Lax Lenders, Keenly Kept

Logging in at work today I see that my firm's team of attorneys "Defeats Class Certification in Billion-Dollar Mortgage MDL" (MDL = Multi-District Litigation, which here was apparently prevented from becoming a proper class action of the aggrieved against the lenders). Initial response? Darn. Those lenders, who refuse to play fair and deluge everyone with ads for loans they can't afford, deserve to be taken to the cleaners on a regular basis until they start policing themselves. The class of dupes who were already taken to the cleaners by these same politically invulnerable lenders need to wise up, yes, indeed: learn the ropes, learn arithmetic, don't sign unless it's both a good deal AND affordable! But it's the dupes who are loosing their homes - not the alien, removed, exploitation-bent banking functionaries or their fortress-like corporations and lawyers.

Of course, for lender corporations and so on to "police themselves" would mean stopping their flood of advertising (unlikely, because then the artifically inflated loan market would falter), which advertising is intended to sucker people (and I mean here human people, as opposed to the corporate 'person') into bad loans (a loan being defined as bad for human people if it has variable interest rates, balloon payments, or - of course - high interest rates, ie, a loan more of a threat to the borrower than a help) and providing, instead, good loans (fixed interest rates, required background checks, low interest rates, built-in mediation in case of disaster to the borrower, legal penalties for borrowers who lie about their assets and income to begin with).

Since some 90% of polled Americans think they are smarter than average (!? see note), "pulling a fast one" is the modern borrower's method of choice for getting ahead in the world. This, like bad tenants in real estate situations, creates an adversarial position between borrower and lender. And the lenders, of course, are not stupid - they have adopted exactly the same ethos with regard to lending - make the loan then sell it to another 'buyer' who will then sell it to another, and so on - with no regard for honesty or for the borrowers involved.

Good old class warfare - exploit the loopholes, steal from the downtrodden, ransack the blind engines of economics! Of course, the people who are hoodwinked by these barbarians on both sides are the rest of us, the ones who want to live rather than "pull a fast one".

So, when I see a legal class action against the bad guys shot down, I'm disappointed. A normal moron, unlike the present one, would think, "Oh, good - my company is doing well!" But I think, "Oh, crap, the people lost another round; the old cycle continues."