New Orleans

I also get why so many were lined up against her:  first, she’s an equal-opportunity offender zinging left, right and in-between on the issues whether banks or unions, and, secondly, she’s an iconoclastic feminist arguing a totally womanist line with women and children in front, but questioning the normally unchallenged assumptions about women in the workplace.  That’s a deadly set of variables for any political calculation.  No doubt she only got this far because most people – like me! – didn’t ever bother to read the book!

Some examples:

• She zings Citibank before the meltdown for an average mortgage interest rate of about 17% and in a tell-all story relates the tale of a one-day consulting gig she did for them about bankruptcy and families in which she argued that Citi should simply not lend to people overstretched, and a senior executive dismissed the entire argument because jacking the overextended with more products and predatory interest rates was essentially their golden goose and business model.
• She tells a moving story of a meeting with Hilary Clinton as a former First Lady and how quickly Clinton got the importance of opposing the passage of a proposed new corporate-backed bankruptcy law and committed her support to the fight, but then once elected as a U.S. Senator from New York, turned around completely to support her new constituency on Wall Street rather than women.  She everything but says that Clinton and senior Senator Chuck Schumer were bought and paid for by campaign contributions.
• She comes out for universal school vouchers and total school choice for good reasons perhaps, but based on the fuzziest of political and economic premises about what would really create “equity” in school offerings, all of which must have driven the teacher unions up a wall.

Generally she drives the hammer hard on the nail.

Over-consumption is roundly dismissed as the economic trigger of the debt crises, which she argues sprang directly from middle class parents trying to find two critically essential things for their children:  good schools and safety.  In the midst of a national education crises and too often random urban crime, both parents were not only forced to work, but also ended up doubling down on inflated house mortgages in the best school districts:  the two-income trap.  Unfortunately, doing so eliminated in the Warrens argument, the historic bench strength of having a reserve worker ready (the wife) that could go to work in a crisis brought on my job loss, medical bills, or family breakups.  Folks were already stretched over the line so tautly that the least twist and they were pulled under.

I can’t say how happy I was to read this book and find out that Elizabeth Warren is fellow traveler on the citizen wealth bus.  I could go on and on, but every once in a while it’s such a pleasure to go back to the first sources and find with total surprise that someone is even better than I could have imagined.

Props to President Obama for stepping up and finding a way for Warren to work in the White House and make the Consumer Financial Protection Agency happen!  The beginnings always prejudice the ends, so she’s in the right space, regardless of whether or not she can run the show.  Better to have a toe smasher than a tiptoe dancer protecting the financial futures of desperate families!

New Orleans

Here’s a big mound of poppycock piled on top of balderdash.  The nerve!

An article the New York Association of Mortgage Brokers managed to spin into the Times last week was a classic example of criminal types without remorse.  The number of times, now depressingly well documented, that mortgage brokers scammed unsuspecting borrowers with flannel mouthed tales about their supposedly fixed interest rate only for them later to learn a couple of years down the line that their rates were adjustable and ballooning, is now inestimable.

The number of times that borrowers found that brokers had puffed up their income in “stated income” loans to justify mortgages that were preposterously unaffordable has also exceeded calculation.

The real shame is not the extra three days, because many of the scam artists, that the broker associations and lenders do little to curtail and police, will simply talk their way around the obvious in these situations for borrowers desperate with desire for credit.  The real shame is that there still is not some mandatory borrower counseling available to assist in assuring that fairness exists, the law has been upheld, and the interests for the borrower come first, rather than last on this list.

If we are going to call the law “Truth in Lending,” then it’s time to back the title up with action.