#Subprime mortgage crisis

[signode-blog]

The 2008 Market Crash: Causes, Impacts, and Lessons Learned

l. Introduction The 2008 market crash stands as one of the most significant financial upheavals in modern history, reshaping economies and livelihoods around the globe. Understanding the causes and impacts of this crisis is crucial for navigating future economic challenges. ll. Background of the 2008 Market Crash A. Economic conditions leading up to the crash Prior to 2008, the United States…

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#2008 financial crisis #2008 market crash #economic impact #financial crisis #financial institutions #financial regulation #financial regulation failures #financial system flexibility #global financial meltdown #global recession #government dole #government intervention #housing market collapse #Lesson learned #Market Crash #Responsible lending practices #Risk Management #role of the central bank #subprime lending #subprime mortgage crisis

[your-spiritual-journey]

#2008 #bankruptcy #credit default swaps #crisis #derivatives #financial collapse #fraud #government bailout #investigation #lending practices #mortgage-backed securities #regulation #regulatory failure #risky loans #Silicon Valley Bank #subprime mortgages #systemic risk #United States

[kc22invesmentsblog]

The 2008 Financial Crisis: A Global Wake-Up Call

Written by Delvin The 2008 financial crisis stands as a stark reminder of the fragility of the global financial system. Triggered by the collapse of the subprime mortgage market in the United States, this crisis had far-reaching consequences that reverberated across the globe. In this blog post, we will delve into the key factors that led to the crisis, its impact on the global economy, and the…

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#2008 Financial Crisis #dailyprompt #Financial #Financial Literacy #knowledge #money #Money Fun Facts #Real Estate #Subprime Mortgage Market Collapse #The 2008 Financial Crisis: A Global Wake-Up Call

[cvsette]

Halloween costume idea: Margot Robbie in a bubble bath explaining the subprime mortgage crisis/2008 financial crisis

#holding a sign that says ‘ask me about the subprime mortgage crisis’ #the bubble bath is the hard part bc I’d need a lot of cotton balls… #txt

[gentlemans-code20]

#Luminaries - Ben Bernanke

Ben Bernanke, in full Benjamin Shalom Bernanke, (born December 13, 1953, Augusta, Georgia, U.S.), American economist who served as chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (“the Fed”), the central bank of the United States, from 2006 to 2014.

#gentlemans code #luminaries #ben bernanke #brookings #economics #economist #academia #academic #federal reserve system #Nobel Prize #Fed chairman #financial crisis #subprime mortgage #crisis #professor #Harvard university #massachusetts institute of technology #stanford university

[thepolicewanttostealmythoughts]

just witnessed the very slight misteach thats going to create a huge error in some students first big corporate/govt job

#university #programming #python #they said to set a bool as true at the start of a project if establishing a variable in an if statement returns an error instead of a catch #which fixes that error but if theres another error that ignores the if itll say the qualification is met #basically 'whoopsie i coded the next subprime mortgage crisis' waiting to happen

[judasvibe]

if this was in my country id absolutely identify as half hispanic or whatever to get real estate without downpayment, since lacking a fat 250k in cash is what's stopping me, and not my income, from owning an apartment to live in

#how is this even legal aldiughserg #subprime crisis 2.0 incoming. until then for people who got normal mortgages: get ready for a cost increase to your loan interest

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Intuit: “Our fraud fights racism”

Tonight (September 27), I'll be at Chevalier's Books in Los Angeles with Brian Merchant for a joint launch for my new book The Internet Con and his new book, Blood in the Machine. On October 2, I'll be in Boise to host an event with VE Schwab.

Today's key concept is "predatory inclusion": "a process wherein lenders and financial actors offer needed services to Black households but on exploitative terms that limit or eliminate their long-term benefits":

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2329496516686620

Perhaps you recall predatory inclusion from the Great Financial Crisis, when predatory subprime mortgages with deceptive teaser rates were foisted on Black homeowners (who were eligible for better mortgages), resulting in a wave of Black home theft in the foreclosure crisis:

https://prospect.org/justice/staggering-loss-black-wealth-due-subprime-scandal-continues-unabated/

Before these loans blew up, they were styled as a means of creating Black intergenerational wealth through housing speculation. They turned out to be a way to suck up Black families' savings before rendering them homeless and forcing them into houses owned by the Wall Street slumlords who bought all the housing stock the Great Financial Crisis put on the market:

