Monday Morning Spooks

So many foreclosure jokes.
IBD carries a three page essay that takes us down memory lane to 1994 when Bill Clinton and

10 federal agencies issued a chilling ultimatum to banks and mortgage lenders to ease credit for lower-income minorities or face investigations for lending discrimination and suffer the related adverse publicity. They also were threatened with denial of access to the all-important secondary mortgage market and stiff fines, along with other penalties.

They call it Smoking-Gun Document Ties Policy To Housing Crisis
Do you want to understand why so many places are empty on your block?
Click all three pages.
http://news.investors.com/Article/589858/201110310805/Housing-Crisis-Obama-Clinton-Subprime.htm

http://news.investors.com/Article.aspx?id=589858&p=2

http://news.investors.com/Article.aspx?id=589858&p=3

Another quote:

[HUD] warned lenders who rejected minority applicants with high debt ratios and low credit scores to “be prepared” to prove to federal regulators and prosecutors they weren’t racist. “The Department of Justice is authorized to use the full range of its enforcement authority.”

It took a little more than a decade for the negative effects of the assault on prudent lending to be felt. By 2006, the shaky subprime mortgages began to default. In 2008, the bubble exploded.

Among our 27 condos are now 8 non-HOA-paying ”owners.”*
Think that decimates our bottom line?
No.
A decimation would only be 1-in-10 non-payers!
This is FAR worse!

*Some of these ”owners” not only are not paying their dues, they are also not paying their property taxes or their mortgages.
Thus the scare quotes.

@liberalmann: You said:

This opened up the sub prime mortgage mess to illegal aliens and contributed to the explosion of minority homeownership that ended so badly.

Once again, you speak of that which you do not know.

Nationally, for loans more than 90 days in arrears, ITIN mortgages had a delinquency rate of about 0.5% last year, compared with 9.3% for subprime mortgages, according to independent estimates. Source

The reason for this is simple, in order to get an ITIN mortgage the credit history scrutiny is much more strict than that of conventional Social Security mortgages.

getting an ITIN mortgage is harder than that of getting a conventional property finance loan. People with the ITIN ordinarily have a credit standing that’s documented. Because of this, the typical history perform needed giving this type of mortgage is a bit more difficult and even more frustrating than for a conventional property finance loan. In addition, charges and home interest rates are usually higher than for other sorts of personal loans in an effort to recompense loan providers for your extra trouble and additional threat. – Source

Lastly, ITINs were not ever bought by Fannie or Freddie.

In spite of their strong performance, ITIN mortgages were never purchased by government sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. – Source

Now I am not going to pretend that I am in favor of illegal aliens receiving mortgages, but if you are going to point to them as the reason or at least a contributing reason for the market meltdown of 2008, then I felt it pertinent to point out your folly.

I don’t think we need to delve back into the fact that while Barney Frank was telling anyone who would listen to him that there was no problem with Fannie or Freddie, the Bush administration tried to call for investigations into the GSEs, but the Democrats would have none of it.
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