Bankers party like it's still 2006 -- with your money
Filed under: Banks, Wealth, Recession
The Service Employees International Union reports that the American Bankers Association is having a conference this weekend. The ABA is a trade group and powerful lobbying organization representing the banking industry. Because so many of its members received bailout money, it's fair to say that U.S. taxpayers are paying for this party. Here's what the bankers will have to look forward to:
- a luxurious riverboat cruise
- a historical mansion tour
- a roaring 1920s big band gala
- celebrity appearances by Newt Gingrich & George Will
Gingrich is a strange choice to speak at the ABA party because he was, to his credit, a vocal opponent of the bailouts. Back in September of 2008, he was asked about the TARP plan on NPR and provided a surprisingly candid answer: "Well, I think you have a Goldman Sachs chief of staff to the president and the Goldman Sachs secretary of the Treasury. And they convinced the president that the American people ought to send $700 billion to Wall Street, which I think is a very, very bad idea, and I would argue is a very un-Republican idea. I don't understand what they think they're doing."
And yet now he's speaking at a conference for an organization that lobbied for the bailout -- and against regulation to prevent future financial disasters.
Worse? The money that he'll be paid for speaking will come -- in a distant sort of way -- out of the very bailout package that he so vocally-opposed. Everyone has his price, apparently.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
10-23-2009 @ 7:14PM
pat said...
Bankers are supposed to make money and be rich. Labor union executives are not supposed to be rich.
But our leader wants to let the terrorists out of gitmo and put the bankers in jail.
The SEIU is part of his entourage and does his bidding.
Why not write about the kids who play water polo at USC complaining about the traveling expenses of the Fottball team. One makes money and the other does not.
Greed is good
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10-24-2009 @ 11:57AM
Al tam said...
Bankers are supposed to be rich if they make good, fair investments. The problem is they get the government to give them free money just because they were so blinded by their greed that they failed to invest wisely. There's no reason you or I should pay for that, but we are.
10-24-2009 @ 12:47PM
trc said...
I think the real problem here is that we no longer trust banking and financial entities. The top 10 banking and financial institutions in the U.S. have made some tremendous mistakes, some of them for decades past now. We can also make strong arguments that these same institutions actually lied to us. All the while these same institutions continue to charge exorbitant fees, use our mistakes relating to credit against us to charge higher interest rates for our loans, almost as if these institutions are doing us a favor. Now when these same institutions make mistakes, we bail them out with our tax dollars, dollars that don't actually exist. This is where the real B.S. is and we will continue to see this bailout situation as well as articles written about this historical bailout by the government, again and again, time after time until we figure out a way to economically rely less on banking and financial institutions, so that when they do f-up like they did, we just let them simply fail and go away. It's time for a new way of banking and financing. There are several organizations that might be non-profit, with more qualified individuals who can run banking and financial business better, more wisely and this will mitigate a lot of this greed and poor decision making - with repercussions and actual accountability. "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them." - Albert Einstein
10-23-2009 @ 7:27PM
Jon said...
SEIU is just an attack dog for the extreme left wing in this country, and they go after all the people that the Democrat Party can't openly go after. They don't represent their membership, and they pay their people to protest.
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10-24-2009 @ 9:36AM
Bubba said...
The thing that most stories overlook is that most of the ABA is comprised of smaller banks. In terms of numbers of institutions, about 99.5% of all the banks in this country are healthy. The 4 or 5 largest institutions get all the press and while they are huge, they won't have near the execs at a convention like this one as all the smaller "community" banks that are perfectly healthy. An earlier writer commented that the service workers union is the attack dog for the dem party. I agree.
The bankers that will be at this party are the ones that support the local little leagues, Boy Scouts, School Booster clubs and are usually the ones that facialitate the trade and business in the rest of the non metropolitan world. Piss on the writer of this article. It seems that all of a sudden its wrong to make money in this country. If you do you are bad...BS on that. Someone has to make the money and pay the taxes...it sure is not Obama and his elite administration, nor is it the union bosses.
