Rocky Mountain Mortgage Fraud Fever
HS This type of activity must be going on in other states as well. Just one more example of the collusion between illegal aliens and corporations at the expense of taxpayers and American workers. Becoming a “straw man” purchaser of a nice home… (and living there and getting paid??) Clearly another example of a job Americans won’t do. No wonder the American worker can’t compete. He’s too honest. So where’s Homeland Security when you need ‘em? Can those computers talk to each other yet? Many illegal aliens clearly have a great work ethic. However expecting them to have any semblance of respect for the way we do things here may be asking too much. Is this type of destruction to our economy just the tip of the iceberg for what we’ll be facing should the amnesty crowd get it’s way? Of course it is.
They say it took a Republican (Nixon) to pull out of Viet Nam. And it took a Democrat (Clinton) to enact welfare reform with something called workfare. And now Republicans who believe in free market economics need to take a cold hard look at white collar crime. Because this type of criminal represents a clear and present danger to the future of our economy and our sovereignty.
And we’ve still got a little thing called “rule of law” at our disposal.
“Use it or loose it” or so they say. THROW THESE COAT-AND-TIE JACKASSES IN A CAGE WHERE THEY BELONG!!!
District Attorney Scott Storey of Jefferson County, Colorado is one busy lawman. The local housing market is chock full of mortgage fraud varmints. One particularly pesky ring, operating for roughly 5 years, recruited hundreds of illegal immigrants to act as “straw buyers,” the lowest players in the mortgage fraud game. Ringmasters were mortgage brokers, realtors, and loan officers in local banks. Straw buyers were supplied with stolen identities, including drivers licenses, social security cards, and income tax returns. Some were given green cards of legal immigrants. What couldn’t be stolen was forged.
False docs in hand, straw buyers obtained mortgage loans they had no intention of paying. Some 300 single family homes in Jefferson County and the adjoining Denver area are known to have been involved. In 191 transactions every single qualifying document was fake. So far, 38% of the mortgage loans have gone into foreclosure. Millions of dollars have been lost.
quote:
The Post’s heart-warming story began:
Gerardo Cabrera fell in love with the house immediately. There was the bay window in the living room, the fireplace in the den, and – most enchanting to a man raised amid the concrete of Mexico City – the woods in the back yard. And so the auto mechanic and his wife, a secretary, decided to pay $200,000 for their own piece of suburban Gaithersburg, a classic tale of immigrants achieving the American dream. Except for one detail: At the time, they were in the United States illegally.
While law-abiding homebuyers must supply airtight proof of identity, legal residence and a Social Security number to lenders, illegal alien purchasers such as Cabrera (a visa overstayer who recently received a green card) need only supply a “taxpayer identification number” issued by the Internal Revenue Service. No criminal background check is required before applying for a TIN, which many banks now accept from illegal alien customers as a primary form of identification.
Cabrera’s broker, Alma Preciado of Metropolitan Financial Services in Silver Spring, told the Post that about 10 percent of her mainly Latino clientele qualify for home loans using a TIN instead of a Social Security number.
That’s just the tip of the illegal-alien homeowners’ iceberg. The Post failed to note that Federal Housing Administration-approved loans through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development do not require lenders to obtain proof of citizenship or legal permanent residence. These FHA-HUD programs, primarily targeting minorities and first-time homebuyers, are federally insured and require minimal down payments.
snip—————–
The Denver metro area alone accounted for 20,000 to 40,000 of the FHA-approved loans for suspected illegal aliens
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=34329
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A lot of the loans were packaged and sold overseas, I believe, so the impact on the U.S. may not be as bad as some believe. So, if that is true, we not only get to fund our debt overseas, but our bad debt, too.
Hmmmm? That may not make a lot of friends if they get stiffed with bad debt. The U.S. could use more friends, not more that hate us.
