All Forum Posts by: Brandon G.

This seems to have turned into a really informative thread.  I don't have time to read through everything right now, but real quick just to Kevin.  I think asserting my articles as confirmation bias assumes these or these types of articles are the only ones I've read and that I had an agenda when I learned about this information.  Instead, I've read many different opinions on this and what I have posted are some of the references I agree with, particularly from Sowell.  If I implied that I thought race was the only thing that caused the bubble then I did not intend to.  I merely meant that I believe it was a part, through a big part, that sparked the fire and a part that I feel was wrongly left out when the telling of this story was done.

Hey Jay, that's essentially what I was referring to.  The second link I listed specifically mentioned the Community Reinvestment ACT (CRA).  I never really mentioned who the loans were actually loaned to.  I don't think race or anything else mattered to the people actually making the loans other than the fact that once those junk loans were allowed to be made many of them were required to make a quota, as mentioned above, to certain "minority groups."  
I don't think it really matters what part of the united states you look at, in as much that Chris seemed to think that race and location in the united states were linked to who was target for bad loans.  I think everyone was targeted, but nationally speaking, it was the government that used it's power to push loans on people and specifically minorities.  So, again, the people making money from giving the loans could care less what color or section of society the loan was going to as long as they money, except for the quotas they had to fill in order for the government to allow their bank to continue to play ball.

Brian, I'm going to have to respectfully disagree that the movie couldn't have included the portion of what happened concerning government forcing racial quotas on banks.  I agree it was an us versus them, but I think this would have been a good way to extend the "it's the government and the banks versus us" angle.  I may be wrong about this, but I feel that I can see it as entirely possible, and in my opinion, I think it would have been a very important part of the movie because if they could have linked how damaging those racial quotas were then perhaps we could have shed some light on other areas where these quotas are also damaging.  

Thanks for the replies

The evidence is in the book I linked to in the first post.  

Here's an article with some information, though I have not fully vetted the author of this article so read at your own risk here.

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=809

I think you've missed the point entirely.  Of course bad loans were given to everyone, regardless of race, social status or credit rating.  Of course poorer people were preyed upon.  That's because it wasn't actually about race, social status, or credit rating.  Of course the poor and financially uneducated were taken advantage of.  
You see, wall street had run out of good, solid mortgages to package and they needed more mortgages to bundle and sell and so they need to get banks to start issuing supprime, risky loans that will still be rated highly.  How did they get this ball rolling (rhetorical)?  How did they sell millions of really, really stupid loans right in front of everyone's faces?  Because it was handled, on the macro level, by saying that certain sections of people were being rejected for loans on the basis of race, creed and economic status.  The "trailer trash" and "people of color" were being discriminated against, so they MUST be given loans too in order to make the world equitable.   That was the pill that was sold.  Once it was swallowed and bad loans were being sold to everyone with a pulse, of course it didn't matter the race or social status of who wanted a loan, because it wasn't REALLY about that.  I'm not sure how else to explain this.  We are talking about two ends of the same horse.  I'm talking about the hay that went in one end and you're talking about the fertilizer that came out the other.

If by ideological belief, you mean truth, then yes, I do subscribe to that.  There were seemingly endless articles and stories run on how many loans were "turned down" to some and "approved" by others and the reasoning given was racial statistics, which were skewed.  So you may be talking about what went down after all the cogs were moving, but what prompted the motion of those cogs is what I'm referring to, but thank you for the insulting, disrespectful and dismissive attitude, it lends a lot to your character and credibility.

I just finished watching The Big Short, a movie about the real estate bubble.  I enjoyed the information in the movie but I was very let down by the fact that they never acknowledged the fact that subprime mortgages were pushed on the American people under the tired guise of racial and minority discrimination.  It was this trump card (no pun intended considering today's political climate) of discrimination that allowed the no-contest argument against solid reasoning, labeling anyone against such subprime mortgages a racist or prejudice.  
I feel this would have been an immensely important lesson to learn so that it could be applied to so many facets of society and politics today.

For references, I refer anyone interested to this book, which itself cites sources for its source material for statistics.
 http://www.amazon.com/Housing-Boom-Bust-Revised/dp/0465019862/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1457247632&sr=1-1&keywords=the+housing+boom+and+bust

(edited because I linked to the wrong book)

I don't have a link.  Almost the entirety of what they discussed was very backwards.  Their views of government regulations and half-statistics to back up social programs along with the poorly guised attempts to appear unbiased when they clearly had an agenda.  The reason I posted the book is that it does a much better job of systematically revealing each issue better than I could myself.

I was listening to NPR because they had a segment about rent costs and real estate.  Almost every single thing they said was the opposite of how the real world works.  It was equally infuriating and scary to think that people will be making policies based on the backwards logic that, although appeals to people's conscience, makes things worse by strictly regulating yet another industry.  

In a related note, I just finished The Housing Boom and Bust by Thomas Sowell.  I would highly recommend it.

The Housing Boom and Bust

I'll try to sum this up with an effort to be succinct.  Local bank gave us a 30 yr fixed rate through Freddie Mac on our first duplex.  The duplex and loan will be in her name only.  We're going to be using a small part of some funds I have with an investment firm to cover part of the costs of the deal, plus the money we have saved in our joint account.  The problem is that I only added my wife's name of the investment fund on January 13th.  We've been married for 4 years.  They are considering any money from this fund a gift to my wife since her name hasn't been on the account for 60 days.  The loan officer at the bank has looked into every avenue he can think of but we are stuck for 60 days until we can get two full monthly statements with my wife's name on it.  We would have to come up with accounts prior to January 13th that had my wife's name on it before that time to pay for the property.  Does anyone have any ideas on how to expedite this process or convince Freddie Mac that this isn't a gift, by their definition?

Thanks

I'll check into those.  Thank you for the response.