FROM 35th STREET TO WALL STREET – ANATOMY OF A FORECLOSURE

THE FORECLOSURE CRISIS

From 35th Street to Wall Street: Anatomy of a foreclosure
by Dan Olson, Minnesota Public Radio,
Sasha Aslanian, Minnesota Public Radio
May 5, 2008

Tomorrow, a Minneapolis woman is scheduled to lose her home. The bank says it’s foreclosing on Faith Burns because she’s fallen behind on her monthly payments. Burns says that’s not so.

The fallout from the mortgage meltdown is vast. One-fourth of this country’s home mortgages are risky subprime loans. About one-fifth of the subprime borrowers are having problems making payments.

In Minneapolis last year, there were 2,895 foreclosures. Already this year, that number stands at 678. We wanted to understand the meltdown through a smaller lens, so we traced the path of Faith Burns’ mortgage. It leads all the way to Wall Street.

BBC PANORAMA – THE MONEY TRAP


A transcript of a BBC Panorama programme which interestingly broadcast before anyone knew about the devious banks destroying the World economy



Last Updated: Monday, 3 July 2006, 16:27 GMT 17:27 UK 





The money trap: Transcript

NB: THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A TRANSCRIPTION UNIT RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT: BECAUSE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF MIS-HEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY, IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS ACCURACY.

PANORAMA

 RECORDED FROM TRANSMISSION: BBC-1
DATE: 2:07:06

SALLY MAGNUSSON: This is the story of how high street banks can lure their customers into debt; it’s told by a powerful insider.

WHISTLEBLOWER: In all my years of experience in the banking industry I would say that consumers should be very, very wary of their banks. They put profits before the customer at every given opportunity.

MAGNUSSON: It’s the story of how banks routinely encourage customers to borrow more than they can afford, sometimes with fatal consequences.

MARION MCDONALD: They told me he’d been found on the railway line in the morning. I can’t even begin to describe how I felt. I had my children to deal with and I had to tell his family and it’s like the world just stopped.

RBS BANK OFFICIAL: [on forecourt] As long as the cameras are not running¿ We’ll have to get the police.

MAGNUSSON: The bank with the biggest slice of our credit card business doesn’t want to talk about debt suicide. But this top executive from one of the biggest financial institutions in the UK is prepared to speak out.

WHISTLEBLOWER: I am a senior executive working in the banking and credit card industry and I have decided to blow the whistle on this industry.

MAGNUSSON: Late at night in January last year a body lies by a railway line. The only clue to the death is a bag nearby. Inside – dozens of credit card statements detailing a mountain of debt. Mark McDonald, who was 43, had thrown himself under a train leaving a widow and two children. Mark was one of at least 17 debt related suicides across Britain in the last 3 years. His story was first highlighted a month ago by our colleagues on Britain’s streets of debt. Now Panorama has fresh revelations about the lending practices of the high street banks.

Capstone Mortgages – Beware!

By Guest Blogger Shaun Parker

Capstone Mortgages – Rip Off

If you are contemplating using Capstone Mortgages then you may want to read about my experience which is similar to many others, you may well want to think again.

How is this done?
Well its quite simple –

• First you must be one of the unlucky people to have taken a mortgage out with them or their other face which is ‘Preferred Mortgages’.

• Then what you do is get your own house insurance because the home insurance they offer is not competitive.

• Then on the anniversary of that insurance you renew your policy as normal because its value for money.

• About two months later Capstone start sending you letters telling you that your mortgage is in arears.

• Your name is then entered on an auto dialing system and their collections department start ringing you night and day but when you answer the phone hangs up immediately and you hear a message to urgently call them.

• You call them and stay on hold for up to 30 mins.

• When somebody answers you are accused of having mortgage arears and that your house it at risk if you do not pay up.

• After 15 mins you find out that what they have done is forced you to have their home insurance without you signing a single document and that the arrears is actually the £300 they have charged you for this privilage.

• After explaining that you have your own house insurance you are then told that you should of sent a copy to them and because you didn’t do this they can force their own expensive product choice on you.

• When you argue about this practice you are told that it is in the small print of your contract but when pushed they refuse to show you this.

• When by chance you discover that Capstone have a copy of your own house insurance on file because your insurance company sent it direct they still refuse to refund the money and continue charging admin costs.

When this happened to me I contacted the customer services manager after four months of Capstone telling me not to worry on the phone and then sending demanding letters through the post and threatening answerphone messages left on the phone.

This Capstone manager promised to sort it out and promised that the Capstone Mortgage Auto Dialing service and their collections team would leave me alone.

