Predatory Loan redlining

new cat 6/16 (dis)aggregate

see gentrif urban renewal

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see sub-prime

see steve mnuchin trump admin corrupt

see countrywide

payday

see debt collector repo

see extraction

student loan?

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{{---

msnbc maddow ripped him a new one, details long hist

pretend flowers pizza delivery

268% interest on harlem restaurant?fined for screwing military

poor ppl need cars b/c gop kills mass transit

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'Subprime loan king' who posted Trump’s $175M bond has long history of 'shady business practices' - Alternet.org

it remains to be seen how successful Donald Trump will ultimately be in appealing Justice Arthur Engoron's sanctions in New York State Attorney General Letitia James' civil fraud case. But for now, he has a financial lifeline while making the appeal: the $175 million bond posted by billionaire Don Hankey, who chairs Knight Specialty Insurance Company.

Since the 80-year-old Hankey posted the bond, his history in the business world has drawn a great deal of scrutiny. The New Republic's Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling, in a biting article published on April 3, stresses that Hankey — who has been called "the king of subprime loans" — has a history of "shady business practices."

The Daily Beast has reported that one of Hankey's companies, Westlake Services, was sued by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) when Trump was president for illegally repossessing 70 cars. And Houghtaling points out that the Westlake debacle wasn't the first time he was "penalized by the feds."

"That's all a part of the game to Hankey, who carved out his $7.4 billion fortune through those kinds of predatory practices, targeting low-income customers with high-interest auto loans," Houghtaling explains. "Hankey's Knight Specialty Insurance Company is the group that underwrote Trump's bond for his civil fraud trial, but it’s not Hankey's only investment in Trump's financial situation.

Hankey is also believed to be the largest shareholder in Axos Financial, according to MSNBC’s Lisa Rubin — a financial institution that, in 2022, refinanced more than $50 million of Trump's loans on Trump Tower and Trump National Doral Miami, according to documents filed with the Office of Government Ethics."

Houghtaling points out that Hankey discussed Trump with Forbes during an early April interview.

The billionaire told Forbes, "I'd never met Donald Trump. I'd never talked to him on the phone. I heard that he needed a loan or a bond, and this is what we do. So, we reached out, and he responded."

READ MORE:[Here's what federal law says about Trump 'threatening a sitting president': ex-federal prosecutor

*Read The New Republic's full article at this link.

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https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-june-21-2022/ start 1:09-

prop 14 jarvis apt gp rhet jiujitsu const pvt prop rights

fused libtard w/ (xian?) social conserv

colorblind

--> new rt [ --> trump?]

berkeley mcduff subdiv mkting ploy, save the redwood league, save tress curve street, so gotta be posh

LBJ gt soc housing bill passed after MLK KIA

RR looking for issue, fed bill (ct?) beat real est org, so he championed?

https://www.heydaybooks.com/catalog/freedom-to-discriminate/

By Gene Slater

Freedom to Discriminate uncovers realtors’ definitive role in segregating America and shaping modern conservative ideology. Drawing on confidential documents from leaders of the real estate industry, Gene Slater reveals how realtors systematically created and justified residential segregation.

To defend all-white neighborhoods against the civil rights movement, realtors put the right to discriminate at the center of individual liberty, effectively redefining and weaponizing “freedom” and providing a roadmap for conservatives nationally. This far-reaching strategy reached its peak when realtors successfully campaigned for a California constitutional amendment that would permanently prohibit fair housing. In the process they created the script of color-blind freedom that polarizes America on issue after issue today.

Slater reveals how California and its powerful realtors would shape segregation for years to come. He shows why one of the first all-white neighborhoods was created in Berkeley, why the state was the perfect place for Ronald Reagan’s political ascension, and how Reagan’s early career—drawing on the realtors’ arguments—would lay the groundwork for current conservative narratives.

A landmark history told with supreme narrative skill, Freedom to Discriminate traces the increasingly aggressive ways realtors justified their practices, and how America’s divides and current debates are rooted in the history of segregated neighborhoods. Slater makes a case that shatters preconceptions about American segregation, connecting seemingly disparate features of the nation’s history in a new and galvanizing way.

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an 11 23

In the years since the Great Recession, when housing prices dramatically fell, Wall Street investors have been buying large numbers of single-family homes to use as rentals. As of 2022, big investment firms owned nearly 600,000 such properties nationwide.

Critics say this practice drives up home prices and worsens the housing shortage, making it harder for families to afford to buy. Industry advocates dismiss such charges, arguing that large investment firms own a tiny fraction of single-family rental housing across the U.S. – less than 4% of the total.

As a professor of public policy at Georgia Tech, I wanted to understand how this trend was affecting my neighbors. So I analyzed more than 1 million property sales in the Atlanta metropolitan area from 2007 to 2016. Since the study period included the mortgage crisis, I excluded bulk sales, such as the packages of foreclosed homes, that aren’t available to typical homebuyers. I examined only arm’s-length transactions of single-family detached homes, where buyers and sellers act independently.

I found that global investment firms buying up local properties are indeed hurting Atlanta families – specifically, Black ones.

Neighborhood transformations

In the period I studied, homeownership declined across the Atlanta metro area by more than 5 percentage points, similar to a nationwide trend. For an average neighborhood, home purchasing by large corporate investors explained one-quarter of that decline.

But when I broke the analysis down by race, I found that Black families were hit much harder: Large investment firms buying up local properties explained fully three-quarters of the decline in African American homeownership. In contrast, non-Hispanic whites were largely unaffected.