This article gives you a little idea of the involvement of our relationship to other nations.
quote:
Since 2004, it has transferred about $85 billion in bad loans, through asset management company Huarong. Then, in 2005, it received a $15 billion cash injection from Central Huijin Co., the Chinese recapitalization body. Finally, earlier this year, ICBC sold a 5.8 percent stake to a consortium led by Goldman Sachs for $3.7 billion. As a result, the bank, which had an NPL ratio of more than 21 percent at the end of 2004, had (by its own, and therefore questionable, assessment) reduced that number to 4.1 percent as of June.
Intriguingly, foreign investors seem not to have noticed how ICBC got from Point A to Point B. Some concerns about the bank’s lending practices have been voiced — most recently, following news in September that ICBC had funded a company, Fuxi Investment, that has been linked to the widening pension funds scandal. However, seemingly no attention has been given to the fact that China has been transferring NPLs from, and providing capital infusions for, state banks — including ICBC — for years, without overhauling their corporate decision-making processes or management.
http://www.forexcenter.net/Forex_Data/Analysis_Commentary/artical.aspx?id=2086
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Lots of wheeling and dealing going on with all the “dollars” China finds on its hands from the trade deficit we have with it. Since they don’t want to buy U.S. Treasuries as much, they look for other places to park the cash.
Many are concerned that more and more nations are moving away from buying our government debt and buying other things with the cash they have. Russia and OPEC have a lot of petro-dollars to spend too.
I don’t think China would mind too much if we straightened out this mess at home.
Regarding immigration and homes, I have been wondering if the two aren’t tied to why Congress want to legalize the 20 million here and bring in even more.
quote:
From 2001 to last month (April 2005) 43.0% of private sector jobs are housing related.
http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/2005/05/housing_employm.html
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Construction has switched to commercial in the areas all the new homes went up in and here in the Mesa, Az. the number of stores, hospitals, healthcare complexes, etc is going strong and keeping construction workers employed.
However, legalizing and bringing more workers in, could end the housing slump and grow jobs again. That many of these workers won’t make enough to pay income tax, doesn’t seem to matter as long as their are high profits to tax, payroll taxes rolling in, and low unemployment numbers.
That we will need 1/3 more infrastructure over the next 20-25 years doesn’t seem to enter the picture either (tax dollars to build it).
But, I think there are so many hidden agendas in the immigration bill being pushed that American voters would be sick if they knew all of them.
One of the linchpins to all of this is the underlying premise that “growth is good”. Frankly I don’t even know how to counteract this.
Some growth and how it is funded can be bad.
Debt that fuels growth and can’t be funded well, can be bad in both the private sector and the government spending arena.
If GDP includes spending by the government, and it does, and private sector spending would stop growing, while government spending increased, it could be bad. Even though a growth in GDP might be seen, the source would be higher deficit spending.
Also, growth in infrastructure can be bad since we can’t maintain what we have. Adding to it when we can’t maintain it won’t be good either.
If the growth in population fuels growth in food stamps, unemployment, crowded schools, overburdened ER facilities, stressed power grids, more pollution, etc. it isn’t good.
If the growth in tax revenues would come from “higher profits” at the expense of workers wages and benefits, it isn’t good.
It is like cancer cells. Not all growth is good if it is based on something that also has the potential to kill other things that are good. So, while our economy is growing and that is good, so is the cancer that could kill it. And most of that cancer is tied to debt and unfunded liabilities we have no way currently of paying.
Jan
With (some) large corporations being the common thread, many have been looking at attempted U.S. hegemony in the middle east and the open borders crowd here at home as a package deal. Hence the popularity of Ron Paul. “Globalists” they’re called. Do you agree with this assessment?
The corporations are a symptom of a problem. They are people, and while the CEO’s and boards of directors have immense power, they are still a symptom. Remember that these same corporations operate in nations with totally different governments, workforces, profits, etc. In each nation, the corporation will go as far as the government will let go, or market forces will let them go.
In some they have higher pay and in many, lower pay for workers. In some the government provides a lot of social programs and in others, not so much.
What we are seeing is that even with all the corporatism here, companies are leaving and going to other nations or moving large operations to them. Even with government working like crazy to give them tax breaks, lower wage workers, subsidies, etc. they are still finding the grass greener elsewhere at growing rates.
