Honest Banks are as hard to find as a Sasquatch.

Bank
Bank (Photo credit: 401(K) 2013)

In the last couple of years, since the financial crash of 2008, I keep coming to the conclusion that, yes it was the bankers.

Sure the Flippers were making money by inflating the value of property, so they could resell it at the inflated prices.  Sure there were appraisers who verified that the inflated prices were normal while getting money from both sides.  Sure the banks knew, for some time, that this was going on but, the housing market was flush so, who would suspect that all these worthless mortgages, the ones that the banks bundled up and sold to other financial organizations, would one day deflate and cause a vacuum that would reach around the world.

Not the bankers, who had made money hand over fist.  They tied to get all of their loans back by upping the rates on other people’s loans, and in some cases causing the failure of more mortgages.  As the tremor spread, and the bankers found their landscape riddles with sinkhole mortgages, the wanted to get the holes filled.  They could not, of course, go the the very people they were now foreclosing on so, they went to the people they had helped put into office…  The Politicians.  The controllers of the Federal money mill.

There was an argument about whether to give them a bailout, or not.  It soon became apparent that to deny them the money would only hurt the people who worked for these organizations, and not the people who made the disaster.  It was then decided to give the money to those institutions that were “too big to fail”.  This did not mean that they could not fail, as the were indeed falling on their faces, it only meant that their failure would create even more havoc on the financial world.

A couple of months after this all started to come apart there was an article in the Sarasota Herald, the same paper that had warned us about flipping, and some the the people who had been doing it, telling about an interview with a woman who worked for the banks.  It seemed that her job was to give seminars to local law enforcement and train them about how to detect people who were trying to defraud the banks.  Yes, they already knew there was fraud afoot but, since they were making money off of this fraud, they did not care.  It was only when it became apparent that this fraudulent inflating of the property prices was now jabbing them in the butt that they took notice..

They got some of the holes filled in, with the bailout money, but that was not quite all of the holes.  They then started mass foreclosures as there were more people now, having lost their jobs as their companies went out of business due to the collapse cause by the banks, who could not pay their mortgages…

One of the results was that they could not foreclose fast enough, some people said that the faster the homes were seized and resold the faster the market would recover, so the banks, and their agents, started what has been called “robo signers” where the NUMEROUS Vice-Presidents at the bank, some of whom just started working there, were verifying large numbers of foreclose documents.  Document they indicated were correct, and accurate.  This in spit of the admissions, by some of the signers, that they signed so many of them that the had little, or not chance, to either verify the information or even understand it.

These foreclosures, and the fraudulent filings, got so bad that some of the Judges began to notice, and some even reacted by slowing the rate of foreclosures.  Since then the Sarasota Harald has written that those caught with fraudulent information, instead of getting censured and their case dismissed with prejudice, were told to go back and refill.  Lets say to student, the banker and the student, both got caught cheating on a test…  They both swore that their answers were accurate and their own but, the teacher discovered that they had both made up their answers, in the hope the teacher would have so many test that he would not pay attention to theirs.  The regular student gets a failure grade and a trip to the office while the banker gets told to re-write his test minus the false answers.

Back to the falsified information inserted into court documents…  Some of the banks have gotten fines for this… though probably not many…  So what do the do?  They list the fines as “expense of doing business” and take it off the taxes, so the taxpayer is now bailing them out AGAIN.

Is there any surprise that Jesus tossed the “money changers” out of the church, or that he would feel that way about them?  NO..

Most of us have to take responsibility for out actions but, if you are a banker, who gives large campaign contributions, not so much..

If the average person where to do what the bankers have done he would be hounded into jail.  If anything happens to the average banker, such as a fine, he just gets the taxpayer to cover it when he takes it off his taxes as an “expense of doing business”.

The small business man who drives his company into the ground loses everything while the banker just gets the taxpayers to bail him out and his company gives him a big bonus…

Why is it only the small guy who has to be responsible?

Thanks,

That Joe Guy.

 

 

 

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By Joseph Bowen

Ex SSgt in Air Force Security Police... I had 10 years of active duty and inactive reserve. I have a total of 20 years, includes Air Force SP, security experience. I also worked 8 years and 4 months in the Garden Center of the Sarasota Cattleman Walmart. I also took the CCNA class at Sarasota Vo-Tech, when it was still called that. I am now, since 2010 a caregiver for my Mother. While I am now a registered Republican I am more likely to vote for whichever person I believe will do a better job.. In the last presidential elections I voted Libertarian, as I the two main choices seemed to be between lying crook, or an uncouth babler who could not be trusted.

2 comments

  1. When banks get too big, they’re just like people with inflated egos. I saw this start to happen when I first started working in the late 1950’s. Sort of culmination of in flated egos happened when banks were allowed to operate nationally. What do we see then? Failures, more mergers, increased costs of OUR doing business with them, lack of interest paid back to the depositor and so on, and so on. It’s always the small depositor that gets the crappy end of the stick. It’s one of the dark things that comes from being a “free society”. Sort of like that saying; “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” (Ever been to one of those “free dunch/dinner” affairs? If you follow their advice, you’ll just be losing more money…) It’s called “Bait & Switch”. Local laws do nothing to protect you from these slight-of-hand theives. Yup — banks want your money, but they don’t want to give you anything in return. What else is new??

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    1. Since Mom is now giving me an alloance, to care for her, I thought it might be a good idea to transfer some of my money over to BoA. This was so I coule get my allowance out of her account and just deposit it into my account rather than have to then travel over to Wells Fargo to deposit it…. Well most of my money is over at BoA, except what I transfer between the two accounts.. I had one of those annual things come up of about $19. I had pretty much forgotten about it as it is an annual, and automatic, thing… So Wells Fargo paid it and charged me $35 for paying $19.90…By the time I had found out about it they had already taken the money out,, so I had a minus $55 balance…

      Talk about greedy indeference…

      Like

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