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

That was just an update on an old con: the "home sale contract," invented by loan-sharks who capitalized on redlining to rip off Black families. Back when banks and the US government colluded to deny mortgages to Black households, sleazy lenders created the "contract loan," which worked like a mortgage, but if you were late on a single payment, the lender could seize and sell your home and not pay you a dime – even if the house was 99% paid for:

https://socialequity.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Plunder-of-Black-Wealth-in-Chicago.pdf

Usurers and con-artists love to style themselves as anti-racists, seeking to "close the racial wealth gap." The payday lending industry – whose triple-digit interest rates trap poor people in revolving debt that they can never pay off – styles itself as a force for racial justice:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/29/planned-obsolescence/#academic-fraud

Payday lenders prey on poor people, and in America, "poor" is often a euphemism for "Black." Payday lenders disproportionately harm Black families:

https://ung.edu/student-money-management-center/money-minute/racial-wealth-gap-payday-loans.php

Payday lenders are just unlicensed banks, who deploy a layer of bullshit to claim that they don't have to play by the rules that bind the rest of the finance sector. This scam is so juicy that it spawned the fintech industry, in which a bunch of unregulated banks sprung up to claim that they were too "innovative" to be regulated:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/01/usury/#tech-exceptionalism

When you hear "Fintech," think "unlicensed bank." Fintech turned predatory inclusion into a booming business, recruiting Black spokespeople to claim that being the sucker at the table in the cryptocurrency casino was actually a form of racial justice:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/07/business/media/cryptocurrency-seeks-the-spotlight-with-spike-lees-help.html

But not all predatory inclusion is financial. Take Facebook Basics, Meta's "poor internet for poor people" program. Facebook partnered with telcos in the Global South to rig their internet access. These "zero rating" programs charged subscribers by the byte to reach any service except Facebook and its partners. Facebook claimed that this would "bridge the digital divide," by corralling "the next billion internet users" into using its services.

The fact that this would make "Facebook" synonymous with "the internet" was just an accidental, regrettable side-effect. Naturally, this was bullshit from top to bottom, and the countries where zero-rating was permitted ended up having more expensive wireless broadband than the countries that banned it:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/02/countries-zero-rating-have-more-expensive-wireless-broadband-countries-without-it

The predatory inclusion gambit is insultingly transparent, but that doesn't stop desperate scammers from trying it. The latest chancer is Intuit, who claim that the end of its decade-long, wildly profitable "free tax prep" scam is bad for Black people:

https://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-intuit-black-taxpayers-irs-free-file-marketing

Some background. In nearly every rich country on Earth, the tax authorities send every taxpayer a pre-filled tax return, based on the information submitted by employers, banks, financial planners, etc. If that looks good to you, you just sign it and send it back. Otherwise, you can amend it, or just toss it in the trash and pay a tax-prep specialist to produce your own return.

But in America, taxpayers spend billions every year to send forms to the IRS that tell it things it already knows. To make this ripoff seem fair, the hyper-concentrated tax-prep industry, led by the Intuit, creators of Turbotax, pretended to create a program to provide free tax-prep to working people.

This program was called Free File, and it was a scam. The tax-prep cartel each took a different segment of Americans who were eligible for Freefile and then created an online house of mirrors that would trick those people into spending hours working on their tax-returns until they were hit with an error message falsely claiming they were ineligible for the free service and demanding hundreds of dollars to file their returns.

Intuit were world champions at this scam. They blocked their Freefile offering from search-engine crawlers and then bought ads that showed up when searchers typed "freefile" into the query box that led them to deceptively named programs that had "free" in their names but cost a fortune to use – more than you'd pay for a local CPA to file on your behalf.

The Attorneys General of nearly every US state and territory eventually sued Intuit over this, settling for $141m:

https://www.agturbotaxsettlement.com/Home/portalid/0

The FTC is still suing them over it:

https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/cases-proceedings/192-3119-intuit-inc-matter-turbotax

We have to rely on state AGs and the FTC to bring Intuit to justice because every Intuit user clicks through an agreement in which we permanently surrender our right to sue the company, no matter how many laws it breaks. For corporate criminals, binding arbitration waivers are the gift that keeps on giving:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/24/uber-for-arbitration/#nibbled-to-death-by-ducks

Even as the scam was running out, Intuit spent millions lobby-blitzing Congress, desperate for action that would let it continue to privately tax the nation for filling in forms that – once again – told the IRS things it already knew. They really love the idea of paying taxes on paying your taxes:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/20/turbotaxed/#counter-intuit

