Honest Banks are as hard to find as a Sasquatch.

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?


That Joe Guy.




Honest Bankers?

The Cave
Image via Wikipedia

I once heard a Fairy Tale  about an Honest Banker and a Hill TrollThe Troll, lets call him Bill, went to the Honest Banker, lets call him Steve, and said, “I want to borrow money so I can fix up my Cave, sell it, and move into one under a bridge.  There is a real nice one not far from here that is under an eight lane overpass, but I just don’t have enough money for it right now.”

Steve said to Bill, “fill out these papers, get an appraisel from Inflated Property Appraisers, and come back to see me”.

So Bill took his forms, went to the Inflated Property Appraisers and came back the next week.  Steve looked at the papers..  HHHHMMMM.  Bill would never be able to pay the load back, and with this market he would never be able to sell his old cave so, when you ran out of money they could sell the mortgages to some other schmuck.   Steve looked at Bill, “this will be fine, here is your money”, and gave him a check.

Bill went off and bought his new Cave.  Later, since he was not able to sell the old cave, the two mortgages eat up his saving, and he was foreclosed on, and had to move into a sewer pipe.

What? you say.  Where is the Honest Banker?

I told you this was a Fairy Tale..  you should remember, there is NO SUCH THING AS AN HONEST BANKER.

Bill, on the other hand, may be living in a Sewer Drain near you.