Comments on: WSJ on Mortgage Lender Lobbying to Limit Regulation

By: Ian Random

Ian Random — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 00:11:00 +0000

But what about Red-Lining? Oh, what after legislation is passed to deal with this mess, next year you’ll be complaining about that.

By: doc holiday

doc holiday — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 17:08:00 +0000

One problem we all share today is the crisis of youth and inexperience and the correlated tragedy of nepotism, i.e, within this Bush Era, we have seen the rapid decay of common sense and a massive upswing of a new generation that is unable to think.

The vast amount of people that have jobs, like @ WSJ, have those jobs because they were connected to the nepotism chain, which is obviously connected to the subprime bones which are connected to the lender bones, the banking bones, the government regulation bones, etc...

Although these people probably are not stupid, they do fail to understand the nature of things in general and as a unit, they are doing a heck of a job in destroying America!

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 14:02:00 +0000

I must agree WSJ has really failed on this one. I have a close friend who runs a mortgage compliance software company. He warned WSJ reporters and editors in 2004, 2005, and 2006 about the inevitable crisis (when they called him about other stories). They basically told him that subprime, lending standards, and fraud, was not a story worth telling. They finally got back to him this summer but he told then that they had missed the boat.

The power of blogs is that gives a voice to experts (and hacks) in a given field. I can appreciate that a reporter does not have the technical skill to recognize a pending crisis but they should be savvy enough to listen to experts who know what is going on. This pending crisis was so obvious WSJ should have been able to figure it out (I.E. like The Economist magazine).

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 13:40:00 +0000

Yes, let's all applaud the WSJ for it's exquisite capacity to describe the horse that has left the barn. A casual observer might imagine that the WSJ has reporters, editors and analysts who might have written about these things in 2001 to 2004 -- that is, might have actually acted as journalists at a time when journalism would have mattered. The J in WSJ after all is for 'journal'.

Who knows? Perhaps some intrepid reporter actually suggested such coverage. I doubt it. But it is at least possible.

Of course if she or he had, we know the brilliant and challenging minds who run the joint would have responded not by seeking to question the mortgage broker, real estate agent, banking, investment banking, rating agency, hedge fund and other industries taking the nation for a ride but rather by questioning the reporter for rocking a boat that, again the brilliant editors would have claimed was leading a nation toward unprecedented prosperity in a time of great wealth creation and financial service innovation!!!

Gosh, the editors would have said, just look at those who are making the American Dream possible for an unprecedented number of home owners: The Coalition For Fair and Responsible Lending and the Responsible Mortgage Lending Association!!

As per the Panglossian Mr. Andrews, who after all could have foreseen anything other than that we lived in the best of all possible housing markets!!

Certainly not journalists.