Like millions of stories from the great recession, this one begins with homeowners struggling to keep up with a mortgage payment they simply couldn’t afford.
By 2009, the adjustable interest rate for Cassandra and Bernard Gray’s Durham, N.C., home loan had spiked to more than 12 percent. “I didn’t know if we were going to be on the street or in a shelter,” Cassandra recalls. “We couldn’t afford groceries. It got pretty bad.”
They were thrilled to sign up for a modification plan with their loan servicer, GMAC Home Mortgage, Cassandra Gray said…
I don’t know about you, but doesn’t it seem that every player who sold subprime loans knew exactly what they were selling? Fraud?
Like everything else this will NOT lead to any criminal charges. Same old dance.
iWATCH News-
Federal authorities are investigating possible fraud at General Electric Co.’s former subprime mortgage arm amid increased public pressure to hold Wall Street accountable for its role in the financial crisis.
The FBI and the U.S. Justice Department are looking into potentially criminal business practices at Burbank, Calif.-based WMC Mortgage Corp. during the home-loan boom, according to four people with knowledge of the investigation. They declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the investigation.
In the case of the salesman who wouldn’t sell, the two sides have starkly different tales to tell.
Greg Saffer says conscience and common sense prevented him from pushing the product his bosses wanted him to sell – “Option ARM” home loans that, he says, put homeowners at risk.
“I’m not going to steer people into a loan program that might not be good for them just because it’s more profitable for the company,” he says.
Expert fired for raising concerns about doomed lender, she says
On her first day at Countrywide Financial Corp., Cynder Niemela gave a talk to a gathering of her new colleagues. Every company, she said, has its own culture. Each is a tribe with its own rituals and myths.
Niemela, a management guru who’d worked for Boeing and other big employers, told the group of executives that research showed it took 16 months for a worker to become fully part of a corporate “tribe.” That time would allow her, she added, to offer a fresh perspective on how things were done at Countrywide.
What’s your experience with the mortgage industry?
In the coming weeks, iWatch News reporter Michael Hudson will be writing a series of stories following up on our two-part investigation, “The Great Mortgage Cover-up.“
To help inform his reporting, Hudson would like to hear from current and former mortgage industry workers about their experiences. Have a story to tell? Tips to guide our reporting? Tell us what you think we should know. The information you share is confidential and will only be used by journalists of the Public Insight Network for journalistic purposes.
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