower's knowledge or consent resulting in terms those borrowers had not agreed to.
And yes, still other borrowers falsified their loan documents all by themselves. Still others were people who lost their jobs and couldn't pay their mortgages.
And still other borrowers did "strategic walk aways." I bought one such bank-owned house where the prior owner was fully capable of paying his loan, but chose not to do so because he made a decision to just walk away. Moreover, he rented the house out -- a different family in each of the 4 bedrooms. He told them in essence "I don't care what you do to the house. Just pay me my rent. At some point Bank of America will foreclose. I'll give you as much notice as I can -- but until then just pay me my rent."
But at the end of the day, it was all because they failed to pay their mortgages.
Quote:
Originally Posted by C2BP
Why not keep those Americans in their homes and lower the principal?
Don't forget some opted for strategic defaults and I am speaking of Doctors and Lawyers... said it was a simple business decision and jumped on it... even with million dollar homes... buy a better one in their neighborhood and let theirs go after closing on the new one... very popular in the higher end.
Others used stated income loans... and when it didn't pan out lost it all... like the courtesy clerk at the market... bought 4 homes and lost them all.
Others had decent purchase money loans but succumbed to cash out refi for that vacation or new CARS...
Yet I still know some that just stayed the course and waited it out and are now sitting pretty... paid down 10 years and own a home that has more than bounced back...
Aside from helping to rescue the US auto industry, TARP was not such a big deal as Paulsen had at first thought it would be. As for Barofsky's book, here's a convenient summary of the plot-line per a 2012 review by Jackie Calmes of the NY Times...
Mr. Barofsky, a former Manhattan prosecutor, is the idealistic alien sent in an emergency to Planet Washington, where he does battle with the self-important, self-serving powers entrenched there or simply taking a spin through its revolving door to Wall Street. He is SIGTARP (in Washington-speak, the Special Inspector General for TARP). But ultimately he is outmatched, and evil triumphs over good.
TARP was a Wall Street bailout. ARRA was the economic stimulus passed and enacted in the following spring. There were a couple of follow-on bills that reauthorized parts of ARRA in subsequent years.
Isn't there a more quantitative way to settle this?
Over the past many decades, a lot of blood has been spilled on asset pricing models looking for such a quantitative method, including looking at the frequency domain in addition to the time domain and cross-sections of asset prices.
The typical stock market trade is remotely arranged between someone who believes that the price of the stock is apt to go up and someone who believes that it is apt to go down, with one share of a stock being identical to many others.
That's rather atypical in the modern era. Most stock trades in the modern era are made because of asset allocation or balancing/reallocation, and have very little to do with someone's believe that a stock is apt to go up or down, as today's stock price incorporates all publicly available information already.
Aside from helping to rescue the US auto industry, TARP was not such a big deal as Paulsen [sic] had at first thought it would be. As for Barofsky's book, here's a convenient summary of the plot-line per a 2012 review by Jackie Calmes of the NY Times...
Mr. Barofsky, a former Manhattan prosecutor, is the idealistic alien sent in an emergency to Planet Washington, where he does battle with the self-important, self-serving powers entrenched there or simply taking a spin through its revolving door to Wall Street. He is SIGTARP (in Washington-speak, the Special Inspector General for TARP). But ultimately he is outmatched, and evil triumphs over good.
First person accounts always reflect the point of view of their respective authors. In this case Barofsky is of course a progressive Democrat, in contrast to Paulson who was not.
TARP pivoted of course. It morphed into something Congress didn't expect, as Paulson and then Geithner realized that the biggest bang-for-the-buck would be shoring up balance sheets.
When Steve Jobs pitched Apple’s new California campus, he wanted to turn parking lots into green landscapes. But the city of Cupertino demanded 11,000 parking spots, which put a wrench in that part of Jobs’ vision.
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