Krugman: "The Question Is Whether Our Economy Is Governed By Any Kind Of Rule Of Law" → Washingtons Blog
Krugman: "The Question Is Whether Our Economy Is Governed By Any Kind Of Rule Of Law" - Washingtons Blog

Friday, October 15, 2010

Krugman: "The Question Is Whether Our Economy Is Governed By Any Kind Of Rule Of Law"


Paul Krugman writes:

The mortgage mess is making nonsense of claims that we have effective contract enforcement — in fact, the question is whether our economy is governed by any kind of rule of law.

***

True to form, the Obama administration’s response has been to oppose any action that might upset the banks, like a temporary moratorium on foreclosures while some of the issues are resolved. Instead, it is asking the banks, very nicely, to behave better and clean up their act. I mean, that’s worked so well in the past, right?

The response from the right is, however, even worse .... conservative commentators like those at The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page have come out dismissing the lack of proper documents as a triviality. In effect, they’re saying that if a bank says it owns your house, we should just take its word. To me, this evokes the days when noblemen felt free to take whatever they wanted, knowing that peasants had no standing in the courts. But then, I suspect that some people regard those as the good old days.

I'm happy that someone as prominent as Krugman is weighing in on the side of the rule of law.

I've been hammering on that topic for years:

5 comments:

  1. "In effect, they’re saying that if a bank says it owns your house, we should just take its word. To me, this evokes the days when noblemen felt free to take whatever they wanted, knowing that peasants had no standing in the courts".

    I've seen those kind of comments online, by random commenters at other blogs. Some people do not seem to understand that one thing is the scripture of the house, which belongs to the owner (who paid for it even if with borrowed money) and a different thing is the placing of the house as guarantee for a loan (the mortgage). If the mortgage is legally invalid, the house belongs to homeowner and that's it. If the mortgage is legally valid, the house still belongs to the homeowner, though if he defaults in his loan payments he may lose it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Dishonesty, immorality, conspiratory fraud, murder, intimidation, cruelty, open treats, lying propaganda and bullying are the tools of the trade for today’s criminal World Banksters.

    In the old days, the American mortgage banking business was the stalwart of honesty and fair dealing. There was no such thing as a sub-prime mortgage loan with balloon payments and certainly no mortgage loan origination fraud with sloppy paperwork submitted to an underwriter; the mortgage company would go out of business with the slightest hint of impropriety!

    Now, there is conspiratory fraud at every level of the mortgage process and the local honest banker is forced out of business leaving only the World Bankster criminals in business! The American mortgage crisis didn’t just happen; it was deliberately planned and executed.

    Bush/Obama administrations are conspirators, and by plan, have bought the mortgage risk and debt with taxpayer money and privatized the pure profit for the World Banksters leaving them with no risk or debt caused by their criminal activity; indeed, they end up with all the foreclosed property that we bought for them!

    Bernanke’s quantitative easing 1 and now 2 trillion of taxpayers money is spent abroad to spread the chaos. Not one dime will be spent in the USA.

    Citizens, these psychopathic Traitor criminals are at War with the American people, hell; they are at War with the entire world!

    We need to fight back at the state level and challenge every foreclosure. We American taxpayers have bought and own the mortgages and we are not going to award the World Banksters the titles (if they can even find them) for free!

    Call out your Congress Representatives and Senators and demand they audit the Federal Reserve and nationalize banking! We own the debt, why shouldn’t we own the profit and give the homeowner and taxpayer a break!

    Next American crisis- dollar fiat currency- again fight back, buy gold and silver and start our own currency that is worth something the world over!

    ReplyDelete
  3. When did Eric Holder pass away? I must have missed that story.

    ReplyDelete
  4. If you have an hour or so, I think that I have a free market solution to the current mess. And as a side affect, it may subvert the Fed with a commodity based currency that everyone could use and understand.
    www.dnusbaum.com/fix.html

    ReplyDelete
  5. GW, I would like to post this video link to a Q and A interview with Janet Tavakoli on C-SPAN.

    This is an excellent, must see, interview in which Janet explains where the American mortgage bear went through the financial buckwheat.

    CSPAN Q@A with Janet Tavakoli

    ReplyDelete

→ Thank you for contributing to the conversation by commenting. We try to read all of the comments (but don't always have the time).

→ If you write a long comment, please use paragraph breaks. Otherwise, no one will read it. Many people still won't read it, so shorter is usually better (but it's your choice).

→ The following types of comments will be deleted if we happen to see them:

-- Comments that criticize any class of people as a whole, especially when based on an attribute they don't have control over

-- Comments that explicitly call for violence

→ Because we do not read all of the comments, I am not responsible for any unlawful or distasteful comments.