Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to another edition of the Odd LODs podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Joseph Wisenthal, Managing editor at Bloomberg Markets, and I'm
Speaker 1: Tracy Halloway, Executive editor at Bloomberg Markets. So, Tracy, we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about the financial crisis and the aftermath
Speaker 1: of the crisis to in today's edition. And it's a
Speaker 1: story that I think a lot of people know because
Speaker 1: they've read books like The Big Short or they've seen
Speaker 1: the movie, and so they know all of the troubles
Speaker 1: that happened on Wall Street and everything, all the money
Speaker 1: that was lost. But today we're gonna talk about the
Speaker 1: same story from literally, I would say, the exact opposite angle.
Speaker 1: The opposite angle. What do you mean. Well, so we know,
Speaker 1: of course what happened with all the major banks and
Speaker 1: how much money they lost and everything. But what we
Speaker 1: don't have from many of these stories is the human
Speaker 1: angle on the own. So we know that housing crashed,
Speaker 1: and we know that all these people lost their homes
Speaker 1: and these foreclosures rippled through all these securities that Wall
Speaker 1: Street had made a fortune on, But we don't really
Speaker 1: know about these same securities from the perspective of the homeowner.
Speaker 1: Ah So this is like the epilogue to the housing crash, right,
Speaker 1: this is what happened afterwards. Yeah, I think that's that's
Speaker 1: exactly right. And um, there's also, um, in addition to
Speaker 1: the fact that we're going to talk about the story
Speaker 1: from a totally different angle, Uh, there's also a really
Speaker 1: interesting tech angle to this story. Because as these foreclosures
Speaker 1: and the housing collapse rolled on, it was, you know,
Speaker 1: this was totally new territory for a lot of people.
Speaker 1: People didn't know how it was going to work, losing
Speaker 1: their homes. And so the fact that this happened at
Speaker 1: a time of blogging in the Internet allowed people to
Speaker 1: learn about what was going on around them in a
Speaker 1: way that they probably could and have in any other era.
Speaker 1: So I remember actually writing a little bit about this
Speaker 1: in two thousand and ten. I think it was the
Speaker 1: idea that all these people who had their homes foreclosed
Speaker 1: on were sort of gathering together online to figure out
Speaker 1: how best to fight the banks or whoever they sort
Speaker 1: of owed money too. It was a really big deal
Speaker 1: at the time. Absolutely. And so today we're joined by
Speaker 1: David Diane. He's the author of Chain of Title. It's
Speaker 1: a book all about how these amateurs who had no
Speaker 1: prior knowledge of the legal system, the housing law, foreclosure rules,
Speaker 1: housing finance, basically educated themselves and learned that all these
Speaker 1: foreclosures that were going on were essentially being done illegitimately
Speaker 1: with false paperwork or people who were foreclosing without proper
Speaker 1: standing to foreclose. And it's about how they banded together
Speaker 1: and use the internet to find each other to teach
Speaker 1: themselves how this super complicated stuff were to fight against
Speaker 1: what they saw as these illegitimate foreclosures. And it's a
Speaker 1: fascinating book. I'm really excited for this one. Let's get started,
Speaker 1: all right, David, thank you very much for joining us
Speaker 1: here in studio. Thanks for having me. I think you
Speaker 1: summed it up. I think I'm at home, all right. Well,
Speaker 1: thanks very all right. Well that was this week's edition
Speaker 1: of Online. You know, you tell her you could probably
Speaker 1: summarize it better than me. But what what is the
Speaker 1: essence of your book and why were you moved to
Speaker 1: write this book? Well, this is true. I did a story.
Speaker 1: I wanted to write this story from the perspective of
Speaker 1: those most powerfully affected by the financial crisis. There's been
Speaker 1: over four hundred books. There's actually a website out there
Speaker 1: that shows how many books there have been about the
Speaker 1: financial crisis, and it's over four hundred. I think I
Speaker 1: would have been able to name about four or five.