He also promised that the charges that should never have been levied would be rescinded. Now almost a year on I am still getting the same letters, the same threatening phone calls and the same charges being levied, whats more today I had a big suprise!!!!

You guessed it, one year on from the first attempt at extortion Capstone Mortgage Services have sent me a new letter for this years insurance, even though Legal and General faxed the insurance policy DIRECT to the Capstone HQ and Legal and General wrote to me confirming this.

That is another £300 added to my ficticious outstanding account!!!!

I rang them immediately and was told by customer services once again that this was an error and that they would refund the cost of the insurance, however, they cannot refund the charges because that is the collections department who are independent. I then found out that last years insurance was refunded but only to the tune of 50% , the other 50% they requested from Legal and General who quite rightly told them to get stuffed so they levied it back on me.

Now considering that they cannot show me my original contract or where I am bound to take their insurance without signing for it, even though I have asked repeatedly to see this contract, also considering despite this lack of proof I have complied with their wishes and so has a leading insurance provider, how can this practice be legal and not outright extortion?

When you investigate further it becomes clear that this practice is designed to bully people into giving Capstone Mortgages money under the pretence of mortgage arrears.

It does not make sense to avoid factoring this story into your decision making process when looking at mortgage providers – Capstone Mortgages would be the last company I would use and I will not roll over and just accept this immoral and unethical practice either.

Read Shaun Parker’s Blog Here:

Watch this space too…..

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By Guest Blogger Shaun Parker

SILLYFLATION – THE FASHIONABLE NEW IMPORT FROM ZIMBABWE !

You too can will shortly be carrying your loose change around in a wheelbarrow just to buy a loaf of bread or pint of milk, exactly as they have been doing for ages in Zimbabwe.

Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, announced today that Goofy Gordon and the Darling Chancellor has cooked up another wheeze with the Bank of England to destroy the UK economy even more than it already has been by the greedy, unprincipled, immoral, banks.

Gordon’s great idea, with Mervyn King’s connivance, is to print lots and lots more bank notes. This is because the banks are hoarding all the money they can lay their sticky, dishonest little fingers on and no one else has any money to buy anything with.

No doubt the banks will get their hands on that new money too for a while, and the Government will be forced to print more and more pretty little bank notes with the fairytale idea that all those impressively printed and colourful little bits of paper will have real value and worth, and people will be convinced they are rich enough again to be able to spend money to buy things, employ people to make them, and generally kick-start the economy.

Garbage ! What it really means is the economy will nosedive even further and inflation never before experienced outside of Third World comedy economies like Zimbabwe will take root in the UK.

Well done Gordon and cronies. You’ve done it again !

What would do wonders for solving the economy here and the rest of the World would be to arrest a few senior bankers and charge them with criminal fraud and throw them in jail for a while. That might encourage banks to stop behaving like thieves and try and be a bit more honest in their dealings.

It is purely the deceit and dishonesty of the banks which have caused this global economic crisis, so the people responsible should be punished. They undermined everybody’s trust in money and the entire system of banking as they committed more and more fraud of one sort or another. They ended up not even being able to trust each other. There’s no trust among thieves, the old saying goes.

That certainly proved right in the case of the banks !

It might be a good idea to let the whole lot of them go bankrupt and completely reform the entire banking system at the same time.

The banks have proved they cannot be trusted to run the financial system, so it needs to be done differently, more intelligently, and by more honest organisations.

LOAN SHARKS – PREDATORY MORTGAGE LENDING

Today’s news is full of the UK Government setting up a ‘telephone help line’ for people who are victims of ‘loan sharks to call. How cute ! Isn’t Mr Gordon Brown and his Government such a nice, caring bunch of politicians?

But if they were so concerned about unlicensed door to door loan sharks why didn’t the government do something about them before ? They have always been a nasty bunch of grasping thieves, so what’s new ?

You don’t need a telephone ‘help line’ for an illegal criminal activity of fraud to be dealt with. But you do need the police to get out there and do the job we taxpayers pay them to do. Telephone ‘help lines’ are always a way to keep people like the police busy answering telephone calls and filling out lots of forms and ticking lots of boxes after asking loads of nonsensical and irrelevant questions of the individual conned into making a telephone call to such a useless ‘service’.

All that activity and box ticking helps them meet those ‘targets’ which Gordon Brown’s silly bunch of dangerous twits are so fond of imagining means they are actually doing something useful.

But, just wait a minute . Loan sharks, predatory lending. A dreadful, fraudulent criminal activity to be sure !

So why hasn’t the Government done anything about curbing the fraudulent, dishonest and criminal activities of the banks and other large financial institutions ?

It is the collective behaviour of the entire financial industry which has brought the whole World economy to it’s knees, driving millions of people into poverty, joblessness, homelessness and Gods knows what sewer of other awful deprivations.

