Asset Protection Blog

The truth is the lenders got everyone into these contracts at inflated values on false pretenses (the market will always go up) which, as they are the financial professionals, is simple hog-wash. Financial experts know all about market cycles. They also know what happens when you flood the markets with easy money. To say a borrower is to blame for taking them up on their bogus offer to get into a predatory contract is just being intellectually lazy and once again blaming the victim. Sure people took advantage, sure there were some who behaved badly, either out of ignorance or self interest, but who set them up to do that? If you don’t want people defaulting on loans you should not lend them 1million dollars at 1500$ a month and then be surprised when they cannot pay more than the 1500$ you qualified them to pay.

Read Albert Edwards piece on this blog about how the central banks have stripped the wealth of the middle class out to the top .01% in the last 20 years. You can miss the big picture watching the minutia.

More importantly, when the commentators blame the public for the planned and implemented wrong doing of the power players who control the money and the rules, then it just continues to obscure the underlying truth which is that the entire nation has just been sold down the river.

Consider this: The banks got everyone into overinflated contracts for payment that were unsustainable. Then they sold those same unsustainable contracts to the managers of the borrowers’ retirement funds as “investments” – then they bet on the failure of those same investments, against their own clients (the fund managers who bought the MBSs) and on EVERY front they made a profit and everyone else lost.

Read William Black’s work on Control Fraud. Get a grasp of the whole picture. This is not a reason to start blaming various sectors of our population for something that is systemic and pre-meditated.

Where Matt Taibbi gets it right is that he doesn’t let people get away with missing the underlying facts. He does what any real investigator MUST do: he follows the money.

If you want to blame your neighbor for falling for a teaser rate easy entry scam, so be it but you won’t find me joining you in that. I’ve spent way too much time in the trenches here and I can tell you that for every person who “took advantage” by getting what they THOUGHT was a great deal and a personal windfall – (which, by the way they have now lost everything because of) there are twenty more who were just hard working people with no real concept of financial reality who bought a house based on what they were TOLD they would be able to afford – to refinance later into something better.

Between the FDIC loss share program and the HAMP and TARP and HAFA and HOPE and all the rest the lenders are now making a PROFIT on their foreclosures and short sales at the tax payers and home owners expense.

And who ever does not understand that this is why banks should be public utilities, and/or should be so highly regulated that they cannot use their own money to bet against their own clients, or to steal blindly from their customers still has not grasped what has happened here and is now happening all over the world.

The people of Iceland got it right: We didn’t make the loans, we didn’t insure the investments – we didn’t have anything to DO with this money shenanigans – and STILL their elected officials are at the table trying to “negotiate” a settlement on debts that they had no part of.

When you combine that with the blatant theft of the wealth of the world through loan sharking and debt impoverishment of nations that has been going on for decades it is no wonder the entire system is on the verge of collapse. It deserves to fail. And the bankers who perpetrated this madness and greed belong in jail. Period.

Everyone compares this to the 1930s but in the 1930s there was a response by government that put people in jail. Today we are still paying the crooks who stole the money in the first place. Front loaded predatory loans that made a profit at the start of the scam are now back ended FDIC loss share foreclosures making them more profits on the back end.

The sad truth is that the only way this could have happened is if we had a population so woefully uneducated about money and finances (who all grew up in the brave new world of credit cards and monthly payments – arguably the logical extension of a government now set on harvesting the working capital of its people in income taxes – who do not comprehend that indebtedness is financial slavery – and you offer them what to them looks like a workable payment – for something that seems incredible – they trust you and take it.

To suggest that the fault of this massive extortion is to be laid at the feet of the borrowers is like saying children who are allowed to feed themselves a diet of candy all day are responsible for having no teeth. Sure the borrowers are not children, but in this case they are ignorant of higher level finance. That is why the laws that require borrowers to provide disclosure are so critical.

There are plenty of studies out from the people bothering to ask the questions that show that our brains do not manage the concepts of debt and payments and wealth building and asset management well without some extensive trainging and education – and our education system does exactly NOTHING in this regard; which means the vast majority of Americans are financial illiterates. It may not be popular to say so, but it is the truth. Seventy five percent of Americans recently polled could not tell you what percentage of 8 was equal to 2.

The difference between human and beasts is supposed to be our higher intellect. If we refuse to use it when confronting such major issues as this and instead turn to scape goating and finger pointing and ‘common sense’ where none exist then we are doomed to go right down the road they are making ready for us into complete neo-feudlism. I for one am not going.

Every single major media outlet is owned by the multi-national corporations. Every one. Read the blogs, read the independent thinkers. Let the media talk to themselves – and don’t let them get away with blaming the people for what has been a perfectly orchestrated global heist of the first order.

All the laws with Zero Tolerance are more about vengeance then actual working justice to improve our human flaws.