Speaker 1: I didn't realize just quite definite. So I did want
Speaker 1: to attack it from a different angle. And and look
Speaker 1: at these people who, as you said, had no institutional
Speaker 1: knowledge resources. We're fighting their own foreclosures and suddenly stumbled
Speaker 1: upon this big secret and uh, and it was really
Speaker 1: kind of a revolutionary act that they did. They read
Speaker 1: their own mortgage documents and they found these discrepancies in them,
Speaker 1: and then they instead of just using that to fight
Speaker 1: their own cases, they decided to look in the public
Speaker 1: records and become citizen journalists in a way. And uh,
Speaker 1: they found each other and then decided really to build
Speaker 1: a movement around this that to to to get this
Speaker 1: into the hands of people who could maybe do something
Speaker 1: about it. David, can you give us a sort of
Speaker 1: quick description of the way mortgages are typically well, how
Speaker 1: they typically work and are assigned in the sort of
Speaker 1: mortgage framework in the US, because that's a big part
Speaker 1: of the story, right, absolutely, So during the how thing
Speaker 1: about what we saw is this tremendous amount of private
Speaker 1: label securitization. So a usually non bank issuer would issue
Speaker 1: you a mortgage. That mortgage would immediately be sold to
Speaker 1: an investment bank, thrown through a few other intermediaries, and
Speaker 1: then put into a trust administered by a trustee UH.
Speaker 1: That trust, out of which the pass through certificates and
Speaker 1: mortgage backed securities would then be sold all over the
Speaker 1: world to UH you know, a Norwegian sovereign wealth funder
Speaker 1: in Indiana, public pension funder, whoever. UM. And there are
Speaker 1: very precise steps both in public law and in the
Speaker 1: governing documents. The pooling and Servicing agreement is what it's
Speaker 1: known as UH. Behind how trusts are created and how
Speaker 1: you transfer property. It's very deliberate. It. The first property
Speaker 1: records law in the United States is predates the Constitution
Speaker 1: by a hundred and fifty years. UH. Sixteen thirties was
Speaker 1: the first property recording office in the country. UH. And
Speaker 1: you're supposed to go be able to go to your
Speaker 1: county recording office and see the chain of title from
Speaker 1: the initial construction of the property all the way to
Speaker 1: the present day. And banks did not take those steps
Speaker 1: very intentionally, did not take those steps they they found
Speaker 1: them either inconvenient or too costly or for whatever reason. Uh,
Speaker 1: these very precise steps of how to transfer a mortgage,
Speaker 1: and particularly how to transfer a mortgage into a trust
Speaker 1: which is tax advantaged, and you have to do it
Speaker 1: in a specific way to maintain and receive those tax advantages. Uh.
Speaker 1: That was what was not done, and that that causes
Speaker 1: a rupture in the chain of title. And in order
Speaker 1: to paper over that, uh, they literally papered over it
Speaker 1: with bad paper, with with bad false documents. Yeah, go
Speaker 1: into that. So we had this, We had this massive
Speaker 1: economic downturn. We saw a unprecedented national downturn in home prices.
Speaker 1: Lots of people lost their jobs. Obviously a lot of
Speaker 1: people stopped paying their mortgage. But what did people discover
Speaker 1: when they started looking into these documents? What specifically did
Speaker 1: they discover that their view was being done wrong and
Speaker 1: made a lot of these foreclosures illegitimate. Right, Well, this
Speaker 1: is all about standing in illegal context. So, uh, if
Speaker 1: I said that Joe, you you stole my car, I
Speaker 1: would have to come up with a piece of paper
Speaker 1: in a court in order to sue you that that
Speaker 1: says I owned the car. And this was the documentation
Speaker 1: that was really missing, uh, and that was confused, and
Speaker 1: so in order to rectify that, the industry UH basically
Speaker 1: mocked up the documents after the fact. And so you know,
Speaker 1: for example, Lisa Epstein gets her mortgage assigns someone in
Speaker 1: your book, Lisa Epstein is a cancer nurse who was
Speaker 1: a foreclosure victim. Uh. She kind of kicks off the
Speaker 1: book and she gets this mortgage assignment and it's Uh,
Speaker 1: US Bank is the entity foreclosing on her. She didn't
Speaker 1: know who U S Bank was. She thought it was
Speaker 1: a fi fational name from a movie, because there's no
Speaker 1: US Bank in Florida. Uh, and they were the trustee
Speaker 1: uh that that somehow got her mortgage through these this process. Uh.
