August 25, 2011 at 10:22:40By Kent Welton (about the author)
8-25-2011
Updated from my original OpEdNews.com article of October 28, 2008 -- Kent Welton
"I don't rule anything out from the Federal Chairman proposing, this Friday, a nationwide refinancing option for all agency Government Sponsored Entities (GSE) mortgages. The "white elephant in the room" is the reason home valuations continue to drop. If homeowners are underwater on their mortgage by an increasing amount, there is an increased rationale for the homeowner to walk away from the mortgage. Providing a Federal nationwide refinancing option would address the increasing number of GSE mortgages which are under water. Who wants to buy a home when they read headlines that 2nd quarter home values dropped by 5.9%? Potential Federal refinancing programs could include the following aspects: An easy to obtain restructured GSE mortgage. Interest rates could be capped at 2-3%. A plan to revise the home GSE mortgage loan to current market values. This would reduce the number of "mail in my keys" and walk away from the house and mortgage." Todd Johnson, SeekingAlpha.com, August 25, 201 1
TREASURY DIRECT HOME LOANS - FIRE THE FED "To suggest that there's a large place for private financing in the future of housing finance is unrealistic. Government is part of our future. We need a government balance sheet. To suggest that the private market come back in is simply impractical. It won't work." Bill Gross, Pacific Investment Management Recently, Bill Gross, who runs the world's biggest bond fund, said the U.S. should consider "full nationalization' of the mortgage-finance system. Clearly more people are realizing the predatory idiocy of "our" housing finance system cannot go on if we are to have a stable and fair consumer-based economy.
With our home loans there is no reason why we, the people, exercising the very purse power of our Constitution, cannot get home loans direct from our own Treasury. In doing so we can agree to establish stable low or no-interest home loan programs. In this way we provide reasonable mortgage vehicles not subject to the predation, interest rate and terms changes, and other disruptions of the private market. The private home lending market has proved itself an utter disaster, a predatory and even criminal enterprise, one we have seen over and over again lead to incredible chaos, pain and suffering - and all this with the very asset that is the foundation of our lives, family, and society.
Given a non debt-money based lending direct from our own Treasury, provided via existing banks and credit unions whether public or private, we can once and for all escape the banksters system that has destroyed so many lives and the economy as a whole. The carnage in peoples lives resulting from the Wall Street home loan system is beyond description
With new legal tender laws to escape the "Federal Reserve" money and credit creation monopoly we avoid all the secondary market chaos and Wall Street criminality we see today and which has cost taxpayers billions in bail-outs to bankers - i.e., the very ones who abused and raped the system. With private debt-money, the social harm and costs spread to other markets and mean more banker bail-outs with yet more money which must be borrowed at interest from a private cartel that creates it out of thin air. Were a public home loan bank system in place, all the chaos could have been and will, in the future, be prevented with a stable low or no interest system of Treasury-direct home loans.
In practice a treasury direct system is simply a friendly local community bank writ large, and one funded not by debt-money but stable treasury direct, non debt-money, financing for the most important asset in our lives. It will be funded and managed thru local banks with greater penalties for fraud and abuse. Forget the taxpayer guarantees for a predatory, private, debt-money, home loan system. We have already seen how this approach has cost us trillions in debt and ruined lives.
If, for example, we adopted a regime of three percent fixed home loans - all funded thru local banks, savings and loans, and credit unions we could then have stable, low-interest, home loans with one big difference -- i.e., the source of funds.
Not only would we not be paying this low interest to and thru the debt-money bond dealers who own the Federal Reserve but the interest, if any, would be paid directly into our public Treasury. Such funds could then be used to make new loans or go to reduce our taxes or fund infrastructure -- all without debt-money chicanery and slavery to a private cartel.
Our problem to date is that we are not likely to hear of any such options because the corporate "free press" and our corporate-financed, bankster-driven, politicians dare not speak of such "radical" proposals or any such freedom from the iron grip of the "Fed" cartel - and this despite the clear constitutional "purse power" directive handed down to We, The People. These lackeys would cry "socialism" in order to keep you tied to the very banksters our Founding fathers fought to escape and keep future generations from becoming their victims. It is privatization that is bankrupting us and stealing our assets and even our ability to work as a truly free community, state, and nation.
