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mostlysignssomeportents · 11 months

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Wall Street Journal goes to bat for the vultures who want to steal your house

Tonight (June 5) at 7:15PM, I’m in London at the British Library with my novel Red Team Blues, hosted by Baroness Martha Lane Fox.

Tomorrow (June 6), I’m on a Rightscon panel about interoperability.

The tacit social contract between the Wall Street Journal and its readers is this: the editorial page is for ideology, and the news section is for reality. Money talks and bullshit walks — and reality’s well-known anticapitalist bias means that hewing too closely to ideology will make you broke, and thus unable to push your ideology.

That’s why the editorial page will rail against “printing money” while the news section will confine itself to asking which kinds of federal spending competes with the private sector (creating a bidding war that drives up prices) and which kinds are not. If you want frothing takes about how covid relief checks will create “debt for our grandchildren,” seek it on the editorial page. For sober recognition that giving small amounts of money to working people will simply go to reducing consumer and student debt, look to the news.

But WSJ reporters haven’t had their corpus colossi severed: the brain-lobe that understands economic reality crosstalks with the lobe that worship the idea of a class hierarchy with capital on top and workers tugging their forelacks. When that happens, the coverage gets weird.

Take this weekend’s massive feature on “zombie mortgages,” long-written-off second mortgages that have been bought by pennies for vultures who are now trying to call them in:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/zombie-mortgages-could-force-some-homeowners-into-foreclosure-e615ab2a

These second mortgages — often in the form of home equity lines of credit (HELOCs) — date back to the subprime bubble of the early 2000s. As housing prices spiked to obscene levels and banks figured out how to issue risky mortgages and sell them off to suckers, everyday people were encouraged — and often tricked — into borrowing heavily against their houses, on complicated terms that could see their payments skyrocket down the road.

Once the bubble popped in 2008, the value of these houses crashed, and the mortgages fell “underwater” — meaning that market value of the homes was less than the amount outstanding on the mortgage. This triggered the foreclosure crisis, where banks that had received billions in public money forced their borrowers out of their homes. This was official policy: Obama’s Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner boasted that forcing Americans out of their homes would “foam the runways” for the banks and give them a soft landing;

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/06/personnel-are-policy/#janice-eberly

With so many homes underwater on their first mortgages, the holders of those second mortgages wrote them off. They had bought high-risk, high reward debt, the kind whose claims come after the other creditors have been paid off. As prices collapsed, it became clear that there wouldn’t be anything left over after those higher-priority loans were paid off.

The lenders (or the bag-holders the lenders sold the loans to) gave up. They stopped sending borrowers notices, stopped trying to collect. That’s the way markets work, after all — win some, lose some.

But then something funny happened: private equity firms, flush with cash from an increasingly wealthy caste of one percenters, went on a buying spree, snapping up every home they could lay hands on, becoming America’s foremost slumlords, presiding over an inventory of badly maintained homes whose tenants are drowned in junk fees before being evicted:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/08/wall-street-landlords/#the-new-slumlords

This drove a new real estate bubble, as PE companies engaged in bidding wars, confident that they could recoup high one-time payments by charging working people half their incomes in rent on homes they rented by the room. The “recovery” of real estate property brought those second mortgages back from the dead, creating the “zombie mortgages” the WSJ writes about.

These zombie mortgages were then sold at pennies on the dollar to vulture capitalists — finance firms who make a bet that they can convince the debtors to cough up on these old debts. This “distressed debt investing” is a scam that will be familiar to anyone who spends any time watching “finance influencers” — like forex trading and real estate flipping, it’s a favorite get-rich-quick scheme peddled to desperate people seeking “passive income.”

Like all get-rich-quick schemes, distressed debt investing is too good to be true. These ancient debts are generally past the statute of limitations and have been zeroed out by law. Even “good” debts generally lack any kind of paper-trail, having been traded from one aspiring arm-breaker to another so many times that the receipts are long gone.

Ultimately, distressed debt “investing” is a form of fraud, in which the “investor” has to master a social engineering patter in which they convince the putative debtor to pay debts they don’t actually owe, either by shading the truth or lying outright, generally salted with threats of civil and criminal penalties for a failure to pay.

