Baltimore, tale of sub-prime woe

Boarded-up homes are common in some parts of Baltimore
The awards on top of the cabinet dominate Beth Jacobson's small office.

Beth Jacobson worked for Wells Fargo - one of the largest banks in the US - for nine years. She was a champion salesman for the company, shifting huge numbers of sub-prime mortgages.

Some awards are the shape of table-top obelisks. Others look more like local football club trophies, with small metal plates screwed onto them, and a list of dates and numbers.

The numbers are large.

"That was for $4.9m [£3m] for 17 sub-prime loans. This month was 26 sub-prime loans. I did over $6m at that point," she says.

She says her tactic was to make sure all the loans she issued were for sub-prime borrowers.

"It was a lot easier to put people into a sub-prime loan. If you take the application and said 'OK, how much do you have in the bank?', and then not ask for any back-up documentation, that would keep it as a sub-prime loan," she explains.

"If you would have [asked] for a couple of bank statements, that would have proved that they could have gone prime, but if the sub-prime loan officer [has] already been able to sell that rate to that customer, then why would you take it prime and cut your commission by two-thirds?"

Liar loans

Under a sub-prime mortgage customers didn't have to prove their income. They didn't have to pay a deposit. The lender made a lot of money - and the customer typically ended up paying a much higher rate of interest.

There has been some anecdotal evidence that companies were deliberately pushing people into such loans when they simply weren't suitable.

Beth Jacobson is one of the first to lift the lid on what was going on, and therefore to shine some light onto the origins of the housing crisis which helped ignite the global recession.

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Tent city's caused by Sub Prime madness! from the Big Wobble Feb 09

The people who caused this misery, Wall Street, have just received nearly 19 billion Dollars in Bonuses, is this the face of Democracy?
Nearly 61 per cent of local and state homeless organisations say they have witnessed an increase in homelessness since the foreclosure crisis began in 2007, the Washington DC-based National Coalition for the Homeless study says.
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And the problem has intensified since the report was produced in April, along with rising repossessions, soaring energy and food prices and job losses, the group says.

"It's clear that poverty and homelessness have increased," Michael Stoops, acting executive director of the coalition, said.

"The economy is in chaos, we're in an unofficial recession and Americans are worried, from the homeless to the middle class, about their future



Here are some videos of a tent city / shanty town that has popped up in the suburbs of Southern California. I've never seen anything like this in America since the great depression. At first it see...


This is a homeless Documentry made by Mission4Him Productions


REPORT: In Southern California, Tent city gathers all victims of the Subcrime crisis that don't have anywhere else to go.




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