Speaker 1: The assignment was made to US Bank and was dated
Speaker 1: as of May May two thousand nine. She was foreclosed
Speaker 1: on in February two thousand nine. So by the evidence
Speaker 1: that US Bank gave that they owned this loan, they
Speaker 1: didn't own it at the time that they foreclosed on her.
Speaker 1: And that's just one example of many, not just in
Speaker 1: her case, but in millions of cases, UH, in in
Speaker 1: situations where because not everywhere in America do you actually
Speaker 1: need to go through a court to foreclose, but in
Speaker 1: Florida you did, and that's why the this was sort
Speaker 1: of the epicenter. But I remember at the time there
Speaker 1: was a lot of talk about judicial versus non judicial
Speaker 1: core and so a lot of your book centers around
Speaker 1: what happened in Florida, which is a judicial state, which
Speaker 1: means that to do a foreclosure you actually have to
Speaker 1: go see aud right, you need judicial sign off. And
Speaker 1: in fact of one thing the industry did is try
Speaker 1: to make Florida a non judicial state. And uh my,
Speaker 1: my activists they went up to Tallahassee and through a
Speaker 1: rally and did a lobby day. They haltered it for
Speaker 1: about three years, and uh even what ended up getting
Speaker 1: done was not completely you know, eliminating the judicial part
Speaker 1: of the system. So they were successful in that event.
Speaker 1: So how we're I mean, we are talking about very
Speaker 1: very technical mortgage law here, assigning notes what needs to
Speaker 1: be done, going down to the county courthouse. How did
Speaker 1: people actually figure out how to mount these sorts of
Speaker 1: legal battles? They were really self taught. Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: foreclosure law wasn't a booming industry prior to two thousand seven,
Speaker 1: two thousand eight. Uh. There was not a lot of understanding,
Speaker 1: both from the perspective of homeowners defense attorneys who were
Speaker 1: mostly closing attorneys who then you know when now the
Speaker 1: bubbles going down, so let's get into foreclosure law uh
Speaker 1: uh and judges even uh. There just wasn't a lot
Speaker 1: of understanding of it. And so what Lisa and Michael
Speaker 1: Redman who was a car salesman, and Lynn Simoniac who
Speaker 1: was a lawyer but mainly involved in in a different
Speaker 1: kind of white collar crime, insurance fraud. Mainly, what they
Speaker 1: did is they really self taught themselves. They they they
Speaker 1: went through pooling and servicing agreements, They went through the
Speaker 1: public records, looked at assignments, found all these patterns. Uh.
Speaker 1: Michael built a guide to look through the public records.
Speaker 1: They got very popular online. People started looking through the
Speaker 1: public records with them, and it really was that era
Speaker 1: of the blog is sphere, where you could have this
Speaker 1: sort of networked community that could distribute information, collaborate on information,
Speaker 1: and amplify each other's work. And they would find things
Speaker 1: in the paperwork that were so stunning that when they
Speaker 1: brought it to legal professionals, the professionals first reaction was
Speaker 1: we don't this cannot be right. They didn't believe what
Speaker 1: some examples, I mean, it just really blew people's mind
Speaker 1: when they were discovered. Well, these third party companies that
Speaker 1: were hired to mock up these documents, these were low
Speaker 1: margin businesses. They were not very sophisticated operations, and so
Speaker 1: they did all kinds of things wrong. One example that's great.
Speaker 1: Lyn Simmoniac finds this document. It's a mortgage assignment and
Speaker 1: that's a transfer from one entity to the other, and
Speaker 1: it says on the mortgage document that they basically forgot
Speaker 1: to remove the placeholder for the mortgage was assigned to.