Why? What makes a company that has the ear of Congress, gets breaks, exemptions, low wage workers, etc. leave all this for another nation?
We have to look then at the real reason they are leaving. That reason is that even with Washington catering to them hand and foot, the profits after taxes and other costs are higher elsewhere. If they don’t go for them, shareholders like the teachers, cops, factory workers with IRA’s, 401K’s, pension funds (all managed for them by professionals) will sell the stock and buy their competitors in China, Dubai, Ireland, Estonia, etc.
Shareholders in the U.S., like consumers, have no loyalty to “made in America.” Why would you buy a U.S. company with a declining dollar based share price when you could buy a European company that has gone up 60% even if the price of that company in euros didn’t go up. Just the loss of value in the dollar makes the shareholder have 60% more by not owning a U.S. stock.
We have Canada, a socialist nation with huge economic problems, Mexico, a corrupt nation with huge economic concerns due to its declining oil reserves, and the U.S. with it huge debt and declining dollar, wanting to merge for “economic prosperity” in the S.P.P.
Misery apparently loves company.
The companies are going to take any advantage those three governments will give them and when it is all said and done, if the benefit of doing that isn’t enough, they will still leave and go elsewhere.
The problem is a government that isn’t running the nation correctly. It is as the GAO say, “unsustainable.” It is almost like saying “stick around and we won’t shoot you.” However, at some point things get so bad you say, “Shoot me. I can’t stand the pain.” Only instead of saying “shoot me,” they just pack up and leave as long as that “choice” is still available.
When that happens you may end up with only companies that don’t compete internationally and can pass all costs on to the consumer, or, the very large companies that no longer have much competition and can spread the cost out over a mega company and have few competitors even in the world market since they are also the “big cheese” in those countries too, with whatever they make. Look at the planes Boeing sells to China and other nations. As long as they can sell and have only Airbus as a main rival, which is also in a high tax nation, they can pass the costs and taxes on and still have the profits they need and an experienced, dependable workforce.
But, the day comes that China starts building the planes and competing against them and even they will make some serious changes and the government will probably grant them all kinds of breaks to keep them here instead of going to a lower tax, lower wage, lower cost nation and exporting back to us.
Jan
Does our Government still tell these large corporations what to do or is it the other way around now?
READ K-STREET
Probably neither. It is like each doing their own thing based on what the other does. Like a two people running in a circle each thinks the one is ahead of the other or behind the other depending on their perception, not reality.
They treat symptoms and deal with emotions rather than core problems caused by both. Eventually, those who see there is no solution and who can, leave the merry-go-round. Rather than react to what the government does and then the government react to what they do and they react again to the government and the government again react to the new tactics, they just get off the merry-go-round.
When there was no place to go, they stayed on the “ride.” Now, there are places all over the world to go to. For most of us who never leave the U.S., we believe that there is no other place on earth people would actually “choose” to live. Yet, something like 1% of our population have expatriated, I believe I read a while back.
There are now “retirement” magazine touting all the wonderful places to go and live a better life than here. There are other countries ranked ahead of us now for economic freedom and per capita wealth and lower taxes and higher education averages, etc.
It isn’t that we have gotten that much worse but rather we slowed our rate of improvement in standards and other nations started catching up and passing in things like savings rates, per capita wealth, economic freedom, etc. Not that they aren’t struggling still, but that they see a “trend” that gives them confidence in a brighter future and confidence is what drives a nation in many ways.
The socialists have convinced people this country is so “unfair,” that it is becoming “unfair” as people lose confidence in it and turn more and more to government for help. It is a self-fulfilling destiny.
The consumer and voter dynamics are based on perceptions and when that perception is bad in a system of government that represents those people and corporations that serve those consumers and voters, we keep making things worse. They elect the wrong people and they consume based only on price, not what is in their own or the nation’s best interest. And, they may even resist government regulating what might be in its best interest if it affects the “lowest price.”