Over at Freedom Watch, Judge Napolitano and his panel discuss an expanding robo-signing scandal (along with the separate topic of the IMF’s insatiable need for more money).
I’ve written often about the recession, but seldom about the mortgage meltdown.
Like many lay people, I thought that the recession would be deep, and that recovery would be slow. There was nothing special in seeing as much. Like other libertarians, I’ve doubted that the kind of remedies on offer near the end of the Bush and into the Obama Administrations would be of much value. Again, that’s a common view.
What some people did see early, however, and that I came to see only later, is that the Great Recession has been of a more serious degree precisely because has been of a different kind. As a financial downturn, it has been more like the Great Depression than subsequent declines since then. It never would have occurred to me that so many homes would be at risk, with so many homeowners being underwater. They’re not underwater, of course, merely because of robo-signing. Some homeowners are at greater risk, however, because of that practice.
(There’s a relationship between faster foreclosures through robo-signing and prices in the housing market, but foreclosure practices are hardly the only influence on home prices.)
A man who’s already ill (sometimes blamelessly, other times culpably by his own lack of a proper diet, for example) can bear only so many new maladies.
In defense of traditional lenders, I’ll note that many have never been part of robo-signing, and are often unfairly demonized. As the embedded clip ably describes, this has been a controversial practice not merely of some private lenders, but of government entities, too.