Letters to the Editor
cdunlea
Published Letters: 153 Editor's Choice: 35
-
Racism & AHM
[Read the article: Subprime: "The financial N-word"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Having originated mortgages for American Home Mortgage, I can assure you that their failure yesterday has NOTHING to do with the subprime industry crunch. To put it simply, they did not sell subprime loans; all their loans required FICO scores of at least 620, otherwise the loans had to be fixed rate loans sold to the government agencies and insured against default.
Also, I suspect a cursory review of their HMDA data--that's the part of the application where we MUST identify sex and color of the applicant to create a record of the lender's demographics--would show that, as the seventh-largest lender in the US, their lending practices were consistent with the current demographic makeup of the US.
Finally, everyone laid off yesterday, and every borrower who suddenly found there was no money to fund their loan to complete their purchase, was equally impacted, black, white, brown, yellow and green.
Perhaps some of you would be interested to know that in the brokerage I work in, about 70% of the loan officers are African American or Hispanic. Their clientele tends to be the same, and they routinely sell subprime. Imagine that! Black people getting fleeced by other black people. Ah, but the Larry Wilmores of the world don't want to hear that little secret told anymore than they want you to remember it was the West African tribes that taught Europeans how to catch slaves. It's all fine to yell "racism" every chance they get but murky when real people--and facts--get involved.
-
Bush is, and always has been, a moron
[Read the article: The Bush-league economy]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]He's quite possibly the out out of touch president since Herbert Hoover denied there was a depression.
"Padishah Emperor"--nice touch. Of course, that's closer than you think--Bush, too, is in the control of megacorporations (the Spacing Guild?) and all his prepared remarks reflect just what they want us to hear.
-
Total BS.
[Read the article: Women and the credit crunch]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]As a "home loan salesman" (known in the industry as an originator), I call BS on this whole racism and sexism thing. From my 12 years in this business, I've engaged in every type of lending--bank loans to government loans to subprime. My demographics are a rainbow, having worked across the spectrum of age, sex, race, color, and nationality, and I can make only one blanket statement: you cannot make assumptions about anyone.
I have met white men you will gladly pay you what you want, and black women who want to know why they must pay for a $12 flood map cert. I have worked with Asians who haggled you to death, but once they agree upon a price refer you to a dozen of their friends and relatives. I have met Hispanic women who pay the rate without asking anything and those who don't pay yet ask everything. It all depends on the individual, and no two people are the same.
Anita Hill can talk about the statistics, but she can't answer the big question: WHY do minorities, especially immigrants, seem to accept subprime loans? After all, many of these people come from cultures where everything is negotiable, from the price of a mango to the length of a jail term. Yet she somehow thinks these people meekly sit back and are browbeaten by the loan man, who increasingly is also a minority like them? She wouldn't like the answers you get more often than not. Many of these people have cash incomes they don't report. Some don't have jobs they can verify. Many of them have bad credit, collections and unpaid utility bills. Many talk their friends or relatives into cosigning their house when they have bad credit. And, here in the Boston area, they almost invariably buy 2- and 3- family houses with no money down, which are ALWAYS high risk to lenders--as you can see by the current wave of foreclosures. In other words, many of these people take these loans because they know they can't go to Bank of America. The sad thing is, most of these people have no desire to change how they do things to allow me to write them a safe government loan--it's much easier to not pay taxes and mismanage their credit.
-
Ignorance
[Read the article: Angelo Mozilo wants a New Deal]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"$375,000. Which would put it nicely underneath the FHA loan cap. Want affordable housing? Just wait."
Uh, the maximum FHA loan cap in most counties in California is $362,790 according to hud.gov. Please marshal your facts better.
And here's a lesson in How the World Really Works: if everyone bought houses in the $500k range, and owe $400k+, nobody can or will sell in the $300k's. What, people will happily sell and bring money to close?? Not with an equity gap that big.
-
ARod
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]King, I've gotta give props to sgaana, s/he hit it right on the head about ARod. The guy could be the second coming of Ted Williams and Red Sox Nation would still hate him, for reasons that have nothing to do with his stats (although given his habit of hitting the long ball only when it doesn't matter--i.e, up by 12 runs or down by 12 runs--I'm sure that factors in as well).
The fact is, he is not perceived as a gentleman, or even a decent guy, in any sense of the word. We in RSN remember all too well how he slapped the ball out of Bronson Arroyo's hand in 2004, and how he jammed his elbow into Pedroia's ribs and cried "I've got it" at a Toronto game just this year--all was regarded as poor sportsmanship. He picks on the rookies for this stuff because he knows veterans like Varitek won't take it lying down. Speaking of which, putting them together in the same locker room is tantamount to putting Ali and Frazier back in the ring.
All of this points to the fact that the guy is anything but a class act. He's a controversy magnet and has damaged the Yankees'image far more than he's helped it. Why do we need a $25M crybaby shitbag when we can get a lovable performer like Lowell for much less?