Speaker 1: And it literally said we grant and assigned this mortgage
Speaker 1: to bogus assigny. And this was a filing that was
Speaker 1: with the court in the court and used successfully to
Speaker 1: to foreclose on something. There was a summary judgment on that.
Speaker 1: So I mean, in a sense, this mortgage was actually,
Speaker 1: you know, the foreclosure was granted to the bogus assigny. Uh.
Speaker 1: And they found it. Michael Lisa didn't believe this when
Speaker 1: they saw it, even and then they heard of another one.
Speaker 1: And Michael's watchword and this whole thing was if you
Speaker 1: can find too. There are thousands. And they did this
Speaker 1: thing called Project Bogus, where they spent the weekend looking
Speaker 1: through every state's public records looking for bogus documents, and
Speaker 1: they found dozens of them. Uh and and I believe
Speaker 1: a spokesman for the company said, uh that was that
Speaker 1: was just a placeholder. That was a mistake. So what
Speaker 1: was the success rate on these sorts of legal challenges?
Speaker 1: Pretty low? You know. Um, there was definitely some ice
Speaker 1: to break through with judges and maybe even with the
Speaker 1: general public. The idea that this was a technicality, This
Speaker 1: was individuals trying to get a quote unquote free home,
Speaker 1: which is never really what Michael, Lisa and Lynn said
Speaker 1: they wanted. They wanted an equitable solution. Uh And And
Speaker 1: this was a situation of false evidence. In any other
Speaker 1: legal context, whether the defendant is guilty or innocent, if
Speaker 1: you're using false evidence to convict that defendant, it gets
Speaker 1: thrown out immediately. It seems only in foreclosure law is
Speaker 1: this judgment made on the part of the judicial system
Speaker 1: that we can't give this guy a break, this defendant.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about that a little further, because it does
Speaker 1: in reading your book, it does seem like that was
Speaker 1: a big hurdle for judges to get over because even
Speaker 1: if you could establish that the person bringing the foreclosure
Speaker 1: it didn't really have standing or the document or mocked
Speaker 1: mocked up. You still had situations where people weren't paying
Speaker 1: their mortgage, they lost their job or whatever it is.
Speaker 1: And so a lot of people and when at the
Speaker 1: time and probably even now looking back, they're like, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe that wasn't done right, but doesn't mean the person
Speaker 1: should be able to stay in their homes because they're
Speaker 1: not paying for it. So how do you what is
Speaker 1: the response to sort of philosophically that is right? One
Speaker 1: thing I would say is that you know, no homeowner
Speaker 1: asked for their documentation and to be lost and the
Speaker 1: standing to be to be confused on this in the
Speaker 1: chain of title to be broken, it's really not their responsibility.
Speaker 1: It's responsibility to the lender. And if we're talking about
Speaker 1: personal responsibility, it works both ways. That's number one. Number
Speaker 1: two is this particular angle of of fraud is just
Speaker 1: sort of a layer from a whole mess of other
Speaker 1: fraud that went on in the housing market during this time,
Speaker 1: whether it was origination or loan modification fraud. With UH
Speaker 1: servicers pushing people into default or securitization. Obviously there's a
Speaker 1: lot of securities fraud that went on. UH. So this
Speaker 1: was a moment of opportunity we had. This situation was
Speaker 1: six point two million people UH since September two thousand
Speaker 1: eight who lost their homes, and UH public policy and
Speaker 1: even even the interests of the investors in these loans
Speaker 1: dictate that you really didn't want that you wanted a
Speaker 1: better solution and and this was a moment of exposure
Speaker 1: where we could have got UH some sort of more
Speaker 1: equitable outcome so that the losses weren't allocated entirely on
Speaker 1: the homeowner, which is what they were during the housing bubble. Yeah.