But they failed. The IRS has taken Freefile in-house, will send you a pre-completed tax return if you want it. This should be the end of the line for Intuit and other tax-prep profiteers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/17/free-as-in-freefile/#tell-me-something-i-dont-know

Now we're at the end of the line for the scam, Intuit is playing the predatory inclusion card. They're conning Black newspapers like the Chicago Defender into running headlines like "IRS Free Tax Service Could Further Harm Blacks,"

https://defendernetwork.com/news/opinion/irs-free-tax-service-could-further-harm-blacks/

The only named source in that article? Intuit spokesperson Derrick Plummer. The article went out on the country's Black newswire Trice Edney, whose editor-in-chief did not respond to Propublica's Paul Kiel's questions.

Then Black Enterprise got in on the game, publishing "Critics Claim The IRS Free Tax Prep Service Could Hurt Black Americans." Once again, the only named source for the article was Plummer, who was "quoted at length." Black Enterprise declined to tell Kiel where that article came from:

https://www.blackenterprise.com/critics-claim-the-irs-free-tax-prep-service-could-hurt-black-americans/

For Intuit, placing op-eds is a tried-and-true tactic for laundering its ripoffs into respectability. Leaked internal Intuit memos detail the company's strategy of "pushing back through op-eds" to neutralize critics:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6483061-Intuit-TurboTax-2014-15-Encroachment-Strategy.html

Intuit spox Derrick Plummer did respond to Kiel's queries, denying that Intuit was paying for these op-eds, saying "with an idea as bad as the Direct File scheme we don’t have to pay anyone to talk about how terrible it is."

Meanwhile, ex-NAACP director (and No Labels co-chair) Benjamin Chavis has used his position atop the National Newspaper Publishers Association to publish op-eds against the IRS Direct File program, citing the Progressive Policy Institute, a pro-business thinktank that Intuit's internal documents describe as part of its "coalition":

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6483061-Intuit-TurboTax-2014-15-Encroachment-Strategy.html

Chavis's Chicago Tribune editorial claimed that Direct File could cause Black filers to miss out on tax-credits they are entitled to. This is a particularly ironic claim given Intuit's prominent role in sabotaging the Child Tax Credit, a program that lifted more Americans out of poverty than any other in history:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/29/three-times-is-enemy-action/#ctc

It's also an argument that can be found in Intuit's own anti-Direct File blog posts:

https://www.intuit.com/blog/innovative-thinking/taxpayer-empowerment/intuit-reinforces-its-commitment-to-fighting-for-taxpayers-rights/

The claim is that because the IRS disproportionately audits Black filers (this is true), they will screw them over in other ways. But Evelyn Smith, co-author of the study that documented the bias in auditing says this is bullshit:

https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/working-paper/measuring-and-mitigating-racial-disparities-tax-audits

That's because these audits of Black households are triggered by the IRS's focus on Earned Income Tax Credits, a needlessly complicated program available to low-income (and hence disproportionately Black) workers. The paperwork burden that the IRS heaps on EITC recipients means that their returns contain errors that trigger audits.

As Smith told Propublica, "With free, assisted filing, we might expect EITC claimants to make fewer mistakes and face less intense audit scrutiny, which could help reduce disparities in audit rates between Black and non-Black taxpayers."

Meanwhile, the predatory inclusion talking points continue to proliferate. Nevada accountants and the state's former controller somehow coincidentally managed to publish op-eds with nearly identical wording. Phillip Austin, vice-chair of Arizon's East Valley Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, claims that free IRS tax prep "would disproportionately hurt the Hispanic community." Austin declined to tell Propublica how he came to that conclusion.

Right-wing think-tanks are pumping out a torrent of anti-Direct File disinfo. This surely has nothing to do with the fact that, for example, Center Forward has HR Block's chief lobbyist on its board:

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/4125481-direct-e-file-wont-make-filing-taxes-any-easier-but-it-could-make-things-worse/

The whole thing reeks of bullshit and desperation. That doesn't mean that it won't succeed in killing Direct File. If there's one thing America loves, it's letting businesses charge us a tax just for dealing with our own government, from paying our taxes to camping in our national parks:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/30/military-industrial-park-service/#booz-allen

Interestingly, there's a MAGA version of predatory inclusion, in which corporations convince low-information right-wingers that efforts to protect them from ripoffs are "woke." These campaigns are, incredibly, even stupider than the predatory inclusion tale.

