The American Spectator

Reader Mail

Greenlight Special

9.30.08 @ 12:01AM

GO FOR THE GOLD
Re: Matthew Vadum's Financial Affirmative Action:

I agree that government meddling in the markets is a root cause of the current mess, but is it only the fault of the freako left?

I live in California, one of the epicenters of the meltdown, and I can tell you nobody was holding a gun on the developers and brokers.

And right up until the kaboom, they were all singing: "Get it built and get it sold, close the deal and get the gold!"

The brokers knew perfectly well how many of the "buyers" were bad risks-so did the buyers. So did the guys who bundled these time bombs and turned them into "derivatives" that nobody understood.

Ah, but THEY did! They understood that they would be in court for prejudice if they didn't sell, and in court for fraud if they did. The only safe path was a product that nobody really understood -- that is, being able to prove they didn't know what they were doing in the first place.

The CFO version of the Nuremberg defense -- shades of Ayn Rand!

Nobel laureate Sir V.S. Naipaul once described the welfare state as a country drawn into a conspiracy against itself. Too bad we can't get him to run the Treasury Department.
-- Martin Owens
Sacramento, California

Thanks to Matthew Vadum for daring to mention the connection between "affirmative action" and foreclosures. Just as Hillary's friend, Ms. Wright-Edelman once postulated that some are not acculturated to work, some are not acculturated to home ownership. Once, buying a home meant living in it, taking care of it and "burning the mortgage" in thirty years. Then our goal changed. It became starter homes followed by movin' on up. After that, starter homes were just too declasse. Impress your friends, start out in that mini-mansion. As for even owning your own car. Much glitzier to lease a Mercedes than own a Ford.

Blame is being placed on unscrupulous lenders, absolving mortgagee of any responsibility. I suppose there is a certain class of potential homeowner who cannot look at the net pay box on his paycheck voucher, then quickly add up his static outlays (those would be the expenses that never change -- except to upwardly spiral in inflationary times), then loosely factor in his own whimsical spending habits that are not likely to change. The Grand Total, which neither he nor the lender is apt to consider, indicates that he is not a very good risk. And as he has never made a house payment before, he probably doesn't know home ownership doesn't stop there. There are taxes and insurance and a lot of incidentals involved in just making a new home livable. He is in over his head the minute he steps in the front door

Ah, but that is OK, because there are countless dependable, nose-to-the-grindstone homeowners on year 27 of their thirty year loans who will be asked to chip in and help the hapless victim of a shyster real estate agent who misled this poor lamb. Guess who is in for a shearing? Not the guy who couldn't even keep up his house payments! It used to be called the "Chicken today, feathers tomorrow" mentality. But thanks to a government that sees to it that no one ever has to eat feathers -- even if it is a diet he fashioned for himself, that will never happen.

More and more, I recall a question I had to try to address in an ethics course long ago, "If you reward the undeserving, what do you do for the deserving?" Ask any politician of either party. And get ready for some waffling.
-- Diane Smith

In 1983 I took a course in Banking in the University of Chicago's MBA program.

The subject of redlining came up. The lecturer pointed out that there had been a lot of complaints -- but identifying redlining was simple and straightforward. One merely needs to look at default rates. If one group or area had statistically LOWER default rates than another, that was prima facie evidence of redlining. Lenders requiring better creditworthiness for a group or an area would reduce their loan failure rate. At that time, the lecturer mentioned that they had done a number of studies and had not found any redlining.

Judging from current events, I'd say that greenlining has indeed been going on; lenders irrationally lending other people's money to poor re-payment risks. How liberal of them! I wish I could find a way to avoid being the supplier of "other people's money."
-- Dan Hirsch
Paris Wisconsin

Letter to the Editor

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