. . . James Kuntsler's cheery Monday tidings while I was gone? I had to catch up on a couple of weeks worth of his blog entries upon return from Europe. (Check
here and
here.) Would it be redundant to mention that he's not particularly cheered by the the state of things in the country? What's bothered him the past couple of Mondays is the discovery of all irregularities in the mortgage contracts that have been turning up now for the past few weeks. In plain English, during the bacchanalia of greed and everybody getting rich and housing prices going through the roof and
mortgage backed securities not worth diddly in the trillions . . . well, guess what? The banks were not too particular about who got the mortgages, and they seemed to care even less about correct documentation of these loans. It's turning out that the records are rife with error. And that's what Mr. Kuntsler is concerned with. I can never resist quoting this guy. Here he is leading into a piece that asks basically where the hell was everybody who was supposed to be monitoring these things: Fannie & Freddie, the hotshots at the investment firms, and numberless federal agencies whose job it is to watch over these things. Here's a flavor of it. I can never resist quoting this guy. He's eminently quotable almost all the time:
The banking authorities were shocked - shocked - to discover last week that an awful lot of mortgage paper in this country is not quite in order... appears to contain, er, irregularities... seems less than kosher... frankly, exudes an odor like unto dead carp or, shall we say, a heap of dead carp the size of the building at 3900 Wisconsin Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. Any day now we will hear that... mistakes... were... made.
Is it indelicate to say that the USA as an enterprise has its head so deeply and firmly up its ass that the all the proctologists alive on planet Earth could not extract the collective cranium from the collective cloacal chamber even with the aid of a Bucyrus-Erie 1060-WX bucket-wheel excavator?
And so it goes in the land of the free.
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