May 20, 2009

The Mortgage Meltdown in Sum

For decades, everybody who was anybody demanded more mortgage lending to minorities. Skeptics were marginalized and vilified. So, in this decade, we got what we'd been asking for, and we got it good and hard.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

41 comments:

Captain Jack Aubrey said...

Thanks, H.L. Sailer.

Anonymous said...

And we're gonna get more meltdowns, just you wait:

Higher taxes on everything
Gov't "healthcare"
More NAM failures and more NAMs
Constant bailouts of CA and other states
Continuing job losses
More bailouts for the greedsters on Wall St.
Etc, etc., etc...

This does not end well...

Anonymous said...

You put the whole thing in one paragraph right there Steve.


Wouldn't it be better for the government to make its -OWN- mortgage company that automatically garnishes the wages (or disability, welfare, AIFDC checks) of borrowers when legitimate lending companies turn them down, backed by our tax dollars?


What we are doing now is taking over lending companies via regulation by forcing them to lend to the newer, lower IQ'ed populace, and spread the cost around by wrecking packaged mortgages hiding the junk...........nailing everybody's portfolio. I'd have rather have had a 5% tax increase and have kept all the junk on the government's reciept than to spread the virus to all of our IRA's, 401K's, and portfolios.


We should just call it what it is: We are going to move the poor into suburbia so they can assault the lives of the lower and middle class, and YOU are going to pay for it. This way we, the elite, can take back our inner cities and gentrify them like Paris...........and move the scum next to John-the-plumber. Oh, and by the way, we are going to wreck John's IRA in the process so he has to work until he is 68 and not 62---courtesy of the "Great-and-the-Good". Thats my summary, but Im a meanie. M



Its a "financial swine flu", mostly effecting the lives of the resto fo us.

Anonymous said...

Exactly. And that's the saddest and scariest part of all. This was not a fluke, or some unfortunate collision of greed and deregulation, it was completely engineered from the top down based on coercion, lies, and magical thinking.

Baloo said...

A post summing up a whole series is a very good thing. Keep doing it.

Anonymous said...

See what I mean?

http://beeradvocate.com/news/2046897

"Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) and Ranking Member Charles Grassley (R-IA) held a hearing on Tuesday, May 12th on Financing Comprehensive Healthcare Reform. Senator Baucus invited healthcare policy experts, tax policy experts, and economists to join Finance Committee members to discuss the tax and savings options that the Committee should consider as it works to craft a healthcare reform bill. Senators and experts discussed a wide variety of ideas for looking for funding within and outside the healthcare system, including proposals by two of the witnesses to triple the beer tax and to find savings to pay for healthcare."

Anonymous said...

Steve
This is the kind of broad, overreaching statement that gives your critics (e.g. McWhorter and Saletan) the ammunition that they need to villify you amongst those that might otherwise be receptive to HBD. The financial crisis that the US is mired in is a function of many factors, one of which IS debased lending standards. However, other more relevant factors include Greenspan's decision to flood banks with money at ridiciously low rates and deregulation of the government's financial system regulatory apparatus, the consequences of which became apparents when frauds like Madoff and Stanford were exposed.

In fact, I would argue that the line of causation runs the opposite direction of what you insinuate with your post. That is, banks with more money than they knew what to do with, made a willing decision to debase their own lending standards. They did this fully understanding that many of the borrowers on these loans would not be able to pay them back,but that they would still achieve a profit because the loans were guaranteed by the federal government. The banks were the main engine in the ponzi sheme that wrecked the economy.

Anonymous said...

A variation on the Baltimore curmudgeon, Mr. Sailer? Liberalism is the theory that the elites know what the people ought to want, and deserve to give it to them good and hard.

Anonymous said...

Please remind me why racial nationalism is wrong.

rightsaidfred said...

It's called redistribution of wealth, Steve. Buy some vaseline and get used to it.

John Seiler said...

And we're gonna keep getting it good and hard for a long time.

That's what happens when voters blindly put fools and crooks in power for decades.

An econonomist just told me -- I haven't confirmed this yet -- that Asian countries are CUTTING taxes to get out of the Bush Depression. So that'll be another advantage over us.

Anonymous said...

Steve,

Lew Rockwell's resident half-Hispanic is calling you a white supremacist. Must be all this talk about minorities!

Mises blogI savage Sailer because he's a creepy white supremacist with questionable theories

headache said...

Only problem is the bosses in Washington are all part of the crowd who wanted this lending to minorities. And they haven't shown any conversion on the issue. For the time being tight purse string may limit their actions but once the economy rebounds, they are prone to repeat the experiment, mostly out of racial solidarity.

