Charles Gasparino writes about the mortgage bailout in today’s NY Post. I’m so glad I’m bailing out deadbeats who tried to play the housing market and failed.
By borrowing far more heavily than what they could afford, they were also gambling that housing would keep rising in value, defying basic rules of economics.
Now they’re being rewarded for their mistakes. Ironically, even the government officials who were part of the deal have privately conceded that, with few exceptions, more than 95 percent of the so-called victims weren’t victims at all; they faced imminent foreclosure because they were delinquent on their mortgage payments — often for a year or more.
Or as banking analyst Dick Bove put it: “What this settlement did was to help 1 million people who were deadbeats.”
And why is there a settlement? A technicality being used to demonize evil bankers.
Why are these deadbeats getting bailouts? Aside from election-year politics, at issue is the foreclosure practice known as “robo signing” — a procedure in which low-level bank employees, without direct authorization, approve perfectly legal foreclosures on a bank’s behalf.
The foreclosures themselves were legal; the only apparent illegality is that the banks streamlined the foreclosure process, with clerks signing the bank officer’s name on legal documents.
Just as “Cash for Clunkers” destroyed the used car market, this bailing out of the undeserving–I’ll bet you only a tiny fraction who get the bailouts will be people who actually have problems due to the economy screwing with their job–is going to continue to depress the housing market. So good to know that I’ve played by the rules, worked hard, saved until I could buy my own home–and then get to pay the government to pay for the houses of others who have done the complete opposite.
And why should I pay my mortgage if there’s a good chance the government will take care of it if I don’t?
If one wanted to risk sounding like an old fogey, because it’s the right thing to do. I suppose that there are an awful lot of people around now to whom that sentence would make no sense at all.