Predatory lending as major factor in housing downturn

The Naples Daily News - Naples,FL,USA reports:

This area has been hardest hit by a nationwide “slump,” he said, with predatory lenders in large part to blame.

Foreclosure epidemic hits Akron with a fury, The Akron Beacon Journal reports:

Some Good News: Starting October 1, 2007, a new federal regulation prohibits creditors making payday loans, vehicle title loans and tax refund anticipation loan

FIGHTING BACK

Inner-city community organizations from nine cities in six states gathered this morning at Ernest Gardner’s house on East 113th St. to announce their new “Campaign to Save the American Dream” from predatory lending and foreclosures.

The organizations — from Cleveland, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Syracuse, Chicago, central Illinois, Wichita and Des Moines — are all affiliated with the National Training and Information Center in Chicago, which has supported neighborhood organizing for bank reinvestment in Cleveland and other cities since the ’70s. The local NTIC partner is Cleveland’s ESOP, which hosted today’s press conference to kick off a campaign for national measures to prevent further foreclosures on family homes, reform the subprime credit market, criminalize abusive mortgage lending practices, and extend Federal Community Reinvestment Act regulation to all mortgage lenders and loan originators.

NTIC held this national press event on East 113th because 44105 is “the highest foreclosure zip code in the country.” (They got an excellent turnout of reporters and cameras.)

QUOTE FROM FINANCE BLOG OF PORTFOLIO.COM

“Subprime is a very convenient term used by elites in the media and on Wall Street because it implies that there’s something wrong with the borrowers, and also with the lenders,” he said. “What you have in reality is just a broader mispricing of credit.”
The fact is that it’s wrong to simply paint all subprime lending as misguided. Subprime borrowers can be responsible borrowers, and enlightened lenders can make good money from them by helping them improve their credit and build themselves a solid financial foundation.

When subprime lending goes bad it’s usually because lenders get greedy, and move into the realm of predatory lending, trying to extract as much juice from the borrower as possible before a bankruptcy made inevitable by usurious interest rates.”

FT ON NEW BESTSELLER IN CHINA ON CURRENCY WARS

Chinese best-seller, Currency Wars , these disparate events spanning two centuries have a single root cause: the control of money issuance through history by the Rothschild banking
dynasty.

Even today, claims author Song Hongbing, the US Federal Reserve remains a puppet of private banks, which also ultimately owe their allegiance to the ubiquitous Rothschilds.

Such an over-arching conspiracy theory might matter as little as the many fetid tracts that can still be found in the west about the “gnomes of Zurich” and Wall Street’s manipulation of global finance.

But in China, which is in the midst of a lengthy debate about opening its financial system under US pressure, the book has become a surprise hit and is being read at senior levels of government and business.

“Some senior heads of companies have been asking me if this is all true,” says Ha Jiming, the chief economist of China International Capital Corp, the largest local investment bank.

The book also gives ammunition, however hay-wire, to many in China who argue that Beijing should resist pressure from the US and other countries to allow its currency, the renminbi, to appreciate.