Banks aren’t issuing loans to the taxpayers who bailed them out.
I’m a woman of principle. Among my many principles is the very determined avoidance of purchasing German products. Some people tell me to get over it, the war is over, the Germans aren’t what they used to be. But the Holocaust is very much alive in people of my generation and our parents, who barely survived and lived to tell the tale. So I won’t buy a Krups coffeemaker, let alone get a mortgage from Deutsche Bank.
Another dictum I have followed my entire adult life is, don’t trust Wall Street. Don’t put your life savings in stocks, not even a 401(k). Many friends have mocked me over the years, pointing to their growing fortune as it was being nurtured by people whose job it was to become rich from investments, not to help their clients accumulate wealth. I’ve never trusted those greedy bastards, and I’ve been vindicated in recent months.
So my husband and I have put all our life savings into real estate. Not speculative investments, just our own home,, which is our nest egg for our looming retirement. The latest mortgage we got, when we refinanced our home a couple of years ago, was from Wachovia Bank. Soon after we signed the papers, Wachovia sold our mortgage to Deutsche Bank.
In September of last year, Congress handed out billions of dollars to banks so they could help homeowners survive the crisis and not lose everything to foreclosure. The Troubled Assets Relief Program, or TARP, used taxpayer money to bail out banks. And we all know how well that went. Wall Street executives paid themselves $18 billion in end-of-year bonuses and are refusing to lend money to homeowners. And Congress is helpless, because the money was given with no strings attached, no oversight. It’s Congress’ fault, and it will take a long time to fix this problem.
I looked up Deutsche Bank on the list of TARP recipients, and the German bank isn’t listed, unless it’s there under a different name, for a subsidiary or holding company. The bank is refusing to talk to me and has referred me to a collection agency, HomeQ Servicing.
I called HomeQ and was asked by a very rude person "How much do you have to pay?" — to which I said, you know how much I have to pay, you’re the collection agency. After arguing for a good five minutes, I realized the woman was asking how much money I could afford to pay (if HomeQ needs an editor to go over those phone scripts, I’m available). Twenty minutes later, having dissected my entire financial record, I was informed that I didn’t qualify for a loan modification. I argued, she re-checked her figures and she insisted that I didn’t qualify. First she said I had too much money, then she said I didn’t have enough.
So much for never giving your money to Wall Street. You’re damned if you do, and you’re screwed royally if you don’t.
I can’t even call Rep. George Miller (my Congressman) to ask him to intervene on my behalf, because Deutsche Bank hasn’t received TARP.
So here we are, hard-working, tax-paying, responsible citizens who have always done everything by the book, and we’re looking at retiring into poverty (if we can even afford to retire at all).
President Obama said this week that executives of financial institutions that have received TARP should be paid no more than $500,000 a year, a mere $100,000 more than the President of the United States earns. The indignation out of Wall Street, "that’s not enough money!" is an insult to millions of people who are in the same Titanic as my family. Not enough for what?
Democrats in Congress are impotent. The stimulus package, now in front of them, has been reduced to a joke, with a huge chunk of it going to ... tax credits for the rich. Don’t they know they won the election? Tax credits, along with the whole myth of trickle-down Reagonomics, have already been debunked as a way to stimulate the economy and create jobs.
Milton Friedman was wrong, Paul Krugman is right, and one doesn’t need to be an economist to see which one of these Nobel laureates didn’t deserve his prize.
The only thing we can do is call our elected officials and demand that they do their jobs and force banks to release TARP funds to homeowners. Ours is not an isolated case, so we hope enough people call, send letters, e-mail or faxes to D.C. and remind the politicians that they work for us and we can take them out just as easily as we voted them in.