That certainly goes for zombie mortgages. Writing about the WSJ’s coverage on Naked Capitalism, Yves Smith reminds readers not to “pay these extortionists a dime” without consulting a lawyer or a nonprofit debt counsellor, because any payment “vitiates” (revives) an otherwise dead loan:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/06/wall-street-journal-aids-vulture-investors-threatening-second-mortgage-borrowers-with-foreclosure-on-nearly-always-legally-unenforceable-debt.html

But the WSJ’s 35-paragraph story somehow finds little room to advise readers on how to handle these shakedowns. Instead, it lionizes the arm-breakers who are chasing these debts as “investors…[who] make mortgage lending work.” The Journal even repeats — without commentary — the that these so-called investors’ “goal is to positively impact homeowners’ lives by helping them resolve past debt.”

This is where the Journal’s ideology bleeds off the editorial page into the news section. There is no credible theory that says that mortgage markets are improved by safeguarding the rights of vulture capitalists who buy old, forgotten second mortgages off reckless lenders who wrote them off a decade ago.

Doubtless there’s some version of the Hayek Mind-Virus that says that upholding the claims of lenders — even after those claims have been forgotten, revived and sold off — will give “capital allocators” the “confidence” they need to make loans in the future, which will improve the ability of everyday people to afford to buy houses, incentivizing developers to build houses, etc, etc.

But this is an ideological fairy-tale. As Michael Hudson describes in his brilliant histories of jubilee — debt cancellation — through history, societies that unfailingly prioritize the claims of lenders over borrowers eventually collapse:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/08/jubilant/#construire-des-passerelles

Foundationally, debts are amassed by producers who need to borrow capital to make the things that we all need. A farmer needs to borrow for seed and equipment and labor in order to sow and reap the harvest. If the harvest comes in, the farmer pays their debts. But not every harvest comes in — blight, storms, war or sickness — will eventually cause a failure and a default.

In those bad years, farmers don’t pay their debts, and then they add to them, borrowing for the next year. Even if that year’s harvest is good, some debt remains. Gradually, over time, farmers catch enough bad beats that they end up hopelessly mired in debt — debt that is passed on to their kids, just as the right to collect the debts are passed on to the lenders’ kids.

Left on its own, this splits society into hereditary creditors who get to dictate the conduct of hereditary debtors. Run things this way long enough and every farmer finds themselves obliged to grow ornamental flowers and dainties for their creditors’ dinner tables, while everyone else goes hungry — and society collapses.

The answer is jubilee: periodically zeroing out creditors’ claims by wiping all debts away. Jubilees were declared when a new king took the throne, or at set intervals, or whenever things got too lopsided. The point of capital allocation is efficiency and thus shared prosperity, not enriching capital allocators. That enrichment is merely an incentive, not the goal.

For generations, American policy has been to make housing asset appreciation the primary means by which families amass and pass on wealth; this is in contrast to, say, labor rights, which produce wealth by rewarding work with more pay and benefits. The American vision is that workers don’t need rights as workers, they need rights as owners — of homes, which will always increase in value.

There’s an obvious flaw in this logic: houses are necessities, as well as assets. You need a place to live in order to raise a family, do a job, found a business, get an education, recover from sickness or live out your retirement. Making houses monotonically more expensive benefits the people who get in early, but everyone else ends up crushed when their human necessity is treated as an asset:

https://gen.medium.com/the-rents-too-damned-high-520f958d5ec5

Worse: without a strong labor sector to provide countervailing force for capital, US politics has become increasingly friendly to rent-seekers of all kinds, who have increased the cost of health-care, education, and long-term care to eye-watering heights, forcing workers to remortgage, or sell off, the homes that were meant to be the source of their family’s long-term prosperity:

https://doctorow.medium.com/the-end-of-the-road-to-serfdom-bfad6f3b35a9

Today, reality’s leftist bias is getting harder and harder to ignore. The idea that people who buy debt at pennies on the dollar should be cheered on as they drain the bank-accounts — or seize the homes — of people who do productive work is pure ideology, the kind of thing you’d expect to see on the WSJ’s editorial page, but which sticks out like a sore thumb in the news pages.