It turns out that while Wall Street firms control just a sliver of the single-family rental market nationally, they can have much more influence at the local level. In the Atlanta metro area, these firms own nearly one-third of all single-family rental properties. They’re even more concentrated in predominantly Black neighborhoods, where more than 10 houses in a row can be owned by the same corporation.

In my study, I found that large investors tend to snap up housing in majority-nonwhite, lower-income suburban neighborhoods. This makes homebuying even more challenging for middle-class families of color, as they get pushed out of the bidding market by global investors.

Home is where the financial security is

Homeownership has long been one of the main pathways for the American middle class to accumulate wealth. Despite this, the national homeownership rate declined by 5.5 percentage points between 2007 and 2016, reaching a five-decade low of 62.9%. Although homeownership has rebounded somewhat since 2016, it remains below pre-2008 levels.

And who owns these homes is starkly divided by race. Between 2015 and 2019, more than 70% of white families owned a home, compared with just 41% of Black families, according to an analysis by Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

To be sure, policies like racial covenants, discriminatory mortgage lending practices and redlining fueled low homeownership rates for Black Americans long before the Great Recession. But global investors’ growing control of single-family homes only widens existing racial gaps in homeownership and wealth.

Directions for new research

While my study focused on Atlanta, it’s not the only place where residents are competing with global investors for housing. Investment firms’ single-family rental portfolios are largely concentrated in Sun Belt metro areas, including Phoenix, Charlotte and Jacksonville. It wouldn’t be surprising to see similar conflicts playing out in those cities.

Since my analysis stopped in 2016, I can’t be sure that Black Atlanta residents are still affected by Wall Street firms buying up housing. Many investment firms have recently been switching from a buy-to-rent business model to a build-to-rent model, which could complicate matters.

In the meantime, while residents and policymakers have claimed that large corporations don’t invest in local communities, researchers lack robust evidence this is the case. Academics should study whether properties owned by institutional landlords are more likely to be poorly maintained or have code violations, as anecdotal evidence suggests.

It’s also worth investigating whether big investment firms undermine local revenue collection by serially filing property tax appeals.

An open-source tool for housing policy research

It’s been hard for researchers to identify corporate-owned, single-family homes, since it requires proprietary real-estate data and labor-intensive number crunching. In a separate project, my colleagues and I have developed a simple, user-friendly methodology that gets around such challenges with the use of open-source software and public tax parcel data.

Local governments and nonprofits can use our methodology to unveil all the corporate-owned residential properties in any neighborhood and link them to outcomes such as code violations. Using data-driven approaches like this is an important step toward developing policy solutions.

Brian Y. An, Director of Master of Science in Public Policy Program & Assistant Professor of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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https://books.google.com/books?id=jLQTEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA132

The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America

By Lawrence T. Brown

:{:{}:

wells jpmc, bofa, M&T, pnc,bb&tpred loan AA baltimore etc leading to bubble/recession

WF got civic and church to shill in guise of wealth building seminars in churches, "alt lending", black tax 15K$ some quid pro quo [see suntrust merger ltrs?]

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wamu

2020 predatory

...Later in 2006, they refinanced the house with their lender, HSBC.

The couple didn't realize they couldn't afford the ballooning mortgage payments until 2010.

That's when Harris had to wait a few weeks for a multimillion-dollar business contract to be signed for a non-profit that she runs.

For the first two years of their loan, their monthly payment was about $2,600. Then the interest rate almost doubled, and, by 2008 they had a balloon payment of more than $8,500 a month.

"We found out then that we was in trouble," Harris said.

According to a 2011 audit of the couple's mortgage, they had been the target of a predatory loan — like many Black homeowners in the county during that time. For three months, they tried to get their lender to approve a three-month delay in repaying the loan. Once Harris' business contract went through, they tried to back pay their mortgage. But the lender never responded.

It wasn't until 2014 that the couple received a notice with intent to foreclose. "The court proceeded with the foreclosure," she said. "The judge rubber-stamped the whole process."

When asked about the case, a representative from Prince George's County Circuit Court responded with a written statement that it followed all local, state and federal mandates.

As the couple was trying to hold a mediation with the bank, Harris was diagnosed with breast cancer and had to get a double mastectomy. Her husband was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. They say they never got a mediation with the bank, but the couple continued to fight the foreclosure in court.

In 2017, they hired Attorney Phillip Robinson to help them with their case pro-bono. A year later, they lost their case in circuit court and got an appeal. By early 2019, they were getting eviction notices. Harris says she already saw many of her friends and neighbors get evicted and didn't want to go through the same process.

"They would junk it. They would throw it. They would just destroy your stuff," Harris said. "And that scared us. That scared us to death. I then started looking for some place to go."

The couple moved to a rental house in Charles County just south of Prince George's. They lost their appeal in August of 2019 even with evidence showing that the bank didn't have the Harris's note or right to foreclose on them, according to Robinson.

Harris has a word of warning to other homeowners who are still fighting their cases.

"The best thing that you can do to preserve you and your family is to go find a nice rental property and start over because you're not going to win," Harris said.

'I Used My Own House As A Guinea Pig'

One person that's been able to help people like Harris is Liz Johnson with the county's NAACP's Strategic Housing Solutions. Johnson has had her own issues with predatory lending which led her to be an advocate for others....

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/debt-collectors-have-made-a-fortune-this-year-now-theyre-coming-for-more/

Earlier this year, the pandemic swept across the country, killing 100,000 Americans by the spring, shuttering businesses and schools, and forcing people into their homes. It was a great time to be a debt collector.

In August, Encore Capital, the largest debt buyer in the country, announced that it had doubled its previous record for earnings in a quarter. It primarily had the CARES Act to thank: The bill delivered hundreds of billions of dollars worth of stimulus checks and bulked-up unemployment benefits to Americans, while easing pressures on them by halting foreclosures, evictions and student loan payments. There was no ban on collections of old credit card bills, Encore's specialty.

