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Post a Comment On: Steve Sailer: iSteve

"A surprisingly sophisticated GOP report on the Mortgage Meltdown"

11 Comments -

1 – 11 of 11
Anonymous Anonymous said...

There is nobody good in this story: knaves, frauds, thieves, fools, opportunists, shakedown artists, race hustlers, sociopaths, egomaniacs, and political wirepullers. I am reminded of the title of Hunter Thompson's book, "Generation of Swine."

A phony sympathy for minorities covers the whole mix in the same way that an oil spill coats the detritus on a beach with gooey slime.

Like Diogenes, we search in vain for an honest man.

7/8/09, 7:46 PM

Anonymous RKU said...

Well, since I notoriously have a one-track mind, what jumped out at me was something in the last quoted paragraph of Steve's very long excerpt from the Republican report, which he praised so highly:

"...nearly one-in-ten Latino homeowners said they had missed a mortgage payment or were unable to make a full payment, while 3 percent said they have received a foreclosure notice in the past year..."

Now 30 seconds with Google allowed me to find the overall national figures based on data from the Bankers' Association:

"Apparently 7.88% of all home mortgages nationally are delinquent, and 3.30% are currently in foreclosure."

Offhand, wouldn't this seem to indicate that the Latino deliquency/foreclosure figures are roughly comparable to the national average, maybe somewhat higher, but not enormously so?

Furthermore, we must remember---as Steve endlessly emphasizes---that Latino home-buying was very heavily concentrated in the "Sand States" such as CA, AZ, NV, and FL, which have delinquency/foreclosure levels enormously higher than the national average. Wouldn't this tend to indicate that Latino homeowners generally have *lower* delinquency/foreclosure rates than their non-Latino neighbors?

I think Steve and the Republicans may have just blown up the "Diversity Mortgage Meltdown" theory without realizing it...

I'm not some king of fanatic pro-Latino lunatic...just someone who likes to follow a Reality-Based model.

7/8/09, 8:10 PM

Anonymous CJ said...

Long read Steve. I'm still digesting it, but I think you forgot to paste in a quote from the report that you intended to include. It's after the colon in this section.

During those years, Wall Street firms rushed into take over the traditional role of the GSEs. They were egged on by the Bush Administration's October 15, 2002 White House Conference on Increasing Home Ownership, where Bush called for adding 5.5 million more minority homeowners through, in effect, zero downpayment liar loans. The GOP report argues:

The GOP report doesn't go that far ...

7/8/09, 9:56 PM

Blogger John Anello said...

The role of the ratings agencies in the debacle is grossly underestimated. S&P, Moody’s, and Fitch were rating mortgage backed securities with the same amount of discrepancy used by Chicago meat packing inspectors in 1906.

These rating agencies remain in business despite their reckless behavior because SEC regulations require that institutions receive their ratings from a nationally recognized statistical rating organization. Becoming an NRSRO is very difficult, again because of SEC regulation.

So the ratings agencies are basically government sponsored monopolies immune from free market consequences for their mistakes. Anyone still think it was the free market that failed?

7/8/09, 10:03 PM

Blogger Xtra Laj said...

"I'm not some king of fanatic pro-Latino lunatic...just someone who likes to follow a Reality-Based model."

Good point raised. Would like to hear Steve respond, but I think that the numbers you are citing are very compatible with the Hispanic population being a sizable part of national foreclosures and driving the national statistics. But whether that is the case would require us to see how the data you are using and the data Steve is using overlap.

7/9/09, 3:52 AM

Blogger silly girl said...

"I'm not some king of fanatic pro-Latino lunatic...just someone who likes to follow a Reality-Based model."

RKU,

I think the main difference is the percent of total dollars of default which does not necessarily mirror the exact percent of defaults. This hard data presented by Steve shows the impact of minority defaults. Also, when the lending institutions report numbers, they are based on actually counting the defaults and counting the total mortgages. These are not random phone surveys where people can lie.

7/9/09, 7:19 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Republicans are intelligent when they're out of power. They're idiots when they're in power.

Democrats are idiots in and out of power.

There's your choice, America.

7/9/09, 9:57 AM

Blogger John Seiler said...

The GOP report also neglects:

1) The debasement of the currency by Greenspan-Bush, causing gold to triple in price after 9/11.

2) The role of state and local governments in advancing shaky mortgages to minorities. In the mid-2000s, Republican Gov. Schwarzenegger signed a bill advancing such easy loans. What other states did so? Somebody should research this.

7/9/09, 12:52 PM

Blogger Eric said...

Apparently 7.88% of all home mortgages nationally are delinquent, and 3.30% are currently in foreclosure.

I think "missed a mortgage payment" and "delinquent" aren't exactly the same thing. If I don't make a payment in March and then use my tax return in April to make my account current I have missed a payment but I'm not delinquent (at least as of April).

7/9/09, 1:28 PM

Blogger Toadal said...

Gainer and Sturm said "Supreme Court's 5-to4 decision... perpetuates profound misconceptions about the capacity of paper-and-pencil tests to gauge a person’s potential on the job."

How else to access how quickly and accurately a candidate can grasp firefighting efficiency while making life and death decisions, besides a paper-and-pencil test? How do we qualify a bookkeeper, a programmer, or an anesthesiologist?
We use Civil Service paper-and-pencil tests to select the most highly qualified candidates; to do otherwise would lead to a weaker, poorer, and more corrupt nation.

Maybe I'm laughing my way to disaster
Maybe my race has been run
Maybe I'm blind to the fate of mankind
But what can be done?

So God bless the goods we was given
And God bless the U. S. of A.
And God bless our standard of livin'
Let's keep it that way


Paul Simon - Have a Good Time

7/12/09, 10:42 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Congress granted HUD the authority to adjust these three affordable housing quotas for the GSEs over time, allowing both Democratic and Republican Administrations to consistently make campaign promises to boost homeownership through government intervention in the market. Consequently, under both the Clinton and Bush Administrations, HUD dramatically increased these quotas, which reached their zenith when the Bush Administration raised them to 56 percent, 27 percent and 39 percent, respectively."

But 56%+27%+39%=122%...Can anyone explain how the three HUD quotas managed that?

7/13/09, 6:35 PM

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