The Obama Years: The Beginning of the End

The Economics of Black Finance

As we wrap up this 9-part series, there is the one and last thing to talk about that besets Black America like nothing other: Money.

It is the only language Eurocentric people speak in all languages, and it is the only way of being able to communicate with them on this lower echelon level on which too many people exist and subsist the world over.

We know that the love of money is the root of all evil, but there is one thing that all Black and afrocentric citizens of the United States of America have got to get behind us once and for all … that “rags to riches” story. It’s a bunch of horse hockey signifying absolutely nothing. It is a solid multi-fold myth that has only worked for very select people at highly select times in history. Bottom Line: Hard work gets no one anywhere in this moneychangers game.

White people themselves have taught for the longest that it isn’t working HARD, but working SMART, that is the key to financial and economic prosperity and success. So what does SMART WORK look like for us?

First of all, let us lay down a historical valuation regarding the U.S. dollar and its economic decline and demise in the world markets.

America (those who own it, that is) arrogantly believed for a very long time that it can subsist on its own oil supplies and subsidies, and that if we build a pipeline of our own through our Russian landholdings in Alaska and Canada, we will not need the world’s oil supplies and will not have a need to go to war and kill people to get at it.

This is wrongheaded thinking for a couple of simple reasons that don’t need mathematical equations to figure it out: (a) Too many have said that we would rather destroy their natural resources than our own, so “fracking” America to death in order to keep the energy supplies going doesn’t appear to be an ecologically sustainable bright idea; and (b) It puts the literal nail in the coffin as to global economics because once America no longer has a primary need for global oil trade, (except as maybe a backup plan) everyone else will continue to trade globally with the Euro instead of the U.S. dollar, and we will have, to coin a clichéic phrase, “painted ourselves into a corner” in the world economic markets.

If, indeed, Putin is demanding that the US dollar is only an intermediary medium of exchange until he can corner the market on every single pound of physical gold America and the “west” has, then we weren’t joking around when we said we are watching the historical “fall of the Roman empire” all over again.

This “Putin as excellent chessmaster” lede could very well be a ruse by the “gold standard enthusiasts” to make us all invest in gold again so they can drive the prices higher than oil by market demand. Gold is extremely cheap right now, but Black folks tend to think that’s an economic game that none of us are involved in and that we don’t need to care about it.

Hold up.

The same people who say we need to “watch and tend” our CREDIT REPORTS and who tip their hats and bow down and roll over to get butt-ditched by Equifax, TransUnion and Experian actually think that this attempt to corner the market on the physical gold standard has nothing to do with us? Then, hell, why bother worrying about your credit reports? Believe it or not, all of this crapola is tied together. It does not operate in a vacuum.

I remember back during Y2K when there was a big media scare about how all of the computers all over the world were going to “crash” because of the dateline turning over from 1999 to 2000. It had something to do with the way the computer clocks would pick up on 2000 as 1900 instead of 2000 and we’d be pulled back in a eatemup machine reversal to 1900, where all in the digital world would crash and burn and be “lost forever.”

Black folks waited with anxious glee to watch all of those major credit reporting bureaus lose every ounce of their data under the Y2K digitalocalypse. Didn’t happen. Now we’ve got Goldocalypse going on, with Russia and Putin’s and China’s hands greasing the wheels this time.

But what does this mean to Black America and what does it have to do with racism and Obama?

Hold on.

How easily we forget that when the housing market crashed and burned in the hands of predatory subprime lenders, how badly that hurt Black people in the housing market and how easy it was for them to point a finger at the U.S. that is US and say “that’s what you get for trying to buy homes and houses that you know you can’t afford.”

How the hell did the homes GET unaffordable in the first place, especially with all of that mercilessly cheap credit going around (except for you, that is)? There’s the answered but unanswered question that is at the center of this economic mess in Black America.

It had nothing to do with personal responsibility from the get-go, it had to do with SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY on the part of those who created this economic market to fail intentionally.

The plan was that they would profit while simultaneously screwing Black and colored people to the walls as they did it. The promise of home ownership, the ownership of land, that glorious vanguard of all that is sacred in America…. Black America, where is your “Tara”?

***

Michael Lewis, author of several exposes that foretold this coming economic crash years before it happened, said this “A few months ago, Standard and [Poor’s], the credit-rating agency, downgraded U.S. Treasury bonds. When that happened, the markets responded by buying Treasury bonds. The fear that created caused a stampede into Treasury bonds. “It’s like a monster walked into the room, and half the people in the room went to kind of hug the monster.”

We all saw it coming, we just didn’t have Lewis’ expertise in order to write about it in such a lucid manner.

Black people working for these subprime lenders at the time saw them move houses on the block that weren’t worth $50,000 appraised at a market value of more than $250k in their lending stips folders. They pulled up photos of properties in predominantly Black areas and realized that millions of dollars worth of debt was being created on homes that they couldn’t sell for the property taxes plus the annual payment on the homeowners insurance owed, let alone the principle and interest. The game they played was that no matter how quickly these homes were foreclosed on, they would keep the money flowing and circulating in their favor; as a matter of fact, the faster they could foreclose, the better. Capital gains in the REO markets was meant to bundle up all of those worthless “cloud” (B & C) loans that only existed on white A-paper and sell them to Big Backed Investors at a premium. It was “liquid fast money” and the person who thought they were getting “Tara” got stuck with nothing more than the high-interest bills and property and intangibles taxes that Tara created. The crowd lenders couldn’t lose because the same people doing the closings were also profiting off the foreclosures. Boom. E. Rang.