Thankfully, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau is on the case. Director Rohit Chopra has warned the arm-breakers chasing payments on zombie mortgages that it’s illegal for them to “threaten judicial actions, such as foreclosures, for debts that are past a state’s statute of limitations.”

But there’s still plenty of room for more action. As Smith notes, the 2012 National Mortgage Settlement — a “get out of jail for almost free” card for the big banks — enticed lots of banks to discharge those second mortgages. Per Smith: “if any servicer sold a second mortgage to a vulture lender that it had charged off and used for credit in the National Mortgage Settlement, it defrauded the Feds and applicable state.”

Maybe some hungry state attorney general could go after the banks pulling these fast ones and hit them for millions in fines — and then use the money to build public housing.

Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in London and Berlin!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/04/vulture-capitalism/#distressed-assets

[Image ID: A Georgian eviction scene in which a bobby oversees three thugs who are using a battering ram to knock down a rural cottage wall. The image has been crudely colorized. A vulture looks on from the right, wearing a top-hat. The battering ram bears the WSJ logo.]

#pluralistic #great financial crisis #vulture capitalism #debts that can’t be paid won’t be paid #zombie debts #jubilee #michael hudson #wall street journal #business press #house thieves #debt #statute of limitations

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il-predestinato · 2 months

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When you get the honour of being their first third wheel of the season... 😵‍💫

Maxsplaining and Leclerifying during the post-qualifying press conference at the 2024 Bahrain Grand Prix. 🎥: F1TV

#charles leclerc #max verstappen #lestappen #george russell #SOMEONE PLEASE HELP GEORGE 😭#the way he sighed with his shoulders #skdfjdksf #charles leaned in #and then max leaned in #and then they ignored the interviewer #business as usual!#*#my edit #f1 #bahrain gp 2024 #qualifying #press conference

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hayden-christensen · 9 months

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'It's been really heartwarming I can't really sort of tell you what it means to me but so much, you know. I mean this is for the fans so to have their support is just huge.' — Hayden Christensen on fan reception to his return to Star Wars.

#hayden christensen #hchristensenedit #haydenchristensenedit #swcastedit #sw cast #kenobi press #starwarsblr #usershale #*mine #*2023 #*gifs #2k #IT HAS BEEN SO LONG SINCE I GIFFED HIM OMFGGGG #I've wanted to for ages but never found the time bc I was too busy making so many eras sets lmao thank god taylor's on a break rn #anyway !#I am very happy that hayden finally gets to play clone wars era anakin which he very much deserves to

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comradekatara · 1 month

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katara is so fucking funny in “the blind bandit” bc they go to the earth rumble she’s like “UGH men and their VIOLENCE…. so uncouth and distasteful and uncivilized,” and obviously she’s just being used as a mouthpiece through which to establish toph’s whole deal. but like. not two minutes ago she was literally freezing two boys to a wall, just because she can, with the biggest fucking smile on her face. so violence done between consenting parties for sport and entertainment is bad, but wreaking wanton havoc on strangers for no good reason is fine, actually?? girl get ur story straight!!

#i think she was just pressed bc sokka was actually somewhat enjoying himself 😤😤 smh #katara #she’s so fucking funny for freezing those kids to a wall tho #all because they said ‘nunya business’……….#meanwhile she APOLOGIZED to the DAI LI for DEFENDING HERSELF against THEIR ATTACK #she’s so. 14 years old 😭😭😭😭

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barrowsteeth · 10 months

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[Article link image description: Text "Kit Connor Wasn't Ready" over an image of Kit wearing a muted purple shirt with his arms crossed in front of his body. Kit is not smiling as he looks directly at the camera.