At the same time, the pandemic compelled households to cut spending. Finding themselves with enough money to settle old debts, people responded to collectors' calls and letters. Debt-buying executives couldn't help marveling at their good fortune. All this created “a perfect storm from a cash perspective," the CEO of Portfolio Recovery Associates, Encore's main competitor, told Wall Street analysts.

After its record second quarter, analysts expect Encore to blow past $200 million in profit this year and reward stockholders with 40% earnings growth compared with last year. Portfolio Recovery is set for similar growth. The share prices of both have soared off their early April lows.

Investors didn't even show much concern when, in early September, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sued Encore, saying that it had broken the terms of a consent agreement struck in 2015.:(style="background-color:#ffcc66ff"):}:**:{The agency had previously charged the company with “pressuring consumers with false statements and churning out lawsuits using robo-signed court documents," as it said at the time. (In a statement, Encore said the CFPB's recent suit was unnecessary because it had fixed the alleged problems “years ago.")

In recent months, the only real bad news for debt buyers was that local courts across the country temporarily shut down. Debt collection lawsuits provide a key source of revenue for the companies, a way to extract payment from consumers, typically low-income, who don't offer it up.

But now even that hiccup is over. After a bit of a lull in the spring, Encore and other debt buyers are back at it, filing suits by the thousands every week, according to ProPublica's analysis of state court filings.

In August alone, Encore filed about 1,000 suits in Indiana and over 2,000 suits in the metro Atlanta area. Other debt buyers jumped back in as well. In Chicago, Portfolio Recovery filed over 3,000 suits in July, while LVNV, a major debt buyer privately owned by Sherman Financial Group, filed over 2,700 suits in Maryland in August. For all these companies, ProPublica found, thevolume was well above the number they'd filed before the coronavirus arrived, in January or February of this year. No national numbers on suits exist.

In statements, the companies said they have been actively working with consumers during the COVID-19 pandemic and only sue as a last resort on a small portion of accounts.

Elizabeth A. Kersey, a spokesperson for Portfolio Recovery, said the company's hardship program “allows for the suspension of collection efforts for ninety (90) days upon notification of a hardship event." The company is currently not seeking new orders to seize debtors' wages or bank account funds, she said.

Ryan Bell, an Encore executive, said, “We have consistently and proactively communicated to consumers the various relief options we've put in place in response to COVID-19, including temporarily stopping collections." The company said it had stopped seeking orders to garnish bank accounts. It is, however, seizing wages.

Sherman Financial did not respond to requests for comment.

If Congress is unable to pass any further stimulus , unemployment is likely to remain high. In that scenario, debt buying companies and the banks that sell defaulted accounts to them expect more Americans to fall behind on their credit card bills over the coming months.

Even that scenario turns out to be rosy for the debt buyers. While good times can mean that Encore collects on more debt than it expected, bad times typically bring a glut of people suffering under loans they cannot repay. The result is that Encore can scoop up the raw materials for its profit machine — defaulted accounts — more cheaply. Or as Encore CEO Ashish Masih put it to Wall Street: The company is “particularly excited about the prospects for increased supply in the future."

“The same giant debt buyers known for fighting consumer protection laws at every turn have been raking in cash during this pandemic," Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass, told ProPublica. “They are now licking their chops in anticipation of profiting even more off families who have their hours further cut or can't find a job, and can't keep up with their bills or their mortgage. This is disgraceful and reinforces the need for Congress to protect consumers and small businesses from this predatory behavior."

In recent years, Encore has bought around 2 million to 3 million U.S. accounts per year, according to public filings. Last year, on average, the company paid 8.6 cents on the dollar for each account. For a typical debt of $3,142, Encore paid $271.

To earn a profit on that investment, Encore and other debt buyers pursue debtors in near perpetuity. Encore is still collecting tens of millions of dollars each year from debts it bought in 2009 or earlier. The key to that persistence is the courts.

Since the early 2000s, debt buyers have flooded local courts nationwide with suits. The companies regularly account for more than a quarter of all debt collection cases in a given jurisdiction, according to ProPublica's review of collection filings over several states.

That disproportionate presence has been particularly apparent in recent months, as the banks themselves have mostly opted to suspend filing new suits. In normal times, Capital One files far more lawsuits than other banks, in numbers similar to those filed by Encore and Portfolio Recovery. But since March, although Capital One continued to seize pay via garnishments secured before COVID-19 struck, it has largely stopped filing new suits.

ProPublica did find one exception among the major banks that commonly file a significant number of suits: Citigroup, which resumed filing suits at its normal levels in July. The bank, for instance, filed over 200 suits in Oklahoma in August, more than it had filed there in January and February combined.

In a statement, Citi spokesperson Jennifer Bombardier said the bank has a special assistance program for customers impacted by COVID-19 and that it is not seeking to garnish the bank accounts of customers it has sued. The bank also did not sell charged-off accounts to debt buyers “for up to 120 days" in the states “most impacted by COVID-19," she said.

Encore sued Nicole Campbell of Brooklyn, New York, in July. Her first task was to figure out what to do. The suit was over $3,023.76 in debt she incurred years ago with CareCredit, a card offered by Synchrony Bank to people who need to cover medical costs, such as dentistry and eyecare. She knew she should answer the complaint by going to the courthouse, but she was wary of going there during the pandemic and wasn't even sure whether it was open.

Even attorneys have difficulty finding their way.“Courts have been returning to full operation, but there's so much confusion as to what's happening," said Susan Shin, legal director of the New Economy Project in New York City. “It's hard to know what to advise people on what to do with their case."

