Of all the bad lenders who brought their crummy loan products to the subprime marketplace, Countrywide was the worst. I witnessed with my own eyes time and again as the Countrywide lending machine gave regular people very expensive loans in amounts and on terms which it knew could never be repaid. When they defaulted, Countrywide simply crushed them.

Countrywide made a lot of loans in Northeast Pennsylvania, fitting as we were subprime long before it came into vogue.

Countrywide did not lend just to poor people in Pennsylvania. You might remember it made a very famous loan to Senator Chris Dodd who, amazingly, never knew anything about it. He was apparently so poor he could not even afford to remember stuff.

Countrywide also made a whole bunch of loans to the people at Fannie Mae but these looked pretty good in terms of rates and terms. This article even names the Fannie Mae guys who got them.

One has to wonder, why would they do this?

First I felt kind of bad for these Fannie Mae borrowers. Maybe the Fannie Mae executives were poor too, or working middle class, like the people I represented who had Country wide loans. Maybe they took the loans because they were not too educated about finance. If that’s the case, I really feel sorry for them, because Countrywide might eventually have been pretty hard on them, just like it was on my clients.

But wait… the article says that these were Fannie Mae executives, some of them making as much as 21 million dollars a year. That’s not really very poor, even where all my middle class clients shop. That kind of pay should let them squeak by until the end of the month.

And wait again….these borrowers were not financial illiterates like many of my clients. Google ‘Jamie Gorelick’, one of those names I hear almost every time something bad happens. She really gets around where there is money to be found. A Harvard girl, this bad penny did a good job running Fannie Mae right into the ground and helping to costing us taxpayers 84 Billion dollars.
That’s “B” as in billions.

It’s “B” as in bribes.

If the machinations of our self appointed too deeply engrained aristocracy continue without being addressed, our country is headed to ruin. We are permitting this to happen.