On Sat, 20 Sep 2008 11:43:54 -0400, A Real Boater
wrote:

Got the picture?

Sure do.

Barack Obama has slammed the banking industry for its predatory use of
sub-prime mortgages, which are pushing millions of American homeowners
toward foreclosure.

But his campaign's Finance Chair, Penny Pritzker, owned a failed
Chicago thrift that helped pioneer sub-prime financial instruments and
faced accusations of abuse.

Superior Bank of Chicago went belly up in 2001 with over $1 billion in
insured and uninsured deposits. This collapse came amid harsh
criticism of how Superior's owners promoted sub-prime home mortgages.
As part of a settlement, the owners paid $100 million and agreed to
pay another $335 million over 15 years at no interest...

But this seven-year-old bank failure has relevance in another way
today, since the chair of Superior’s board for five years was Penny
Pritzker, a member of one of America’s richest families and the
current Finance Chair for the presidential campaign of Barack Obama,
the same candidate who has lashed out against predatory lending.

Though Superior Bank collapsed years before the current sub-prime
turmoil that is rocking the world’s financial markets – and pushing
those millions of homeowners toward foreclosure – some banking experts
say the Pritzkers and Superior hold a special place in the history of
the sub-prime fiasco.

“The [sub-prime] financial engineering that created the Wall Street
meltdown was developed by the Pritzkers and Ernst and Young, working
with Merrill Lynch to sell bonds securitized by sub-prime mortgages,”
Timothy J. Anderson, a whistleblower on financial and bank fraud, told
me in an interview.

“The sub-prime mortgages,” Anderson said, “were provided to Merrill
Lynch, by a nation-wide Pritzker origination system, using Superior as
the cash cow, with many millions in FDIC insured deposits. Superior’s
owners were to sub-prime lending, what Michael Milken was to junk
bonds.”

In other words, if you traced today’s sub-prime crisis back to its
origins, you would come upon the role of the Pritzkers and Superior
Bank of Chicago.

It's a pretty picture huh?