With help from an attorney with the New Economy Project, Campbell responded to the suit by mail. She's not sure what to expect next but said she doesn't have much time to worry about it. She cares for three boys, 5, 11 and 14, on her own and has to figure out how to get them to school on the city's part-time schedule while helping them with online lessons when they're home. She juggles this with her own job as a customer service rep: That also has a rotating, part-time schedule in order to minimize the number of people in the office.

“It's crazy to me they're filing all this during this time when there's so much going on," she said.

Such collection suits are most common among workers with income under $40,000 per year and particularly common inmostly Black neighborhoods. The suits routinely result in judgments, which in turn usually result in attempts at garnishment,according to a ProPublica analysis of Missouri court filings. Past studies have put the number of workers who have their wages garnished each year at around 4 million. In most states, plaintiffs can seize up to a quarter of a worker's take-home pay or clean out their bank account.

In recent years, when state legislatures have moved to protect more funds from garnishment, Encore has been there to oppose the measures. In 2018, a Connecticut bill proposed to automatically protect up to $1,000 in a bank account. An Encore executive, Sonia Gibson, argued against it, writing in a letter, “Since the average amount we collect through bank garnishments is typically around $700, an automatic exemption of $1,000 would leave us unable to use bank garnishments." The bill died.

Last year in California, Encore joined with other debt buyers to combat a similar bill that aimed to protect around $1,700.

“It was a really huge fight," said Ted Mermin, head of the California Low-Income Consumer Coalition and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. “And you've got to think, 'Why?' Who on earth thinks it's a good idea to take someone's last dollar? The only people who would do this are debt collectors who have no ongoing relationship with someone." The bill narrowly passed and became law.

In Washington state, lawmakers last year sought to protect more workers from wage garnishment. Under federal law, earnings above $217.50 in a week are eligible to be seized, a level that has remained the same since 2009 because it's tied to the $7.25 federal minimum wage. The Washington bill, which ultimately passed, aimed to tie the exemption to the state's much higher minimum wage, which this year is $13.50 an hour. In 2020, about $472.50 in weekly take-home pay would be protected. That wasmuch too high for Encore. Gibson argued in a letter that people earning that much shouldn't be “completely exempt from garnishment."

As an alternative to automatic protections, Encore generally argues that consumers should have to file exemptions in court to demonstrate they really can't afford to have their money taken.Consumer advocates say that such exemptions, which often exist in state laws, are rarely invoked by debtors because they either don't know about them or don't understand the process.

On paper, Randall Ward would seem to be well-insulated from garnishment. He lives in the small town of Marianna, Florida, and state law protects the wages of anyone deemed the “head of household," which is defined as someone who earns more than half the household's income and has dependents. Since Ward helps care for his 20-year-old son with Down syndrome and a granddaughter, his pay from his job as a manager at a Waffle House is eligible for protection.

But when Encore, after having won a judgment against Ward the previous year, sought to garnish his wages this past February, Ward didn't understand that he qualified for the “head of household" exemption. So, starting in March, Encore began taking a quarter of Ward's take-home pay. The size of the debt, a Citibank card that had ballooned to $5,220 with interest and court costs, meant that Ward, even with what he's proud to call a “good job," was in for many lean months.

The only way to make ends meet, he said, was to cancel health insurance for himself, his son and his wife, “because I could not pay the bills if I didn't do it."

Then the virus forced his restaurant to close for several weeks and his pay stopped altogether. The family was without income as he waited for his unemployment claim to go through. When, finally, he could go back to work, the garnishments returned. Encore has said in public statements that it looks to work with consumers, especially those who've been impacted by COVID-19. Ward said that was not his experience.

“They're just ruthless about it," he said. “I would hate to see that happen to anybody."

Encore declined to comment on individual accounts.

Collection suits can have a lasting negative effect on consumers. A recent study by economists from Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business and the University of California, San Diego, focused on debtors who, after being sued, agreed to pay in order to avoid garnishment. The settlements left consumers worse off: They were more likely to fall behind on other debts or end up in foreclosure or bankruptcy, the study found. The main reason was that paying up on one debt had drained those consumers' cash buffer and that left them vulnerable to falling behind on others.

Even in good economic times, low-income consumers live on the edge, so the CARES Act aid was particularly helpful to them. According to a Federal Reserve survey, the temporary $600 boost to weekly unemployment insurance benefits actually resulted in higher pay for about 40% of those who received them. On top of that came the $1,200 stimulus checks ($2,400 for married couples) with an additional $500 for each child.

In July, the Fed found households with income under $40,000 a year had significantly more savings than normal: Whereas last year just 39% said they would have covered an unexpected $400 expense with cash, this summer, 48% said they would.

Debt collectors were a clear beneficiary of those extra funds. According to a survey by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while most people used the stimulus payments to buy food and other essentials, about 25% used at least some of the money to pay down debts.

But Felipe Severino, a Tuck School of Business professor and one of the authors of the paper on debt collection settlements, said there may be negative long-term consequences for households who used the extra money to settle older debts. The companies say they do not charge interest on the old, charged-off debts they collect so the debts are not growing.

“I would argue it's not a very good use of their money," he said. With less of a safety net, those households are more likely to find themselves behind on their bills again.

Furthermore, he said, stimulative government aid like the CARES Act is meant to be “spent and magnify across the economy" in the near term by, for instance, leading to increased purchases at local businesses. That doesn't happen when the money goes to debt collectors.