Anonymous said...

One aspect of multiculturalism/diversity highlighted by this crisis - though, of course, unmentionable - is that when a society lowers standards and violates traditional customs and practices, regardless of the reasons, the effects are systemic. Everyone knew these mortgage practices were a joke, and that led to the jettisoning of standards of conduct throughout. Without societal mores, it's every man for himself. Grab what you can. That's our new national credo.

Anonymous said...

I want to live in your fantasy world.

well, not really.

bjdouble said...

I heard a guy in McDonalds arguing for the Sailer thesis . . . it's already gone mainstream.

Anonymous said...

Where are you, Steve?

Anonymous said...

You should write a book about this, providing evidence for the "mortgage meltdown in sum" like you did with Obama. An idea will never get across unless someone coherently presents it in one place.

Hunsdon said...

No one has made a H.L. Mencken "democracy" reference yet?

Anonymous said...

"For the time being tight purse string may limit their actions but once the economy rebounds..."

Optimist.

Hunsdon said...

I could have sworn that Captain Jack's comment was not in place when I made the democracy reference. Color me embarrassed.

Captain Jack Aubrey said...

And having thoroughly wrecked our banking system they are now setting out to do the same to our healthcare system. Awesome.

I cannot think of a single group of people less qualified to run anything than our current Congress. I would not trust them to mow my lawn.

Anonymous said...

Does this mean you are going to stop posting on this topic? I love reading your thoughts, but you have beat that dead horse pretty well by now, haven't you?

rob said...

The mortgage market breaking was not the start of a diversity depression.

Depressions end. The Medicare trustees have an optimistic recent estimate: the Medicare "trust fund" will hit 0 in 2017, two years earlier than their last estimate.

"The financial outlook for the...trust fund is significantly less favorable than projected in last year’s annual report,” the Medicare trustees said. “Actual payroll tax income in 2008 and projected future amounts are significantly lower than previously projected, due to lower levels of average wages and fewer covered workers.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/13/us/politics/13health.html

Gee, what demographic changes might be responsible for lower wages and less health insurance coverage? Is there some group that went from like 3-4% to ~15% of the population in a few decades? Is this a demographic that by and large can aren't able to do more productive work than menial jobs Americans won't do because the work isn't very valuable? The very same population group whose bottomless supply retards labor saving innovations and depresses wages and benefits?

Half of children under 4 are NAMs, if they behave and perform like previous generations of NAMs, and there's plenty of reason to think they'll be even less productive and more criminal, and less employable...

I don't see how WHAMs will be able to support them all in the style to which they've become accustomed.

Or how the country will ever be heavily middle-class republic with a sophisticated, technical economy again.

It seems reasonable to start discussing the option of different nations for different peoples. Peaceful succession is way better than violent succession.

Tanstaafl said...

For decades, everybody who was anybody demanded more mortgage lending to minorities. Skeptics were marginalized and vilified. So, in this decade, we got what we'd been asking for, and we got it good and hard.

The first two sentences are a fair enough summary. The third is a non sequitur. The "we" who asked for this are decidedly distinct from the "we" who are getting it. That distinction deserves clarification, not obfuscation.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous said...
Does this mean you are going to stop posting on this topic? I love reading your thoughts, but you have beat that dead horse pretty well by now, haven't you
?

Hi, FeministX!

Lucius Vorenus said...

Cossack in a Kilt I could have sworn that Captain Jack's comment was not in place when I made the democracy reference.

They use a LIFO stack for comment approval at Blogger/Blogspot - it totally screws up your temporal perception of the comments.

It's a really embarrassing rookie programming mistake.

Captain Jack Aubrey said...

The "we" who asked for this are decidedly distinct from the "we" who are getting it. That distinction deserves clarification, not obfuscation.Well, "we" went along with it, mostly without complaint, did we not? Just like good little Irish schoolchildren scared witless by the members of our "caring professions"?

The frightening thing is that looking at the data our caring classes have gotten fantastically better at brainwashing our kids, while teaching them less of anything useful. Fully 66% of voters 18-29 voted for Obama.

Hunsdon said...

Lucius Vorenus:

Oddly enough, RIGHT AFTER I posted the apologia, I read your explanation of LIFO blogger comment posting on another thread.

I guess we're just slipstreaming through time, here!

silly girl said...

"The frightening thing is that looking at the data our caring classes have gotten fantastically better at brainwashing our kids, while teaching them less of anything useful. Fully 66% of voters 18-29 voted for Obama."

Cap'n Jack,

Students don't need "caring classes"

They need caring parents, like a dad who makes them behave in school and get their homework done. It's also great when parents are literate and can help with the homework.