Today's situation of forced free trade, forced globalization, and ruin of the middle class and First World Standards creating the very chaos from which we can gain the courage to begin to reclaim the "Fed" stock and completely revise our home finance system, not to mention our government debt-money bond system. With all the government guarantees in place in the mortgage market, we already have partially nationalized home finance. With the removal of these guarantees homes loand will become increasingly expensive and hard to obtain. We will remain at the mercy of Wall Street and private bankers instead of establishing a simple treasury-direct system home loan system.
Nothing is more indicative of the stone cold oligarchy within which we are trapped then the absence of any discussion of exactly such a program. Must we wait until the system collapses under the weight of forced debt-money, and the fascist parade beings in earnest, to hear a discussion of Treasury-direct home loans, nationalization, state banks, or a public central bank in this "free country" of ours? Must we eternally bow down before the money God, Goldman Sachs, a promethean too-big-to-fail entity wherein our Treasury Department appears be be nothing more than an in-house subsidiary?
Real home loan reform is not only possible today but absolutely necessary. First, however, something other than complete private bankster control must be broached and freely debated not only in Congress but in a media free of corporate control (see EditorFreedom.com). This is a tall order at present as the "weapons of mass distraction" are currently out of our hands -- despite the fact the public owns the airwaves we still have no say in editorship.
Clearly, the family home is the very building block of society -- our society. We should then be able to decide (easy with a National Initiative process) that we are going to act like any small community and help our neighbors build their homes and minimize the cost -- just like a nation-wide "barn raising." Or, do we want to screw our kids with endless debt-money interest, non-portable equity buildup, and recourse loans only for the little guy?
We can decide we are not going to place our families at the mercy of amoral, far-flung, investors who could care less that we lost our job to "free trade" with China or that we now face losing our home, our life savings, our health, and facing divorce over money matters. The landscape is now littered with debt-beaten and broken families for these very reasons, and mortgages idiotically bought and sold into pieces.
Indeed, the incredible social chaos and completely unnecessary costs that arise with debt-money-driven financial failures and home foreclosures are truly immense. Why do you think the ruling banking elite are scrambling so hard to look like they are relieving the burden of the millions already foreclosed and the millions more awaiting foreclosure? They seek to prevent and real reform and prevent what the people really want and need - a stable, non-predatory, home loan system financed by their own public treasury.
We are being screwed more ways than you can count today and thing promise to get worse with a "New Democrat" in the White House serving corporate interests.
In any case the home lending disaster all stems from a corrupt "independent" private central bank system. Independent of whom you ask? Why, the people, of course, but not the banking cartel owners of the "Fed." The founders knew what they were doing when they placed the "purse powers" in Congress -- i.e., the most representative body of the people. Unfortunately, they did not leave us with the initiative power to override a corrupt and bought-off Congress which has saddled us not only with a private central bank scheme but also a corporate-run WTO/GATT/NAFTA forced-trade regime.
In any event we do not need to dismantle the "Fed" to accomplish this end. We simply need, by Congressional action, to move the home-loan funding power to the Treasury exclusively. Commercial lending can remain under the present regime, although a recapture of the central bank by the people would be preferable.
Consider that, with current interest rates over time, you must pay for your house 2-3 times over. Does this make sense? Exactly what time-value do the people as a whole wish to place on their money and home loans to their neighbors? At present, we are not allowed to make this determination, or even to set our own rates and terms.
In our consumer-driven economy we now take immense amounts of mortgage interest money spending power out of consumer's hands and feed it into a small wealthy elite's hands, and to foreign bond holders? Talk about non-economic nonsense and drastically lowering the velocity of money! This crushing of consumer demand via private central bank interest thievery makes no sense even in conventional economic terms. It has to go.
The profiteering in our home loan system is immoral, immense, and inexcusable. The system must be changed, and the people must regain control over their home loan apparatus, or we face recurrent tragedies and ever greater debt, dislocation, and taxation until it all implodes and we are forced to pay the ultimate price.
Kent Welton,
PublicCentralBank.com
www.KentWelton.com
Author, Exec. Dir. The Center For Balance.org - Websites: PanditPress.com, OligarchyUSA.com, PublicCentralBank.com, EditorFreedom.com, FascismUSA.com & more
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.
No comments:
Post a Comment