Okay, this should make a lot people extremely angry.
Remember Countrywide Financial? If it walked and breathed, that was good enough for them to give it a mortgage. Of course, many of those mortgages have died a horrible death. Well, not quite.
A NY Times article illustrates how former Countrywide executives are making a killing on the same market they destroyed.
More after the fold.
A quick excerpt to get the blood boiling:
Stanford L. Kurland, Countrywide’s former president, and his team of former company executives have been buying up delinquent home mortgages that the government took over from other failed banks, sometimes for pennies on the dollar. They get a piece of what they can collect.
"It has been very successful — very strong," John Lawrence, the company’s head of loan servicing, told Mr. Kurland one morning last week in a glass-walled boardroom here at PennyMac’s spacious headquarters, opened last year in the same Los Angeles suburb where Countrywide once flourished.
"In fact, it’s off-the-charts good," he told Mr. Kurland, who was leaning back comfortably in his white leather boardroom chair, even as the financial markets in New York were plunging.
This is insane. These are the guys that helped to create the crisis we now face...they made millions inflating the bubble and now their making millions more from the wreckage of that bubble.
The actions of these people is actually helping in some cases, but it is infuriating:
It is quite evident that their efforts — and the nascent government program to encourage other private investors to work with lenders — are, in fact, helping many distressed homeowners.
"Literally, their assistance saved my family’s home," said Robert Robinson, of Felton, Pa., whose interest rate was cut by more than half, making his mortgage affordable again, even though he recently lost his job.
But to some, it is distressing turn of events to see the Countrywide team, led by Mr. Kurland, in the business again.
"It is sort of like the arsonist who sets fire to the house and then buys up the charred remains and resells it," said Margo Saunders, a lawyer with the National Consumer Law Center, which for more than a decade has sought to place limits on abusive lending practices.
So what should be done?
If these people haven't actually committed a crime, they can't be prosecuted for being greedy little bastards. However, maybe they can be held liable for civil damages for knowingly creating bad loans. Then the current money they are making can be scooped up to be used for good.
It just makes me sick to see the same greedy shits make even more money on the same disaster they created.