Speaker 1: One thing that early on your book, and this really
Speaker 1: struck me, is that one of the main characters, I
Speaker 1: think it was Lisa, she tried to renegotiate her mortgage
Speaker 1: long before she went into default. It's her closure, and
Speaker 1: it seems and ultimately she couldn't get the bank to
Speaker 1: even return her calls, and they hinted to her that
Speaker 1: if she stopped paying her bills that then she would
Speaker 1: jump to the top of the queue. And so it
Speaker 1: seems as though perhaps that this incredibly complicated, disorganized web
Speaker 1: prevented an actual meaningful negotiation to keep people in their
Speaker 1: own There's no question. I mean mortgage servicing, which is
Speaker 1: this business that's basically who you pay your your mortgage to.
Speaker 1: It's it's the the person who services the loan on
Speaker 1: behalf of the investors. Uh. That business is first of
Speaker 1: all rotten business. Um it's uh. They are all sort
Speaker 1: of financial incentives in mortgage servicing to default instead of
Speaker 1: to modify, uh, mostly around the compensation model. Uh. And
Speaker 1: so this was done routinely. What happened to Lisa ends
Speaker 1: up happening later in the book to an assistant Attorney
Speaker 1: General of the state of Nevada. I mean this happened
Speaker 1: all the time, where they would imply, miss a few
Speaker 1: mortgage payments and then will help you, and then when
Speaker 1: you miss a few mortgage payments, they put you into foreclosure.
Speaker 1: And this idea of service or driven defaults was far
Speaker 1: more routine than people realize. So, you know, the moral
Speaker 1: argument of hey, they missed their mortgage payment, they got
Speaker 1: to pay the piper doesn't really account for the fact
Speaker 1: that they were induced to miss their mortgage payment. But
Speaker 1: even if we saw a fairly low success rate when
Speaker 1: it came to individual legal challenges. There was a little
Speaker 1: bit of wider success in the sense that there was
Speaker 1: eventually a foreclosure settlement with some of the biggest services.
Speaker 1: Right did that help us all? Well? I I write
Speaker 1: about that at length in the last third of the book. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, the settlement was really designed to you know,
Speaker 1: get people in front of a podium and creating a
Speaker 1: big headline number that they could talk about that we
Speaker 1: stuck it to the banks. The headline number was not
Speaker 1: really as much as advertised. Sean Donovan, who was the
Speaker 1: head of the Housing and Urban Development Department at the
Speaker 1: time now he's at O m b UH, promised that
Speaker 1: there would be a million principal reductions, that we would
Speaker 1: cut principle in a million homes as a result of
Speaker 1: the biggest settlement, which was the National Mortgage Settlement. I
Speaker 1: went through the numbers and in the book I say
Speaker 1: that in the end, eighty three thousand people got a
Speaker 1: principle was over less than the initial advertising of how
Speaker 1: good this would be. Um, and you know it's twofold.
Speaker 1: Number one. What was granted the homeowners at that time
Speaker 1: was far less than what was needed and far left
Speaker 1: than even what was promised. And number two, the idea
Speaker 1: behind a settlement is that the settlement, the activity you're
Speaker 1: settling stops And the fact is that every day in
Speaker 1: America continues to this day, somebody is thrown out of
Speaker 1: their homes based on a false document. Yeah, I just
Speaker 1: wanted to bring it forward to today. Has anything improved?