Why hasn’t the Government stopped the completely fraudulent nature of that laughingly described ‘sub-prime’ mortgage lending which is what kick-started the World wide financial Crisis in the first place ? Why isn’t the Government doing something about it right now, before it gets even worse ?

After all, sub-prime mortgage lending is just another version of loan sharking. It is a means by which mortgage lenders use fairy tale nonsense finance babble to substitute for honesty and straight dealing. It is deliberately designed to ensnare home buyers into their sub-prime clutches so the banks can extort ludicrous and unrealistic high interest rates, followed by sudden leaps in monthly repayments which the banks know borrowers will find incredibly difficult to meet.

This in turn allows the banks to turn the screws of extortion – just like those criminal loan sharks – by charging huge amounts of extra money based on utter fiction; knowing it will drive the hapless borrowers further into financial oblivion, repossession and homelessness- and almost inevitably joblessness as well; because holding down a job while being thrown out of your home onto the street is a bit of a tricky proposition.

The mortgage lenders say they do everything they can to help people who are in difficulties with their mortgage repayments. But that is a lie. They do nothing of the sort. What they do is to deliberately drive people further and further into financial difficulty. They employ people like teenagers in call centres to ask a standard list of questions, just about exactly the same for every mortgage lender.

These questions are all about ‘have you got the money today. Will you pay your mortgage by credit card now to stop us taking legal action to repossess you’ etc. The nature of the call centre teenagers is obstructive, insulting and meaningless; deliberately designed to be as stressful as possible and making it impossible for the borrower not to sink into a state of severe stress and almost certain depression.

These calls are not about borrowers negotiating the best possible means of being able to maintain their home loan by talking to responsible, mature bank employees with the authority to be able to sort out the best possible solution for the mortgage to be maintained.

One of these unpleasant loan sharks, part of that Lehman Bros empire that sparked the Global Financial Crisis, told a mortgage holder in difficulties, “Nothing you can say to us will make any difference. We are going to repossess your house regardless’.

Doesn’t sound like negotiation to me. Doesn’t sound like doing all they can to help a borrower in genuine difficulties either.

It does sound like the language of a door to door criminal loan shark using whatever threatening behaviour is available to find excuses to extort more and more money out of hapless victims.

When will the Government do something to stop this loan shark mortgage extortion engineered by the banks ?

BANKS ARE VINDICTIVE, WITHOUT CONSCIENCE OR MORALITY, WARPING SOCIETY

Wantonly, viciously, Spitefully, destroying people’s lives and the whole economy as well.

The UK council of Mortgage Lenders reports today that only £700 million worth of new mortgages were lent during January this year. Taking a very approximate average mortgage of £200 000, that represents just 3 500 individual mortgages granted in the UK during January 2009.

I know each month’s figures are different and may increase in later months; they also may not. But this just gives a general indication of where things area heading.

Multiplied by the twelve months of the year that makes just 42 000 individual mortgages granted for the purchase of houses in the UK for the whole of 2009. The level of repossessions alone is already way above 50 000 a year and estimated to be over 70 000 in 2009.

The bottom line is that nearly everyone wanting to sell a house will find it almost impossible to find a buyer, and everyone wanting to buy a house will also find it almost impossible to obtain a mortgage sufficient to fund the purchase.

Which only goes to show that the banks, so obsessed with throwing families out of their homes and onto the streets, are obscenely spiteful, nasty, power crazed and vindictive organisations without conscience, humanity or any sense of human decency, morality or dignity.

The repossessed houses will mostly remain unsold and empty, just like thousands of houses have in America. They will be exposed to deterioration, neglect and vandalism and likely to progressively lose value and become more unsaleable. The homeless families will cost the Government even more money in social housing of some sort. Employment becomes virtually impossible when you become homeless.

The children of those families will be traumatised and suffer lifelong psychological damage, contributing further to the downward spiral of civilisation our society is already suffering from. Entirely thanks to the disgustingly materialistic way of life forced on us by the banks and other financial institutions that set the economic agenda and drive big business to warp society into becoming fiercely, pointlessly, wastefully spendthrift; never giving but a passing thought as to how to wisely spend the fruits of progress, technology, profit and increased leisure.

The banks are just wantonly, viciously, Spitefully, destroying people’s lives and the whole economy as well.

Ever since the spinning Jenny freed workers from unremitting, backbreaking, soulless toil to the potential for a better life, the financiers and accountants have stolen that freedom away from us by continuously inventing new ways of stealing the profits of improved technology and progress, pocketing it for themselves and squandering it in a breathless race to become even more garishly, pointlessly, meaninglessly extravagant.