For example, there's a well-coordianted campaign to block the junk fees that the credit card cartel extracts from merchants, who then pass those charges onto us. This campaign claims that killing junk fees is woke:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/04/owning-the-libs/#swiper-no-swiping

How does that work? Here's the logic: Target sells Pride merch. That makes them woke. Target processes a lot of credit-card transactions, so anything that reduces card-processing fees will help Target. Therefore, paying junk fees is a way to own the libs.

No, seriously.

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/2023/09/27/predatory-inclusion/#equal-opportunity-scammers

#pluralistic

[chribby]

pluto in aquarius rambles

Pluto in Aquarius = Power to the People

Pluto = Power

Aquarius = Human, the Water Bearer, rules Groups of people, and demagogues.

I have several predictions based on Pluto in Aquarius. Pluto in Aquarius will be ruled by a Saturn in Pisces when it moves on Jan 20th, 2024... and as we can see, people are receiving reprecussions (Saturn) based on their Beliefs (Pisces)

Previously, I’ve predicted that it would be the Fall of Silicon Valley. In fact, while Pluto was briefly in Aquarius this year, Saturn stationed in Pisces on March 7th (One day before my birthday, lol) and Silicon Valley Bank ended up doing a bank run.

EDIT: 02/23. I just checked. Saturn did go into Pisces 03/07, but Pluto wasn’t in Aquarius until 03/23. I do consider Pluto to rule financial systems, and I do think the Saturn transit did spark the bank run, but I wanted to correct this! I am sorry! Pluto spiked the same bank run on Black Monday 2008, and led to the subprime mortgage crisis. So, Saturn-Pluto, but NOT Pluto in Aquarius. I apologize.

I think it’s fun to use astrology in tandem with what we’re experiencing because as above, so below. But, it’s more fun to be able to recognize the energy that you’re looking at.

So, here’s a little loose list of things that I think will happen during Pluto in Aquarius.

1. Power (Pluto) to the People (Aquarius) = Our reliance on these big corporate structures (Capricorn) will lower and lower, especially as we see ourselves getting punished for speaking about what we believe in. I feel like we will question sources of power, and then look into finding our power within ourselves. I feel like there will be more demagogues lol. But mostly, it will be people turning to their communities.

2. Political Revolutions - Last time Pluto was in Aqua was from 1778-1798 and I swear to god they got that bitch cracking like CRAB LEGS. They had

Irish Rebellion

Settler-Indigenous Wars

Indigenous rebellion against spanish colonization

Haitian Revolution

Northwest Indian War …

Like THEY WASN’T FUCKING PLAYING. So, you already know what time it is. I guess my question is how will the INTERNET play into this?

3. Ass play is about to be as common as kissing in my opinion.

4. Here’s more general predictions lol

cyber crimes, technological terrorism worse than data breaching, pen testing (Pluto = Terrorist activity)

online tombs

cyberpollution

Camgirling is about to change in a new way.

Digital sex work

Digital smut (erotica writers? You’re up)

Digital Decay will be addressed. We will see the first ruined images due to natural jpeg artifact build up

Digital Third Space/Metaverse will be expanded upon. Focusing on a decentralization of both this technology and the need for this “digital third space” will help this from being some terrorist rich kids fantasy.

4. OH AND LIKE I FUCKING SAID. SILICON VALLEY WILL FALL.

5. 3D is up, more focus on 3D. I saw a tweet about that, but I think that a lot of the kids will be more advanced at 3D vs how we as kids went towards digital art? Idk how to make that make sense but yea.

6. Cybertheft. Feels like there is about to be A GLARING VULNERABILITY LOL THAT JUST WENT UNCOVERED UNTIL NOW and it will get EXPLOITED AND TORE TF UP

7. Everybody thinks they’re fuckin Jon Stewart … one thing I haye about us Aquarii we don’t know how to shut the fuck up sometimes…

8. Streamers held the long con enough for people to forget responsible pirating, but this will turn on its head during this transit I think…

9. Looking at the internet….

Pluto rules generations. So pluto in Aquarius will be a new generation. And they will be weird as hell.

Pluto in Scorpio = When World Wide Web was created.

Pluto in Aquarius = WWW Square. And I feel like now, we’re looking at the damages and transformations the internet underwent since the web was created. It feels much more hollow.

I think Pluto Squares tell us how to fix things. Just saying.

This is all I have… for now….