The flood of government aid, along with the sudden contraction in spending due to COVID-19, has led to an unpredictable economy, one where unemployment has shot up without the usual tide of delinquencies, bankruptcies and foreclosures. But now, banks are predicting that tide to finally arrive in the coming months.

In July, Capital One reported a loss for the quarter despite delinquencies actually going down. The reason was the bank set aside $2.9 billion as a provision for future credit losses, a kind of safety net for the future.

Encore did not appear to need such precautions. “Our liquidity puts us in a strong position to capture the substantial purchasing opportunity, which we believe is sure to follow," Masih, the CEO, told analysts.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/elizabeth-warren-sounds-the-alarm-on-a-mounting-housing-crisis-and-the-profiteers-who-will-take-advantage/

During her 2020 presidential primary campaign, Sen. Elizabeth Warren had a lot to say about the United States’ housing crisis — and after suspending her campaign and endorsing former Vice President Joe Biden (now the presumptive Democratic nominee), the Massachusetts senator continued to address the subject. Warren, in an op-ed she wrote for the Washington Post with Carroll Fife (director of the Oakland office of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment), stresses that the coronavirus pandemic has made a brutal housing crisis even worse. And private equity firms, according to Warren and Fife, are hoping to cash in on the misery by gobbling up “distressed real estate.”

“The nation is facing an acceleratinghousing crisis,” Warren and Fife warn. “Too many people had no stable housing before the pandemic hit, and COVID-19 has made the problem even worse. Renters who were already facing an affordable housing shortage — with many spending more than half of their income on rent — now have no federal rental assistance or federal protection from eviction. Homeowners have less than a month left of foreclosure protection. And more than 30 million people receiving unemployment insurance just saw their benefits cut by $600 a week, raising the threat of a wave of defaults that could trigger a double-dip recession.”

But while “families” see as a “looming catastrophe,” they add, “private equity firms just see dollar signs.” And Warren and Fife cite a Wall Street Journal report that investors are hoping to buy “distressed real-estate assets at bargain prices.”

According to Warren and Fife, such “profiteering” is “straight out of private equity’s playbook during the 2008 financial crisis."

"Following the 2008 crash,” they explain, “corporations that grabbed up properties on the cheap, converted those homes into rentals and turned into the worst kind of slumlords — jacking up rents, neglecting maintenance requests and health and safety concerns, and eagerly assessing fines, fees and eviction notices. Other corporate-owned homes were left vacant in a hoarding of housing stock. We cannot stand by while this history repeats itself.”

Warren and Fife’s recommendations range from “strong federal legislation to guard against the coming wave of evictions and foreclosures, including emergency rental assistance” to preventing “predatory companies from further destabilizing neighborhoods and profiting off the displacement of families.”

“If we fail to prevent another private equity real estate grab,” Warren and Fife warn, “we risk allowing another massive upheaval in the housing market that could wreak more havoc on low-income Americans — especially black and brown families still recovering from losing their homes a decade ago. Against a decades-long backdrop of racist federal policies that have impeded black homeownership, lawmakers’ refusal to proactively address this problem would be an indefensible oversight that would again give Wall Street carte blanche to use a national crisis to enact a massive, generational transfer of wealth from vulnerable Americans to corporations."

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1119

invert yield curve; homewreckers book 8 mil foreclosures; big % llc shell corps; // CDO; R wolff says banks can't deal with hit 1/2 of Gt Recession , get loans to cover loans; mnuchin etc wilbur recalled gov't baillout after S&L; mnu sez put 1.x billion but pain nothing for indybank and then got subsidies to foreclose?! // get car for free, put some bucks in then pocket total profit 11/8/19

new

steve mnu piad 0 for indy bank, and gov't guar lose no money, sold to buddy in same blg (bunch of pluto-crats ) soros, paulsen, wilbur

extensive interview: https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-october-23-2019/

https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-october-21-2019/

aaron glantz homewreckers

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Letter to the Honorable Richard Cordray, Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau - Waters, Conyers, Johnson Lead Over 60 House Democrats in Letter Supporting CFPB Arbitration Proposal

Letter

By: Zoe Lofgren Pete Visclosky Eleanor Norton Alan Lowenthal Jerry Nadler Nydia Velázquez Mike CapuanoKaren Bass Bob Brady Bobby Scott Tim Ryan Gwen Moore Don Beyer, Jr. John Garamendi Danny Davis Ted Deutch Steve Cohen Keith Ellison Bill Foster Paul Tonko Bonnie Watson Coleman Emanuel Cleaver II Sheila Jackson Lee José Serrano Carolyn Maloney Elijah Cummings Luis Gutiérrez Mark Takano Hakeem JeffriesBarbara Lee Stephen Lynch André Carson Jared Huffman Debbie Wasserman Schultz Suzanne Bonamici Ed Perlmutter Jim McGovern Eric Swalwell Dan Kildee Earl Blumenauer Tulsi Gabbard Al Green Denny HeckDiana DeGette John Conyers, Jr. Lois Frankel Maxine Waters Peter Welch Mike Honda Hank Johnson, Jr.Lacy Clay, Jr. Rubén Hinojosa, Sr. Terri Sewell Gregory Meeks Patrick Murphy Raul Grijalva Suzan DelBeneDon Payne, Jr. Cedric Richmond David Cicilline Brad Sherman Matt Cartwright Judy Chu Jan SchakowskyGerry Connolly

Date: Aug. 3, 2016

Location: Washington, DC

Keyword Search : Corporation

We write in strong support of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's proposed rule to prohibit the use of class-action waivers in forced arbitration agreements for financial services and products, and to increase transparency in the arbitration process. Consistent with the Bureau's exhaustive study on forced arbitration, which found that forced arbitration restricts consumers' access to relief in disputes with financial service providers by limiting class actions, the proposed rule is a critical step to protect the public interest by ensuring that consumers receive redress for systemic unlawful conduct.