Just my two bits.
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10-24-2009 @ 7:43PM
JIM said...
Is your fatcat bank trying to foreclose on you and spend all its money on parties? You amy want to fight your foreclosure using the following information.
BACKGROUND
Mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) are simply shares of a home loan sold to investors. They work like this: A bank lends a borrower the money to buy a house and collects monthly payments on the loan. This loan and a number of others are sold to a larger bank that packages the loans together into a mortgage-backed security. The larger bank then issues shares of this security, called tranches ( slices), to investors who buy them and ultimately collect the dividends in the form of the monthly mortgage payments. These tranches can be further repackaged and sold again as other securities, called collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). Home loans were so divided and spread across the financial spectrum, it was possible a given homeowner could unwittingly own shares in their own mortgage.
Eventually, the most desirable, qualified customers dried up; they all had homes. So banks turned to less desirable customers that they had traditionally shunned -- subprime borrowers. These are borrowers with low credit ratings who pose a higher risk of defaulting on their loan. But all types of lenders bent over backwards in the early 2000s to get this type of borrower into homes. The no-document loan was created, a type of loan for which the lender did not ask for any documentation and the borrower did not offer any information. People who may have been unemployed may have received loans for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
One answer is that, with the introduction of MBSs, lenders no longer assumed the risk of a loan default. They simply issued the loan and promptly sold it to others who ultimately took the risk if payments stopped. And since early MBSs performed well based on mortgages granted to the more dependable prime borrowers, investors clamored for more. In response, lenders loosened their restrictions for mortgage applicants and borrowed heavily to create cash flow for loans in order to create more mortgages. After all, without mortgages, there are no mortgage-backed securities.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/warning/view/
MERS FORECLOSURES http://www.mersinc.org/Foreclosures/index.aspx
Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc. (“MERS”) is a proper party that can lawfully foreclose as the mortgagee and note-holder of a mortgage loan. MERS Membership Rule 8 provides required guidelines that must be followed when MERS is the foreclosing entity. Please click here to access the Rules of Membership, and reference the Rule 8 requirements.
In mortgage foreclosure cases, the plaintiff has standing as the holder of the note and the mortgage. When MERS forecloses, MERS is the mortgagee and it is the holder of the note because a MERS officer will be in possession of the original note endorsed in blank, which makes MERS a holder of the bearer paper. MERS will not foreclose unless the note is endorsed in blank and held by MERS.
The MERS Legal Primer provides a sampling of cases that address the standing of MERS to foreclose its mortgages. These cases are not meant to be an exhaustive list involving MERS but are merely to serve as a primer for the legal arguments. These statements are from the MERS website.
THE QUESTIONS
As mortgages were packaged/bundled into mortgage back securities (MBS) and sold to investors and since these MBSs were bought by investors, with some mortgages being split and owned by several institutions or people (tranches), how can the homeowner/borrower know who actually owns their mortgage? If the homeowner /borrower does not know who actually owns their mortgage, then how does the foreclosure court know who actually owns the mortgage and CAN actually proceed with the foreclosure?
The real estate attorneys representing these possible foreclosed homeowners should request that the foreclosing institution show that they ACTUALLY own the mortgage and can bring foreclosure action to court and are not just the mortgage servicer.
Also, since these mortgages were sold without registering the mortgage in the county, the county has lost doc stamps (tax monies) and who /whom really owns the mortgage. I would say if it is not the company listed at the county and they were paid off when they sold the mortgage, and then a release of lien should be requested for the homeowner.
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10-24-2009 @ 11:54PM
Pencerah said...
if i an banker, i will collect money and give it to the poverty programs
(just dreaming)
regard
Kerja Keras adalah energi kita
thanks
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10-25-2009 @ 3:24PM
brandon said...
Don't be whining bitches, do something about it!
http://www.showdowninchicago.org/
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