They literally called them A, B and C-paper loans: A for Anglo, B for Black, and C for Colored. The B and C-paper loans were an intentional rip-off coming off the note blocks.

In a nutshell, you give them money to buy the house, you promise them interest at a MINTED rate price to pay back the rest of the borrowed money (because your credit is bad of course), you pay them HUMONGOUS fees and rates to close it, you lose the house, they get to keep the house AND the land AND your money, AND they get to make money off the fact that you could not keep the house.

Revolving door effing.

They said “We don’t want the house back,” but they really did. They stood to make a whole helluva lot more money lending and foreclosing and then flipping the mortgage to another sucker who would be foreclosed on within two to five years than on selling the house in the hopes that you could keep it and “make America a better nation through home ownership”.

 Don’t think for a minute that they would never try to pull this off again in a million years.

Yeah. They would. What you don’t know can, and will, hurt you.

One place of anger for these D.C. money dogs is that they are mad at President Obama for interfering with their predatory lending scams. Their one utmost desire is to pick it up again where they left off in 2009, and we already know that those who were hurt the most by this were, in fact, black and colored families in the act of producing for themselves “The American Dream” of home ownership.

As of today, December 1, 2014, the news is “The Fed tightly guards nonpublic information about deliberations by the committee and the select staffers who are privy to them, about five dozen people in all. Doing so is critical to “reinforce the public’s confidence in the transparency and integrity of the monetary process,” the Fed’s policy on external communications says. The policy also states that Fed staffers “will refrain from disseminating information outside the Federal Reserve … that might allow an individual firm, or organization to profit financially.” The newsletter containing the leaked material came from an economic policy intelligence firm called Medley Global Advisors whose clients include hedge funds, institutional investors and asset managers. On Oct. 3, 2012, Regina Schleiger, an analyst with the firm, sent clients a “special report” titled “Fed: December Bound.” The report focused on the Sept. 12-13 open market committee meeting, where the panel had approved what’s called “QE3,” a new program of large-scale purchases of mortgage-backed and Treasury securities.”

***Not only can they do it again, they will do it again.***

They are counting on your, or our, ignorance and lack of knowledge to help get them there again and rebuild this “bubble” from the top down in their “trick-off” economy.

There are only two thoughts they ever have about Black people: We are liquid money, Black Gold, Texas tea, and that we are dumb as hell when it comes to economic knowledge and the ability to sustain ourselves based on the current way they do business in America. And trust this, the housing market -boom or bust- determines the way everything else is going to go.

If you’ve got no place to live that you can call HOME (Tara, terra firma, soil, land…), nothing else matters, not on a grand scale anyway.

It is the base from which we all operate to get anything and everything else done in this world. It is leverage with which to move forward and progress and advance. People who spend their lives in and out of homelessness and transience cannot accomplish much in the world because they do not even own the ground on which they stand.

We should all be well aware of that by now, which means that we must understand that Black folks have got to stop waiting until the big white snowballs have gained enough steam and gotten bigger on the roll and then crushed our arsses under an AVALANCHE before we know how the game works and how NOT to get crushed underneath it.

Yes, their economic and financial “bubbles” are our economic and financial avalanches, and that, too, is BY DESIGN.

 Solutions

1) NEVER EVER borrow money at more than prime rate plus a percentage point.

They make enough profit off the initial market pricing of the home and a ledger of interest on the loan at prime, so they don’t need more than a point above prime to make a killing. Your credit rating has absolutely nothing to do with your ability to pay back a home loan, so your credit rating should never be used as a guideline for which to decide how much to charge for interest rates. Credit stips were designed from the outset to be racially charged; some white folks just fell by the wayside in its movement outward.

2) Never sign boilerplate loan papers, particularly the PROMISSORY NOTE or MORTGAGE DEED. Besides the Truth in Lending, the HUD Statement, and the Escrow Amortization, the Note and the Deed are the only real documents that seal the deal anyway. The other “junk docs” are majorly disclosures and discharges of your principal duty to pay. Each loan entered into must take the borrower’s individual concerns and creditworthiness into account at the time of closing. There is no one size fits all in this market.

3) Take Standard & Poor’s methodologies into account when deciding whether or not your lender is credible enough to even loan you money REGARDLESS of your credit rating. Your investment is their profitability margins, so some lenders aren’t fit to be lending money in the first place. They need you more than you will EVER need them.

4) The rule of thumb is that “He who has the gold makes the rules.” Don’t get it twisted. You’re the one with The LIQUID Gold. Without your business, they don’t make money AT ALL. Period. Develop that mentality and take it to heart, and keep it at your side in everything that you do.

5) When Barack Obama is no longer President, there are some lessons we should have learned and learned well about immediate gratification when it comes to what we want and aspire to in life. The first lesson is that it isn’t hard work that will get us there, it is the power in the Black consumer economics flow that controls the conversation.

They are in business to make money, and it’s your business to make sure they make as little of it from you as possible until those investments become hardcore reality in Black America through our own business ownership and enterprises. If they aren’t buying from us, we shouldn’t be buying from them.

Every ethnicity in this nation has found multitudinous ways to put in a siphon and bleed Black people out of money, land and futures, and then leave (us) high and dry when there is nothing else left to drain.

You are, Black people, the only humanly traded stock commodity left on Wall Street who can stop it once and for all. Make the money work for YOU, not the other way around.

That doesn’t call for HARD work, slave-style; it calls for SMART WORK, futurific-style.

*Part 1 of a 9-Part Series*