There is overwhelming evidence that class-action waivers in financial products and services agreements undermine the public interest. Originally used primarily in commercial settings, forced arbitration clauses have proliferated in everyday consumer contracts, and are now prevalent in financial services agreements.By restricting class actions and class-wide arbitration in consumer contracts, these clauses enable corporations to avoid public scrutiny by precluding access to the courts. This is particularly problematic for small, diffuse misconduct that harms innumerous consumers. As the Bureau's research has shown, consumers rarely use arbitration to recover small claims, such as those associated with overdraft fees, because these cases are either too costly for consumers to pursue on an individual basis, or the individual consumer is unaware of a corporation's misconduct.

The proposed rule is in the public interest and will protect consumers. As you know, Congress expressly granted authority to the Bureau to research the impact of forced arbitration clauses in financial products and services, and based on this evidence, to promulgate a rule to prohibit or impose conditions on the use of forced arbitration if the Bureau finds that it would be "in the public interest and for the protection of consumers." There is little doubt that the Bureau's proposed rule will serve these twin goals. As more than 200 of the nation's leading law professors and scholars have observed, "class actions can serve as a powerful tool to help consumers of financial services and products vindicate their rights under federal and state law." The Bureau's study confirms this conclusion, finding that in addition to providing consumers with financial remedies for unlawful, predatory, or fraudulent conduct, class action settlements also included behavioral relief for consumers through corporate commitments to alter fraudulent practices that gave rise to the claim. On an individual basis, these forms of relief would have been largely unavailable or greatly diminished. The Attorneys General from 16 states likewise note that the "need for regulations to protect the public interest has never been so great," observing that forced arbitration has predictably resulted in consumer harm and "a systemic failure to hold accountable those companies who abuse the trust placed in them by consumers." In discrimination cases, individual consumers may not even be aware that they were harmed by a corporation's unlawful conduct. As the Center for Justice and Democracy has found, class actions are uniquely capable of holding corporations accountable for civil rights violations for these claims.

We strongly believe that your comprehensive study on forced arbitration unequivocally demonstrates that the proposed rule is necessary to the public interest and consumer welfare.Congress has already acted to ban forced arbitration clauses in residential mortgages and in financial products offered to servicemembers and veterans. We have entrusted the Bureau with authority to extend these protections to the rest of the financial services marketplace. Accordingly, we encourage you to proceed quickly to ensure that consumers have equal protection under the law.

Source: http://democrats.financialservices.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=399950

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https://www.c-span.org/video/?458861-1/land-fee

quite good

MARCH 18, 2019

Land of the Fee

Devin Fergustalked about his book, Land of the Fee: Hidden Costs and the Decline of the American Middle Class, on the hidden transaction fees that Americans regularly pay and the impact these costs have on the middle class.

only nixon could go to china:

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/trump-administration-now-has-fair-housing-its-crosshairs

Trump administration is trying to make it easier for banks, landlords and insurance companies to discriminate against minority homeowners and tenants.

Anna Maria Farías, an assistant secretary at HUD, is asking for comments on possible revisions that could “add clarity” and “reduce uncertainty” on a HUD rule based on a legal theory the Obama administration and its predecessors used to prove discrimination cases.

The theory, “disparate impact analysis,” measures discrimination, such as African-Americans paying higher interest rates on loans, without having to prove an intent to discriminate.

...

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Senate moved Wednesday to end an Obama-era policy that warns auto lenders against discriminating against people of color by charging them more on auto loans. West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin joined Republicans in a 51 to 47 vote to overrule the policy by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—an agency that’s been assailed by Republicans since its creation in 2010. The House is expected to approve the bill and to send it to President Trump for his signature. The rule was adopted after a 2011 report by the Center for Responsible Lending found African Americans and Latinos disproportionately received interest rate markups more frequently and to a greater degree than their white counterparts.

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/2/27/modern_day_redlining_banks_face_probes

gop ~ dodd frank on collecting info invest rept used to bust banks; bank diss study for excluding data they fight to keep private.

shocking new investigation by Reveal and the Center for Investigative Reporting has uncovered evidence that African Americans and Latinos continue to be routinely denied conventional mortgage loans, even at rates far higher than their white counterparts, across the country. According to the piece, the homeownership gap between whites and African Americans is now wider than it was during the Jim Crow era. Reveal based its report on a review of 31 million mortgage records filed with the federal government in 2015 and 2016. The investigation found the redlining occurring across the country, including in Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Detroit, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and San Antonio, Texas. Since its publication earlier this month, the report has sparked national outrage and, in some states, unusually swift political action. Pennsylvania’s attorney general and state treasurer have both launched investigations into redlining in Philadelphia. We speak to Pennsylvania state Senator Vincent Hughes and Aaron Glantz, senior reporter at Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting. His new investigation is headlined “Kept out: How banks block people of color from homeownership.”

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Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: A stunning new investigation by Reveal and The Center for Investigative Reporting has uncovered evidence that African Americans and Latinos continue to be routinely denied conventional mortgage loans even at rates far higher than their white counterparts across the country. According to the piece, the homeownership gap between whites and African Americans is now wider than it was during the Jim Crow era. Reveal based its report on a review of 31 million mortgage records filed with the federal government in 2015 and 2016. The investigation found the redlining occurring across the country, including in Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Detroit, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and San Antonio, Texas.

AMY GOODMAN: Since its publication earlier this month, the report has sparked national outrage and, in some states, unusually swift political action. Pennsylvania’s attorney general and state treasurer have both launched investigations into redlining in Philadelphia. This is Democratic state Senator Vincent Hughes of Pennsylvania questioning Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro during a recent Senate budget hearing.