Speaker 1: Not a whole lot. I mean, you know, the state
Speaker 1: and federal government has sort of walked off the field,
Speaker 1: and there are still active cases and they're just sort
Speaker 1: of fought out one by one by one. But this
Speaker 1: is something that obviously, uh, there aren't a lot of
Speaker 1: people out there who are in foreclosure with the kind
Speaker 1: of resources to really maintain those cases. There's some good
Speaker 1: rulings here and there, but this is something we're gonna
Speaker 1: be untangling for a long time. I wanna go back
Speaker 1: big picture. I mean, you mentioned that the very first
Speaker 1: laws regarding property have been around since longer than the Constitution,
Speaker 1: and it's very specific how you have to you know,
Speaker 1: at every stage, there's all kinds of laws. In your mind,
Speaker 1: is there any doubt that if all these laws had
Speaker 1: been followed properly from the beginning, that we wouldn't have
Speaker 1: had this huge bubble and crash and housing. I you
Speaker 1: think that that if the property records laws were adhered to,
Speaker 1: that you would have seen less uh securitized and subprime
Speaker 1: mortgages for a variety of reasons. Obviously, when they created
Speaker 1: property records laws, they didn't see over the horizon to
Speaker 1: a securitization machine. But it did, you know, not adhering
Speaker 1: to them certainly facilitated the financialization that we saw of
Speaker 1: this this very pen and ink market. Um it was,
Speaker 1: it would have been a wet blanket. And and you know,
Speaker 1: the one thing just in particular, as an example, the
Speaker 1: REMIX tax laws. You know, these trusts were created as
Speaker 1: real estate mortgage investment conduits or remix and those are
Speaker 1: not supposed to take badly performing loans. You're you're not
Speaker 1: supposed to put in badly under written loans and quality
Speaker 1: you can't qualify for the tax benefits. And to do that,
Speaker 1: and one theory or postule is the reason they didn't
Speaker 1: write the paper is that it would have been obvious
Speaker 1: that it was bad they would have gotten a tax benefits.
Speaker 1: So you know, I mean, there are a variety of
Speaker 1: way days in which if there was actual adherence to
Speaker 1: this very deliberate system, I think you would have seen
Speaker 1: less of a crash. David, are there any efforts underway
Speaker 1: today to sort of modernize the way mortgage laws and
Speaker 1: foreclosures are done? Because it does seem in a sense
Speaker 1: quite quaint, this idea that I have to go down
Speaker 1: to the courthouse and actually physically assign a mortgage note
Speaker 1: with you know, a pen and a piece of paper.
Speaker 1: It doesn't necessarily sit quite well with the current century,
Speaker 1: right right, I mean it is antiquated, and uh, you know,
Speaker 1: there there are steps around paperless mortgages, there are some
Speaker 1: steps around electronic notorizations, and we can have that argument
Speaker 1: and legislated out. What we can't do is the industry
Speaker 1: just saying all right, we're not going to follow them anymore.
Speaker 1: That's that's gonna be the decision that we make. Uh
Speaker 1: that that that leads to bad public policy, and it
Speaker 1: certainly did in this case. Um So you know, I
Speaker 1: think that even the people profiled in this book would say,
Speaker 1: if you want to make an argument that we can
Speaker 1: do this in a more efficient fashion, then let's have
Speaker 1: that argument. Let's legislate it out. But basically, uh. You know,
Speaker 1: the pro the public system of recording was privatized during
Speaker 1: this this uh this era, and it did not perform
Speaker 1: very well. One thing that you say in your book
Speaker 1: that really struck me is that this bird, this explosion
Speaker 1: that we had of securitization and the financialization of home ownership,
Speaker 1: in your view, didn't even do a very good job
Speaker 1: of expanding the homeownership rate. And the fact that the
Speaker 1: traditional way that people always got loans from their local
Speaker 1: savings and loan did a perfectly good job expanding home
Speaker 1: ownership in America, and that all of this new speculative
Speaker 1: money didn't really have much even even before the crash,
Speaker 1: which public benefit. When Fanny May was a public agency
Speaker 1: from the nineteen thirties to the nineteen sixties, homeownership rose
Speaker 1: twenty points uh and it went uh and and even
Speaker 1: in the this this bubble era, this era when when
Speaker 1: the mortgage market was kind of taken over by Wall
Speaker 1: Street or they at least pulled a lot of market
Speaker 1: share from the government sponsored entities, it only went up
Speaker 1: three or four points UM. And you know, it went
Speaker 1: up a decent clip during the bubble, but that was
Speaker 1: an unsustainable uh scenario. Now we've seen it go back
Speaker 1: down to sort of the level it was really in
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties. Uh, there was the biggest thing about
Speaker 1: the mortgage market as it was, is that everybody had
Speaker 1: a stake in everyone else's success. You know, Savings and
Speaker 1: loans got their deposits from people in the neighborhood who
Speaker 1: they gave loans to. And and that symbiosis meant that
Speaker 1: was if someone got into trouble, they would want to
Speaker 1: help them out, because you do better on a modification
Speaker 1: and a foreclosure sale. Uh. When you sort of passed
Speaker 1: the risk around and it goes into somebody in Norway
Speaker 1: who has no connection, you know, to the trustee not
Speaker 1: really acting in their interests, and the service are not
Speaker 1: really acting in their interests, suddenly that everyone having a
Speaker 1: stake in one another is broken. And uh, that's something
Speaker 1: I think we need to get back to in some sense.
