Wednesday, June 25, 2008
The Trillion-Dollar Bank Shakedown
This was apparently written in 2000.
If anybody has the right to day "I told you so", this is THE guy.
P.S. - It's not entirely "politically correct"...
If anybody has the right to day "I told you so", this is THE guy.
P.S. - It's not entirely "politically correct"...
In the Winter 2000 issue of Atlanta's City Journal, Howard Husock criticized the Clinton Administration and predicts some outcomes:
"The Clinton administration has turned the Community Reinvestment Act, a once-obscure and lightly enforced banking regulation law, into one of the most powerful mandates shaping American cities—and, as Senate Banking Committee chairman Phil Gramm memorably put it, 'a vast extortion scheme against the nation's banks.'
Looking into the future gives further cause for concern: 'The bulk of these loans,' notes a Federal Reserve economist, 'have been made during a period in which we have not experienced an economic downturn.' The Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America's own success stories make you wonder how much CRA-related carnage will result when the economy cools. The group likes to promote, for instance, the story of Renea Swain-Price, grateful for NACA's negotiating on her behalf with Fleet Bank to prevent foreclosure when she fell behind on a $1,400 monthly mortgage payment on her three-family house in Dorchester. Yet NACA had no qualms about arranging the $137,500 mortgage in the first place, notwithstanding the fact that Swain-Price's husband was in prison, that she'd had previous credit problems, and that the monthly mortgage payment constituted more than half her monthly salary. The fact that NACA has arranged an agreement to forestall foreclosure does not inspire confidence that she will have the resources required to maintain her aging frame house: her new monthly payment, in recognition of previously missed payments, is $1,879."