SEN. VINCENT HUGHES: Are you aware of the study that was just published by The Center for Investigative Reporting that looks at discriminatory lending practices? It titles—the study titles itself “Kept out.” OK, consciously. Are you aware of this research? Are you knowledgeable about what’s been going on in this area?

ATTORNEY GENERAL JOSH SHAPIRO: I am aware of it. And, frankly, I’m disgusted by it. And I read the articles. We were aware of some of this even before the articles came out. It is—it is not only wrong in terms of what’s happening to that individual who’s being denied a mortgage, you know, based on this reporting, but, to your point, it holds the city back. It holds neighborhoods back and blocks back. It holds people back from achieving what they are capable of achieving. Obviously, I’ve been very careful today about saying too much about investigations. I will take the somewhat unusual step of announcing here today that we have launched an investigation into this—

SEN. VINCENT HUGHES: Great.

ATTORNEY GENERAL JOSH SHAPIRO: —through—and it’s important to know—my Bureau of Consumer Protection. And, you know, we are chasing this down, and we take this seriously.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Meanwhile, the Philadelphia City Council has passed a motion for oversight hearings, and community groups in redlined neighborhoods have begun organizing to pressure culpable banks to end their racially discriminatory practices.

All this comes as a bipartisan group of lawmakers on Capitol Hill is moving to gut provisions of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill enacted after the 2008 financial crisis. The bill forces banks and credit unions to disclose to the government detailed information about who they lend to. The ranking Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, has cited _Reveal_’s reporting as a reason for Congress to put the brakes on this effort.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, for more, we’re joined by two guests. In San Francisco, California, we’re joined by Aaron Glantz, the senior reporter for Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, his new investigation headlined “Kept out: How banks block people of color from homeownership.” And joining us from the capital of Pennsylvania, from Harrisburg, Democratic state Senator Vincent Hughes of Pennsylvania, who serves as the Democratic chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Thanks, both, for joining us. Aaron, if you would start out by laying out what your investigation, “Kept out,” found and what exactly redlining is?

AARON GLANTZ: We wanted to know why it was, as you mentioned in your intro, that even though segregation and housing discrimination has been illegal for 50 years, that the homeownership gap between blacks and whites in America is now greater than it was during the Jim Crow era. So, we analyzed 31 million mortgage records. My colleague Emmanuel Martinez went through virtually every mortgage application that was made in the United States in 2015 and 2016, using data available under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. And we controlled for how much money a person made and the neighborhood they wanted to buy in and the size of the loan they wanted to take on and six other social and economic factors that might play into whether or not a person would get a mortgage, whether or not a person would be able to buy a home.

And we found that in 61 cities across the country, including Philadelphia, St. Louis, Detroit, San Antonio, Orlando, Gainesville, Washington, D.C., in all of these cities around the country, people of color were more likely to be denied a conventional home purchase loan, even when they made the same amount of money as their white counterparts, even when they wanted to buy in the same neighborhood as their white counterparts, and even when they wanted to take on the same size loan as their white counterparts.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, I’d like to ask Senator Hughes—the starting line in this piece is: The homeownership gap between whites and African Americans is now wider than it was during the Jim Crow era. Did that come as a surprise to you? And your reaction to the series, overall?

SEN. VINCENT HUGHES: Well, I think what we have to do is look at this directly, from the great reporting that Reveal did, and understand the ripple effect that comes when you have this kind of discrimination going on. For example, Philadelphia has the largest poverty rate of any major city in the nation, 26 percent—largest deep poverty rate of any city in the nation. The ripple effect on housing stock, we’ve got 15,000 vacant houses. The ripple effect on wealth and across the board. And broader policy, the ripple effect on education funding, because now, because of this problem, we don’t have the capacity to provide local dollars to a state that’s not doing what it’s supposed to do in terms of funding basic education in Pennsylvania. So, what we’re talking about specifically around the discrimination piece, but then we have to broaden the lens to see how this plays itself out across the board on a number of other public policy matters. And it is an extremely, very, very serious problem.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Aaron, I wanted to ask you—you mentioned that it’s been 50 years since redlining was outlawed. And most Americans are familiar with the term “redlining,” but they’re not really familiar with how discriminatory lending policies occurred. And I wanted to ask you to talk a little bit about that. In my book, Reclaiming Gotham, I mentioned some of the people who were the forerunners of this, a trio of individuals—[Homer] Hoyt, Frederick Babcock, Ernest Fisher—who were theoreticians of housing value in the United States and who ended up running the FHA, but they all had racially biased views—the FHA being the agency that insured many of the home mortgages in the ’30s, ’40s, ’50s and even today. For instance, Babcock said things like, “There is one difference in people, namely race, which can result in very rapid decline [of property values].” And so, they basically were the people who created this grading system, by ethnic and racial groups, of who was best suited to obtain a federally insured mortgage. And this has become, as you mentioned, until 1968, the basis for most lending in the United States. But how has it continued even after it was outlawed?

...

nomi prins 12/17 AN

https://www.alternet.org/economy/next-financial-crisis-will-be-worse-last-one

...On the flip side of that euphoria however, is the fact that the median wage rose just 2.4 percent and has remained effectively stagnant relative to inflation. And although the unemployment rate fell to a 17-year low of 4.1 percent, the labor force participation rate dropped to 62.7 percent, its lowest level in nearly four decades—particularly difficult for new entrants to the workforce, such as students graduating under a $1.3 trillion pile of unrepayable or very challenging student loan debt. (Not to worry though: Goldman Sachs is on that, promoting a way to profit from this debt by stuffing it into other assets and selling those off to investors, a la shades of the subprime mortgage crisis.)