Image quote plain text: He certainly would have had cause to be furious, but he couches his feelings to me a little differently. "I think I felt disappointed," he tells me, "because I was really trying, you know. I really was trying to set that boundary. It was my private life, and I can understand why people would want to know, but I was also, you know, an 18-year-old kid." End plain text]

#kit connor #heartstopper #heartstopper cast #i’m never going to stop being furious about the way kit was treated #stop speculating about other people's sexuality #it can cause the person great harm #not to mention that it's no one else's business #and also creepy and weird af #press #interviews

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petit-papillion · 3 months

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Italian newspaper headlines - life is good 😊

📸 racingnews365

#love story.. marriage...#we are still talking about a business contract #right?#charles leclerc #contract renewal #italian press

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k-wame · 3 months

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“I'm texting him dead to me” 😭😭😭 Paul Mescal & Greg James call famous friends on Sit Down Stand Up

#like i get that they're all busy but jfc i will cry if no one picked up for me? this game is so stressful & fun!#paul mescal #andrew scott #aous #all of us strangers #daisy edgar jones #saoirse ronan #aous press #greg james #sit down stand up

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userparamore · 2 years

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well, there's a million other girls who do it just like you / looking as innocent as possible to get to who they want and what they like

MISERY BUSINESS bakersfield, ca | oct 2nd 2022

(x)

#poor misery business could only enjoy being retired for 4 years 😔 press f in the chat for misery business' retirement plans #paramore #pmore #hayley williams #misery business #live #paramoreedit #pmoreedit #hayleywilliamsedit #musicedit #usermusic #dailymusic #dailywilliams #dailywomen #alternativequeens #blogmusicdaily #dailymusicians #usergreta #*mygifs

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duckprintspress · 11 months

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In honor of the 54th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots – June 28th, 1969 – Duck Prints Press is thrilled to share with you how we’re celebrating Pride Month: with queer stories, of course!

Introducing our Pride 2023 Bundles: two collections of short stories, one general imprint, one erotica, each priced at a discounted $19.69, with all purchases benefiting two wonderful queer charities selected by the authors of the stories in the bundles: The Ali Forney Center and the Transgender Law Center.

We’ll be donating roughly 35% of the proceeds from these bundles to charity – the Press is donating 10% off the top, and many of the authors chose to donate part of their royalties as well, bringing the totals to approximately 40% of the list price of the erotica collection and approximately 35% of the list price of the general imprint collection.

How This Works

you buy one or both bundles between now and July 28th, 2023.

we tally up all the proceeds earned and do some math-e-magic to figure out how much we’re donating!

we divide the charity share in half right down the middle and, within the first week of August, we donate raised money to the Ali Forney Center and the Transgender Law Center; then, we post the proof we’ve done so.

you get fantastic stories!

we all get that happy, glowy feeling of knowing that money has been well-spent on fantastic causes!

About the Press

Duck Prints Press is a queer-owned indie press, founded to publish original works by fancreators. We’ve been in operation for over 2 years, and in that time we’ve worked with well over 150 creators to publish four anthologies and almost 70 other stories, from shorts to novels, and we’ve got more on the works (our fifth anthology is Kickstarting RIGHT NOW, as a matter of fact!). The vast majority of our creators and their creations are queer/LGTBQIA+ (maybe even all, but we don’t out anyone and we don’t ask demography because, frankly, it’s none of our business).

20 of our authors have chosen to include their short stories in one or both of these short story bundles, and these 20 and others nominated charities, then voted to narrow it down to these two! Participation in these bundles was entirely voluntarily, as was choosing to donate shares of royalties, which about a third of the authors have opted to do.

About the Charities

Note: These charities are not affiliated with the Press, do not know we’re doing this fundraiser, have not endorsed this in anyway and are, as such, utterly uninvolved in this beyond being the beneficiaries of our efforts! Text is from the websites of each charity and is being used under fair use laws.

The Ali Forney Center was founded in 2002. Committed to saving the lives of LGBTQ+ young people, our mission is to protect them from the harms of homelessness and empower them with the tools needed to live independently. A 24-hour program, The Ali Forney Center never closes its doors. We provide more than just a bed and food for those in need — from initial intake at our drop-in center to transitional housing and job readiness training, we provide homeless LGBTQ+ youth a safe, warm, supportive environment to escape the streets [of New York City].

Transgender Law Center is the largest national trans-led organization advocating self-determination for all people. Since 2002 we’ve been organizing, assisting, informing and empowering thousands of individual community members towards a long-term, national, trans-led movement for liberation.

