Modification blunders bedevil U.S. housing recovery - Yahoo! News
Three years after the foreclosure crisis began, the process to apply for a loan modification remains a bureaucratic nightmare that is complicating the housing recovery and could dull the impact of any Obama administration initiatives in the works.
The administration's biggest foreclosure-prevention effort, the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), targeted to help 3 million to 4 million homeowners, has reached only about a quarter of that since its 2009 inception.
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Thanks to Fred Pilot for the link to this update on the failed HAMP program. The basic premise of this approach was that the banks would voluntarily enter into loan modifications if the government gave them monetary incentives to do so. That premise has proved to be mistaken. There is no way banks will do anything voluntarily unless it makes them bigger and richer. The fact that they have been bailed out by the taxpayers from the costs of their own mistakes is of no consequence to them. They just want more.
2 comments:
> There is no way banks will do anything voluntarily
> unless it makes them bigger and richer.
> The fact that they have been bailed out
> by the taxpayers from the costs of
> their own mistakes is of no consequence to them.
> They just want more.
The idea that corporations have no moral obligations to anyone other than their shareholders is what makes them a thing of beauty to conservatives and libertarians.
Corporations have no social duty
Except to those who own their stock
…
Corporations are amoral
Corporate conscience is impossible
The corporation really has no choice
...
So if you want your freedom
Let the corporate seize the day
There really is no better way
-- The Milton Friedman Choir
If corporations were people, this lack of conscience, empathy, morality, (to some) a soul *, etc., would make corporations, by definition, sociopaths.
Oh wait? Corporations are people?! Is concentrating more wealth and power into the hands of sociopaths a good idea?
As a reader of "The Daily [Ron] Paul" put it, "we made up fictitious entities and exempted them from the chains that bind normal people."
I find it interesting that the two most influential novelists among the libertarian/Tea Party movement are Ayn Rand and Robert Heinlein, yet they had diametrically opposed viewpoints on the individual's role in and moral obligations to the larger society they lived in. Contrast the motives of the protagonists in "Atlas Shrugged" to "Starship Troopers" (the book, not the movie).
* There's a sign that's popular at the "Occupy" protests that says "I'll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one." Perhaps "I'll believe corporations are people when God lets one into Heaven" might be more appropriate for the audience the sign-holders are trying to persuade.
"I admire its purity. A survivor... unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality."
is
(a) a disciple of Ayn Rand describing corporations
(b) science officer Ash describing the xenomorph in the 1979 movie "Alien"
(c) all of the above
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