Those of us living in the actual world without billionaire family pedigrees possess a healthy dose of skepticism over the “Make America Great Again” sect that believes Trump has transformed America “hugely,” for record-setting markets don’t imply economic stability, nor do 40 percent corporate tax cuts translate into 40 percent wage growth. We can march forward into 2018 carrying that knowledge with us.

But first, a recap. For the U.S. financial system, 2017 was marked by five main themes: The GOP’s “You All Just Got a Lot Richer” Corporate Tax Reduction Plan; Big Banks Still Bad; The Fed’s Minor Policy Shift; Debt; and Deregulators Appointed to Positions of Regulatory Authority.

Banks Are Still Big and Bad

The Big Six banks have paid billions of dollars in settlements for a variety of frauds committed before and since the 2007-2008 financial crisis, but that didn’t keep them from tallying up new fines in 2017. The nation’s largest bank, JPMorgan Chase, agreed to pay $53 million in finesfor scamming African-American and Latino mortgage borrowers with disproportionately higher rates than for white borrowers.The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau fined Citigroup $28.8 million for not disclosing foreclosure-avoiding actions. Bank of America got fined $45 million for its foul treatment of a California couple trying to save their home.

But the Big Six bank that received the most attention in 2017, as it did in 2016, was Wells Fargo. The number of people affected by its fake-account creation scandal grew from 2 million reported in 2016 to about 3.5 million. That increase resulted in Wells Fargo expanding its associated class-action settlement to $142 million.

Wells Fargo was mired in smaller scandals, too. For instance, it charged 800,000 customers for auto insurance they didn’t need, raised mortgage rates for certain customers without properly disclosing it was going to, and made a bunch of unauthorized adjustments to people’s mortgages.

No Glass-Steagall Reinstatement, More Deregulation

The idea of reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 featured in both the Democratic and the Republican National Committees’ platforms during the campaign season. But Trump’s treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, made it clear multiple times there would be no such push from the administration, arguing against doing so before senators including Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

To emphasize his disdain for regulation and oversight, Mnuchin also pushed the Financial Stability Oversight Council, over which he presides, to vote 6 to 3 to rescind American International Group’s designation as posing a potential threat to the U.S. financial system. Thus, AIG will no longer be paying penance for its role at the epicenter of the last financial crisis by filing regular risk reports anymore. Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen also supported the move.

...

http://www.alternet.org/activism/meet-your-new-neighborhood-loan-sharks

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n 2014, ProPublica published an investigation of USA Discounters, a subprime lender that, contrary to its name, specialized in enticing military service members into overpaying for furniture, electronics and appliances. When they fell behind on the high-interest loans, the company often took them to court in Virginia — a few miles from the company’s headquarters, but often nowhere near where the service members were based. With court judgments in hand, the company gained the power to seize money from soldiers’ paychecks or bank accounts.

Since our story ran, USA Discounters has gone out of business and declared bankruptcy, but still has faced legal challenges over its practices. This summer the company settled with the attorney general of Colorado over a suit filed last year.

The state’s suit focused on the company’s collection techniques, but it also alleged that USA Discounters had charged interest rates above what is allowed in Colorado. The deal involves a penalty of $1 million and breaks for thousands of customers on outstanding debt. Although the company has shut down its stores, it continues to collect on outstanding loans.

As part of the deal, USA Discounters did not admit or deny wrongdoing. The company disclosed in a filing in its bankruptcy case that other regulatory investigations are ongoing.

In addition to settling with USA Discounters, Colorado’s attorney general also settled a separate suit with two other retailers, Freedom Furniture and Electronics and Military Credit Services. These businesses, owned by a pair of brothers, used practices similar to those of USA Discounters. As we reported in 2014, these three companies had filed more than 35,000 collection suits in Virginia courts since 2006. And like USA Discounters, Freedom has also been hit with other investigations: In late 2014, Freedom settled similar lawsuits brought by two other states and the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It closed its stores last year.

Colorado’s attorney general said that, together, the settlements with USA Discounters and Freedom would net $3.9 million in redress for harmed consumers. Freedom also did not admit wrongdoing as part of the settlement with Colorado.

https://www.propublica.org/article/us-attorney-asks-court-to-reconsider-countrywide-loan-case

sturgis:

Some of the deals Steele made between SCLC and business interests proved controversial. In 2008, for example, an op-ed bearing Steele's byline appeared in a number of Southern U.S. newspapers criticizing federal legislation to reduce credit card fees by arguing that it would boost the profits of major retailers including Wal-Mart. But it turned out Steele didn't write the editorial and was angry the P.R. firm that did put his name on it because, as the Washington Post reported, Wal-Mart "is listed on the SCLC's Web site as a sponsor of the organization. No one at the SCLC would want to insult a large benefactor."

:{:{}:

That same year, Steele had an op-ed published in the Washington Post that noted the devastating effect the subprime mortgage crisis was having on minority homeowners. But rather than supporting proposals to better regulate credit markets, Steele attacked them -- while defending companies that issued high-interest credit cards to people with bad credit. As Mother Jones observed at the time, that's not altogether surprising when you consider that a year earlier "the SCLC formed a partnership withCompuCredit, a subprime credit card issuer and payday lending company."}:

The Federal Trade Commission eventually sued CompuCredit for unfair and deceptive trade practices and for violating the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, charging that it cheated consumers out of more than $200 million through a scheme in which they paid so much in fees that they had little credit available.

But Steele defended the company even then, saying that it "has been a true friend to the SCLC."