Speaker 1: And sometimes we almost are getting back to that because
Speaker 1: Fannie and Freddie are now de facto public agencies in
Speaker 1: the conservatorship. And actually what we've seen is that loans
Speaker 1: are performing pretty darn well in the last three or
Speaker 1: four years. And now some say that's because the credit
Speaker 1: box is closed and not enough people are being able
Speaker 1: to get loans. But you know, as we move into
Speaker 1: what is housing finance reform look like, I think we
Speaker 1: can take some lessons from where it was in from
Speaker 1: the thirties of the sixties. All Right, David Diane, author
Speaker 1: of the new book Chain of title, highly recommended read,
Speaker 1: thank you very much for joining us. All Right, thanks
Speaker 1: for having me off. I really enjoyed that conversation. That
Speaker 1: was sort of full of financial crisis nostalgia for me.
Speaker 1: That's probably a bad way to put it, because it
Speaker 1: also highlighted the very real suffering of a lot of
Speaker 1: people whose homes were put in foreclosure during that period
Speaker 1: of time. Yeah, that's one of the reasons that I
Speaker 1: really enjoyed reading this because reading this book and talking
Speaker 1: to David, because so much of what we do and
Speaker 1: what we talk about, you know, we look at these
Speaker 1: indices and how they perform, or we look at these
Speaker 1: securities that collapse. But looking at it from this other
Speaker 1: perspective that there are real people on the other end
Speaker 1: and there is a massive human toll is really important.
Speaker 1: And thinking about how how basically impossible it is to
Speaker 1: fight against a system that's so incredibly complicated and where
Speaker 1: the people on the other side are so well funded,
Speaker 1: and it's sort of reading the book made me very
Speaker 1: nostalgic for that era of the Internet when people were
Speaker 1: really using it to educate themselves and get access to
Speaker 1: all these documents, and how it really did enable them to,
Speaker 1: at least to some extent, fight back against this machine.
Speaker 1: So that's probably the one positive that came out of
Speaker 1: the discussion. The most depressing thing in that, in my mind,
Speaker 1: was the idea that even though we built this huge
Speaker 1: private securitization machine on Wall Street, that we didn't actually
Speaker 1: see an increase in home ownership. And then we went
Speaker 1: through you know, we went through the housing crisis, we
Speaker 1: went through the foreclosure crisis, and we didn't really have
Speaker 1: much to show for it. I agree it's depressing because
Speaker 1: you would think, well, we have this national goal to
Speaker 1: have more homeownership, so at least we got that out
Speaker 1: of it. But the fact that it didn't even do
Speaker 1: that good of a job, to me, was one of
Speaker 1: the more mind blowing things that I read in the book.
Speaker 1: And the other thing is, you know, we still have
Speaker 1: this debate going on about what exactly US housing finance
Speaker 1: should look like, and it seems like we have a
Speaker 1: lot of stuff to think about and we haven't even
Speaker 1: really agreed on a path forward. So yeah, the fact
Speaker 1: that all this stuff is still happening, even if it's
Speaker 1: at low levels because theren't many there aren't as many
Speaker 1: foreclosures these days is um certainly seems ominous, and it
Speaker 1: makes you think that we've wasted a lot of time.
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to this edition of The Odd
Speaker 1: Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Wisnthal. You can follow me on
Speaker 1: Twitter at the Stalwart, and I'm Tracy Alloway. I'm on
Speaker 1: Twitter at Tracy Alloway. Thanks for listening. Thank you,