I remember reading a textbook in grad school that lamented the fact that teaching continues to attract minorities and the bottom of the college educated barrel.

Anonymous said...

"It seems reasonable to start discussing the option of different nations for different peoples. Peaceful succession is way better than violent succession."

Not possible. The Left, which was all for secession when Bush was POTUS (remember Jesusland?) is now violently opposed(see the recent TX dust-up. But oddly enough, the VT secession mov't is not a concern. I wonder why?). The tea parties were laughed at or their were hints that there might be Nazis(!) in attendance.
Behind the Left's laughter and derision is fear. If secession even progresses a bit, the gravy train will go off the tracks. There is no way in hell this is happening without a fight. The Left also wants to make sure that no places are even minimally majority white. If that isn't possible, they'll make sure a population of NAMs is present (Somalis in Lewiston, ME is one such example).

ben tillman said...

Everyone knew these mortgage practices were a joke, and that led to the jettisoning of standards of conduct throughout. Without societal mores, it's every man for himself. Grab what you can. That's our new national credo.


That's the thing about mass immigration: it turns the country into a giant commons. And "grab what you can" is the inevitable response to a commons. See Garret Hardin's original formulation (The Tragedy of the Commons or Matt Ridley's discussion in The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts aned the Evolution of Cooperation).

One fundamental difference between Republican voters and Democrat voters is that Democrats generally view the country as a commons, while Republicans are committed to the perpetuation of the country as a going concern. This ties in with Steve's views on affordable family formation, as those who live where family formation is affordable are more likely to view the country as a going concern, although the arrow of causation can also point in the other direction as those predisposed to the going-concern viewpoint will re-locate to where the environment is more suitable for their productive (and reproductive) project.

Tanstaafl said...

Well, "we" went along with it, mostly without complaint, did we not? Just like good little Irish schoolchildren scared witless by the members of our "caring professions"?

Sounds like something is weighing on your conscience. Good for you.

The "we" that includes myself, my family, and my friends most certainly didn't "go along" with, much less demand more mortgage lending to minorities. Nor did we profit from it. We are however, thanks to the other "we", on the hook to help pay for it all.

And no, when it comes to identifying the significant "we"s who didn't just go along with it but actively pursued it and profited from it - first by lobbying relentlessly for racial favoritism, then by perpetrating fraudulent lending based on that favoritism, then by securitizing and thus laundering that fraud, and finally by engineering taxpayer-funded bailouts and stimuli for themselves - Irish schoolchildren are not anywhere near the top of the list.

Svigor said...

They did this fully understanding that many of the borrowers on these loans would not be able to pay them back,but that they would still achieve a profit because the loans were guaranteed by the federal government. The banks were the main engine in the ponzi sheme that wrecked the economy.You just fingered the federal government, not the banks.

Guarantee all the loans I give, and see how "responsible" I am.

Svigor said...

I heard a guy in McDonalds arguing for the Sailer thesis . . . it's already gone mainstream.I think I heard Rush talking about it the other day, obliquely.

Svigor said...

One fundamental difference between Republican voters and Democrat voters is that Democrats generally view the country as a commons, while Republicans are committed to the perpetuation of the country as a going concern.A very interesting way of putting it. It certainly rings true.

Anonymous said...

And so it begins:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124078772568857401.html

Captain Jack Aubrey said...

Could people here bother to learn how to embed an HTML link, rather than just cutting and pasting the address in their comment? It ain't that difficult. Google "HTML" for instructions.

Paranoid Bitchy Incessant Whiner said...

Captain Jack Aubrey: Could people here bother to learn how to embed an HTML link, rather than just cutting and pasting the address in their comment? It ain't that difficult. Google "HTML" for instructions.

And to think that they call me a paranoid bitchy incessant whiner.

Pshaw.

PS: Make sure to remind them that they need something like an empty space [ASCII 32] after the closing tag "</a>" so as to compensate for the "html parser/filter eats carriage returns after closing tags" bug.

- PBIW

Rex Little said...

I understand how "community redevelopment" arm-twisting led banks to make massive numbers of inferior-grade loans. But that should only have hurt the balance sheets of the banks themselves. What turned it into a meltdown was that the financial community bought securities backed by these toxic loans without discounting for risk. Nobody forced anybody to do that, so far as I know. So how and why did it happen?

Captain Jack Aubrey said...

Nobody forced anybody to do that, so far as I know. So how and why did it happen?

Because the managers minding the businesses were getting paychecks based on profits. Few had any of their own skin in the game. All the incentive was to risk, risk, risk!