Bob Diamond Barclays American Dream Becomes a Horror Story

Micke , , , ,

Bob Diamond Barclays is an American banker and former chief executive officer of Barclays plc. In 2010, he became its president and deputy group chief executive; and in January 2011, succeeded John Varley as group chief executive of Barclays. Made no difference to him he went ahead anyway and signed into law The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA).

Politicians Wanted To Look Good

That gave community organizers and gung ho political upstarts the power to twist the arms of bankers to give near do wells with below average credit ratings (that means they had skipped out on payments before and had also been late on payments) a chance to own their own homes even though they were unqualified high risk low wage borrowers. Politicians, being the power freaks they are, just wanted to look good for the mid-term elections. Gave the CRA all the help it needed to blow the nay-sayers out of the water by backing this nonsense to the hilt.

The Feds, being the geniuses they are, denied permission to banks (that failed to fulfill CRA loan quotas) to do corporate mergers, acquisitions or a chance to expand their business. The Feds throttled those notions using government blackmail along the way, except no one went to jail.

Ninjas

The bankers quickly categorized people with No Income, No Job or Assets, and therefore of little traditional credit-worthiness, NINJAS.

Under tremendous pressure from Carter and later Bill Clinton & George W. Bush, bankers were coerced into making a trillion dollars’ worth of sub-prime loans to people at the low end of the food chain. In other words the first ones fired when a recession hits. Flash bang to the future in 2007 the recession hits, the mortgage crisis ensues. Who do you think gets laid off first? The low income people that were now without a job simply walked away from the payments and either went to live with relatives or rented somewhere else. Who do you think gets stuck with the trillion dollar tab?

So many of these CRA mortgagers that had hardly any skin in the game on their upside down homes. Just walked away sticking banks with the foreclosures and eventually the taxpayers with the trillion dollar debt. The bankers are then stuck with 1.7 million foreclosed homes they cannot put on the market yet lest the oversupply would drive down the price of homes even further.