03.12.10
Satan’s Favorite Bank: Employs grub street suicide alarmsmen
Today, in from the wires on Satan’s favorite bank in Pasadena, OneWest:
Many borrowers complain they get the runaround when they call their lenders for help, receive contradictory information from different employees and are required to repeatedly fax the same documents.
At the same time, suicide threats from distressed borrowers are so common that one lender, OneWest Bank Group in Pasadena, Calif., had to establish procedures for alerting the police. Lenders’ call-center employees are under heavy pressure. “These people make $14 or $15 an hour, and we ask them to move mountains,” said a OneWest executive at an industry conference last month.
That’s so considerate. One can but be astonished at the great labor of the “lender’s call center” and pure milk of human kindness dispensed by OneWest.
From the Wall Street Journal inside a larger article on how another big menace, Bank of America, locked a woman out of her home unjustly and stole her pet parrot.
Now if Jihad Jane had been caught doing such things, the US government’d handle things a little differently, DD thinks.
Also from the wires:
A couple facing foreclosure from OneWest Bank has joined the growing number of homeowners, attorneys and real estate professionals who believe the bank would rather foreclose than modify a loan.
“It comes down to money and greed. All they want is your home,” said Tom Cravalho, who with his wife Mona has been working for nearly two years to get out of an adjustable rate mortgage.
The Cravalhos said their original lender, IndyMac Bank, agreed to a loan modification in the summer of 2008 that would have offered them a 3 percent interest rate for five years. But then IndyMac was seized by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which sold the bank’s assets to a group of investors who formed OneWest Bank in March 2009.
Tom Cravalho said OneWest Bank has refused to honor the original agreement or discuss new terms. The Cravalhos’ attorney believes OneWest is more interested in reimbursement from the FDIC for the bad loan under a so-called “shared loss” agreement than it is in modifying the Cravalhos’ mortgage.
DD began writing on Satan’s favorite bank when the Huffington Post started its celebrity-run campaign to get people to move their money from big evil parasite banks to small community-oriented banks that allegedly care about their customers.
That was here.
Just to keep current, I went back to Move Your Money to check if OneWest was still in the list of recommended allegedly not-evil banks.
Yep. No change. Large evil bank still in master list of allegedly small not evil banks.
“AlterNet writer Stephen Pizzo has a simple question for people still using a big bank,” states the Move Your Money blog fatuously. “Why? They’re bad for you, bad for the country, and everybody knows it.”