8 years ago
3
How Housing’s New Players Spiraled Into Banks’ Old Mistakes
Some private equity firms that came in as the cleanup crew for the housing crisis are now repeating errors that banks committed.
Continue Reading http://www.nytimes.com
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Well, they figured that they will get bailed out by the taxpayers, so why try to do anything different?
The article does not say that. None of the firms it profiles are anywhere near big enough to qualify for a bailout anyway. I encourage you to read the article. Rather than showing collusion between Wall Street and Washington, it shows what happens when relatively unregulated actors are allowed to control both mortgage loans and mortgage loan collections for higher risk buyers. Like the banks pre-2008, they're getting rich off of loan defaults (by betting against borrowers they supposedly help) and collections fees rather than loan interest, and they're doing it mostly legally. Plenty to be cynical about without dragging bailouts into it.
Argh. It's actually worse than I thought.