#pluto in aquarius #pluto #aquarius #pluto in aqua #i need to write more lol

[galwednesday]

This week's deep dive rec is TAL: The Giant Pool of Money, a collaboration between This American Life and NPR News, that was the first long-form reporting that really made me understand how the hell subprime mortgage defaults led to a global financial crisis:

This American Life producer Alex Blumberg teams up with NPR's Adam Davidson for the entire hour to tell the story—the surprisingly entertaining story—of how the U.S. got itself into a housing crisis. They talk to people who were actually working in the housing, banking, finance and mortgage industries, about what they thought during the boom times, and why the bust happened. And they explain that a lot of it has to do with the giant global pool of money.

And since one hour isn't as much of a deep dive as usual (an hour and a half if you listen to the new reporting in the second half of their follow-up episode from a year after the financial collapse), I'll double-rec Michael Lewis's The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine which goes even more in-depth on the financial and regulatory mechanisms at work.

#wednesday deep dives #I read The Big Short after consuming a bunch of other related reporting so I can't speak to it as a beginner's guide #but it was written with a general audience in mind and I think the TAL episode would be enough of a primer to make it understandable

[sleepysera]

"The Indian Removal Act of 1830 The annexation of 55 percent of Mexico in 1848 The forced taking of the Philippines The forced taking of Puerto Rico The forced taking of Hawaii Japanese internment camps The destruction of a thriving Black community in Tulsa, Oklahoma The destruction of a thriving Black community in Rosewood, Florida Past and present-day redlining The abandonment of Black New Orleanians during and after Hurricane Katrina Predatory lending leading to the subprime mortgage crisis that wiped out billions in Black wealth

This is just a short list but, I hope, you get where I am going with this. Our American history is simply too rife with documented instances in which land occupied by people of color has forcibly been taken, preyed upon, intentionally devalued, or flat out destroyed for any well-meaning white people to roll their eyes when an old Black woman says that she believes that white people had an organized plan to take land occupied by Black people in D.C."

-Dax-Devlon Ross, Letters to My White Male Friends (2021)

#books #quote #nonfiction #racism #poc #us history #gentrification

[quasi-normalcy]

In one sense there is nothing remarkable in observing that capitalists would prefer individuals who agree to work and consume in ways that most advantage capital. We need only to consider the ravages of the subprime mortgage industry that helped trigger the great financial crisis of 2008 or the daily insults to human autonomy at the hands of countless industries from airlines to insurance for plentiful examples of this plain fact. However, it would be dangerous to nurse the notion that today’s surveillance capitalists simply represent more of the same. This structural requirement of economies of action turns the means of behavioural modification into an engine of growth. At no other time in history have private corporations of unprecedented wealth and power enjoyed the free exercise of economies of action supported by a pervasive global architecture of ubiquitous computational knowledge and control constructed and maintained by all the advanced scientific know-how that money can buy. Most pointedly, Facebook’s declaration of experimental authority claims surveillance capitalists’ prerogatives over the future course of others’ behaviour. In declaring the right to modify human action secretly and for profit, surveillance capitalism effectively exiles us from our own behaviour, shifting the locus of control over the future tense from “I will” to “You will.” Each one of us may follow a distinct path, but economies of action ensure that the path is already shaped by surveillance capitalism’s economic imperatives. The struggle for power and control in society is no longer associated with the hidden facts of class and its relationship to production but rather by the hidden facts of automated engineered behaviour modification.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

[your-spiritual-journey]

#2008 recession #bailout #central banks #consumer confidence #economic downturn #financial institutions #foreclosure #global financial crisis #government debt #government regulation #housing market crash #quantitative easing #risky lending practices #stimulus package #stock market #subprime mortgages #TARP #unemployment

[eggplantmaniac420]

yo mama so subprime they used to call her mortgage crisis

[maybetheyregiants]

homestuck is about the 2008 subprime mortgage loan crisis and transgenderism

[mariacallous]

In America, fraud has always been a key feature of business, and the national worship of entrepreneurial freedom complicates the task of distinguishing salesmanship from deceit. In this sweeping narrative, Edward Balleisen traces the history of fraud in America—and the evolving efforts to combat it—from the age of P. T. Barnum through the eras of Charles Ponzi and Bernie Madoff. This unprecedented account describes the slow, piecemeal construction of modern institutions to protect consumers and investors—from the Gilded Age through the New Deal and the Great Society. It concludes with the more recent era of deregulation, which has brought with it a spate of costly frauds, including corporate accounting scandals and the mortgage-marketing debacle. By tracing how Americans have struggled to foster a vibrant economy without encouraging a corrosive level of cheating, Fraud reminds us that American capitalism rests on an uneasy foundation of social trust.