Notes from the Right-Wing: Operation Malicious Mortgage

I'm Joeverkill, and these are some Notes from the Right-Wing.

Finally, someone is being held responsible for all the mortgage buttfudgery that's been going on. From the AP:

More than 400 real estate industry players have been indicted since March — including dozens over the last two days — in a Justice Department crackdown on incidents of mortgage fraud nationwide that have contributed to the country's housing crisis.
The FBI put the losses to homeowners and other borrowers who were victims in the schemes at over $1 billion...
Banks reported nearly 53,000 cases of suspected mortgage fraud last year, up from more than 37,000 a year earlier and about 10 times the level of reports in 2001 and 2002, according to the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.
The most common type of mortgage fraud was misstatement of income or assets, followed by forged documents, inflated appraisals and misrepresentation of a buyer's intent to occupy a property as a primary residence.

Both the borrowers and lenders are at fault here. The borrowers are already being punished... sort of. A lot of them have been foreclosed upon and/or have had to declare bankruptcy. I don't want to get off on a tangential tirade here, but I don't think that's punishment enough. Bankruptcy doesn't absolve student loan debt, but it allows people who committed mortgage fraud to get a free walk? Ridiculous. It's free money to the liars and the freeloaders, and the honest folk pay for it.

In any case, it's good that the lenders are being punished also. They have already suffered an economic hit because of the subprime crisis, but now they shall suffer legal repercussions as well. These a-holes are the ones responsible for higher rents, plummeting real estate values, and skyrocketing mortgage insurance rates. It's nice to see 'em held accountable for their indiscretions.

I'm Joeverkill, and this has been Notes from the Right-Wing.