About the Bundles

(this is getting long, so read more...)

We’re offering two bundles: one containing 14 stories from our general imprint, the other containing 11 stories from our erotica imprint. For all the deets, you’ll need to visit the page for each story, but here’s an overview…

Titles in the General Imprint Charity Bundle:

A Mutual Interest by Alec J. Marsh

The Problem with Wishes by Annabeth Lynch

Let the Solstice Come by D. V. Morse

Warmer Lights by Era J. M. Couts

An Odd Gathering of Peculiar Cats by J. D. Harlock

Dead Man’s Bells by Nicola Kapron

Widow’s Black by Nina Waters

twin flames by nottesilhouette

A Shield for the People by Puck Malamud

Much Ruckus by R. L. Houck

Bubble, Bubble by Sage Mooreland

Settling Down by Theresa Tanner

Best Friends AND… by Tris Lawrence

To Fill My Cup by Violet J. Hayes

Approximately 35% of the $19.69 list price of this bundle will go to the charities.

Titles in the Erotica Imprint Charity Bundle:

Pas de Deux by Aeryn Jemariel Knox

Study Hall by Alec J. Marsh

A Safe Place to Land by boneturtle

Clerical Error by Dei Walker

In the Moonlight by E. V. Dean

We All Need to Get By by Lyn Weaver

The Fated Prince by Mikki Madison

Lust by Nina Waters

No One Right Way by R. L. Houck

Easier Than Expected by Samantha M. Piper

Urchin Juiced by Xianyu Zhou

Approximately 40% of the $19.69 list price of this bundle will go to the charities.

What are you waiting for? Come get some great stories, support a queer-owned business this Pride, and benefit two fantastic causes. Win-win-win situations don’t get much better than this!

These bundles will only be available for one month, so don’t miss out. Visit our webstore between now and July 28th and get yours!

#duck prints press #our titles #read pride #short stories #queer fiction #queer short stories #queer business #queer authors #queer books #read queer #lgbtqia

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cruciomione · 6 months

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another hope for the bear s3 is exploring carmys “celebrity chef” status. i don’t really consider this a plot hole because, it seems like carmy just quit EMP quietly and took off to chicago to run the Beef so no one would really know where he went off to after he left new york.

but i find it kinda weird how he was the most excellent CDC at the most excellent restaurant in the entire USA, but we don’t really get to see the extent of that or it’s not really talked about by anyone other than Sydney or Pete (aw😭)

obv famous chefs irl aren’t being stopped in the streets bc no one really knows them unless they are apart of that world too. but i do think now that Carmy is more publicly starting this venture with the Bear, we get to explore and have more perspective on his career overall

this has been explored in fics as well and i’m really hoping the writers don’t abandon this

#the bear #sydcarmy #like EMP chef visiting the bear is actually very likely and not just something only carmy can imagine #i’m curious if they will explore the press/media side of running a restaurant #i also remember watching tiktoks about the two chefs carmy is based on and it was apparently a. really big deal when they went off to start #their own businesses too after having similar careers to carmys so i’m expecting a lot of press

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suyacho · 6 months

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what happened to writing for fun & having this as a fun space for everyone? what’s with the bullying? and before you say it’s not “bullying”, people are being pieces of shit and driving others off the app if that’s not bullying idk what is. what’s with idolizing “big blogs” and them acting like they’re a celebrity or something? what’s with critiquing people their writing and not liking their “characterizing” or “writing style”, wake up babe it’s tumblr, your numbers on here don’t mean anything, it was supposed to be a place where people write as a hobby, not professional writers. now it’s just a toxic place for most people because wherever you there’s always someone ruining someone elses experience.

#snow; sighs #sorry i woke up upset n angry #suffer with me🫡#also if youre pressed over this as a big blog youre the issue #LMAOAOAOA #m also not saying every big blog or every tumblr user is like this but‼️‼️#theres discourse every other business day or even daily #and gatekeepy claimy behavior over things everyone and their mothers have done before but thats a whole different topic #ANYWAYS #cw discourse #tw discourse

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