Banks These Days

Older folks like to rattle on about “kids these days”, how reckless and irresponsible and even cruel they are. Sounds a lot like banks these days.

Sure, it’s terrible that kids these days have no manners and don’t appreciate anything they do have, but we really do have bigger problems in the raw immorality of America’s banking institutions. America’s banks are reckless and irresponsible. They screw things up and mom and dad are expected to pay for them. Mom and dad being America’s taxpayers. They’re also cruel bullies – the sort of cruel bullies who offer vulnerable families and lonely little old ladies mortgages at one rate, then keep raising their rates until they can’t pay up, then kick them to the curb.

And if that wasn’t enough, they then decide to just bulldoze that family’s home, grandma’s home.

Why? Because. That’s why.

Daft right-wingers may cover for banks by claiming that the onus is on the homebuyers who should have realized they couldn’t pay for their home in the first place. With right-wingers, the onus is always on the poor and vulnerable, never the rich and mighty.

Let’s take a look at what’s really happened to everyday people whose homes are being foreclosed. Since grandma’s so sweet and nice and lovable, we’ll use grandma as an example.

Grandma wants a home. She gets offered an adjustable rate mortgage by a savvy banker who tells her it’ll make it easier for her to pay off her mortgage. Her initial rates will be much lower than they would be otherwise, and she’ll have more time to save up for her later rates. He assures her that her rate won’t be adjusted more than a half-percent, maybe a percent. As time passes, however, grandma discovers that the banker’s assurances were as empty as the poor box in the Church of Capitalism. Her rates don’t go up a half-percent, or a percent. Instead, they double. Grandma can’t pay this new rate. Impossible.

Grandma was offered a mortgage that was affordable for her. Then the bank adjusted the details of her mortgage so dramatically that grandma couldn’t pay anymore. So they kicked her out.

Thankfully, grandma has you, so she just barely escapes homelessness. Her home, some time later, gets bulldozed by the bank. No home for grandma, no home for anyone. What’s the bank’s explanation for this egregious behavior? There are too many homes. Too many homes!

Homelessness is on the rise in many parts of America, but according to the bank who threw grandma out of her home and later bulldozed it, the problem is that there are too many homes. Makes you wonder about those fancy schmancy business, economics, and finance degrees, eh? Well, if you judge the success of America’s education programs on how well America’s finance industry works for everyone, then clearly they’re a failure. If you judge them on how well they work for banks, clearly they’re a success, because the dough, the cash, the proverbial green, just keeps rolling in for them.

Bait and switch is when a business offers you one product in order to get  you to cough up cash for it, then switches the product on you and gives you something entirely different. They promise you one thing, and give you another.

That’s a form of fraud and the authorities have chosen to stand idly by and let the big banks carry on with this dirty business. Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court, your state government and local government are sitting around while this sort of things goes on.

Great job, guys. God bless America.