"Boater" wrote in message
. ..
ACORN is a rather controversial organization, but it has done a lot of
good in pointing out and helping eliminate predatory lending practices,


There were not predatory lending practices. The poor declining inner-city
was a bad investment. The poor could not put up the 20% down and even if
they could they could not make the payments. In the olden days the banks
had to carry the paper they wrote a loan on. They wanted to be paid for the
loan. But since the poor could not normally do this, the Federal Government
required Fannie Mae to buy the loans. Now the banks could loan money to the
bad credit risk, make money and not worry about a bad loan. F&F then
started packaging the bad and good loans and selling them, so they could
make more money. The Fed's were really behind F&F but if the officers of
F&F showed a large profit, they got large bonuses. They even went so far to
lie to get an extra $100 million in bonus money. Government settled for
$3.5 million and dropped charges. Sad. Then the smart people of wall
street, seeing a huge pool of profit to be made without risk, jumped on
these bad, government guaranteed loans. And since F&F exerted no real
oversight, the pool of inflated bad loans grew immensely. And now since the
government created this mess, by guaranteeing bad loans and no oversight on
how bad the loans and inflated prices they caused. We have a financial
crisis. And what is scary, is the same people who caused this mess are
supposed to recue us. Scarier than Holloween.