In the Moneychanger’s Temple: $307 Million More for Us, Nothing for You

by | Dec 19, 2015 | Opinion | 0 comments

stop-predatory-lending2Hello? Is anybody home? Pr’olly not.

President Obama is riding the crested wave of his last term in office and it appears, by all seen and heard, that we’ve forgotten many of the main things that got him elected to office, including the largest US fiscal disaster since the Great Depression.

Yes, we’re repeating it again, because believe it or not, the predatory lending that was taking place at that time that exacted heavy penalties like higher cost loans and higher interest rates for being Black customers and clients (the “Black tax”) and caused mostly Black and Hispanic people to be run out of “house and homes,” has still not been fixed, let alone recompensed.

Closing agents and foreclosure attorneys even calculated in the factor of how long it would take before these people would lose their homes and how quickly they could “flip” them to another borrower in exchange for cash and loan-to-value before the next flip. How did they know? They knew they could not afford the loans when they gave then the money, and many of them used inflated appraisals to over-value the market price of homes that were not worth a fourth of what homebuyers were being charged for them. Unscrupulous car dealerships, title pawn shops, and rental centers do the same thing, especially the “buy here pay here” ones.

While JPMorgan Chase and its economic bed wenches tumble back and forth between them over investment disclosures and “conflicts of interest” with regard to those investment disclosures, there have been very few indications that they are not simply biding time before they are back in the home loan rip-off market again come 2017.

In recently developing news about the way the housing markets are marking the days until President Obama is gone, Wells Fargo has been forced back to court over the lone individual homeowner, Dennis Comer’s, case with regard to being duped into a high-priced subprime loan and subsequently, the foreclosure of his home.

Though Comer’s case, one of nearly nil that survived an onslaught of lawsuits against the financial giants, is highly unlikely to survive a full court review (it might but most likely it will not), let’s face it — this kind of predatory loan/lease market is a highly desired, easily-duplicated and easily reconstructed one that it would make more sense to recreate than to stop doing it.

Admission of wrongdoing is hard when the lender/backers who caused the economic housing crash are being told by court after court that it is okay for them to do business that way and that they can keep doing business that way rather than get into the righteous business of home lending that encourages ownership over the ‘paydown-foreclose-flip-paydown-foreclose-flipagain’ loan processing scheme that began on Bill Clinton’s watch in the 1990s.

It has long been known that the largest economic gains in America are nearly always made at the expense of its Black and minority citizens, majorly those who are ultimately left in the cold in one pyramid scheme zero-sum game after another.

However, the fact that the unrepentant predatory lenders are still fishing around like sharks smelling blood in the water is enough to leave a person’s bones in a cold chill.

This is not just meant for homebuying, the cheating is coming out from all ends like a dog with diarrhea: Buy-Here-Pay-Here anything, Rentacenters, Title Pawn shops, the whole nine…

*He who does not learn from the past…”

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