12.01.16
Steven Mnuchin, recently of Satan’s Bank …
Steven Mnuchin, set to be Donald Trump’s Secretary of the Treasury, is the perfect choice for the root hog or die economy in the culture of lickspittle. Mnuchin is someone who took a pie of excrement, IndyMac bank, and turned it into an even bigger pie of ill will and poison as OneWest.
And that’s essentially what Elizabeth Warren said about him yesterday:
“Steve Mnuchin is the Forrest Gump of the financial crisis — he managed to participate in all the worst practices on Wall Street. He spent two decades at Goldman Sachs helping the bank peddle the same kind of mortgage products that blew up the economy and sucked down billions in taxpayer bailout money before he moved on to run a bank that was infamous for aggressively foreclosing on families.”
The image of a mildly retarded man, excellent at ping pong, stumbling through life as a Wall Street financier, managing to accumulate billions in riches just because of the way the system works while uttering the occasional word candies like “Life is a box of chocolates …” should make you laugh, if nothing else.
I would eagerly await Warren going off on him for five or ten minutes when he arrives before the Senate. The lady has an inspirational talent for the putdown.
Coincidentally, Mnuchin made a great deal of money as the CEO of OneWest in Pasadena, which was IndyMac until forclosed on by the US government at the beginning of the financial crisis.
The blog briefly covered it as Satan’s Bank and rather than work up everything from scratch I’m just going to go to the archives.
02/8/10
[OneWest] is involved in a similar case in California, where it’s trying to foreclose on an 89-year-old woman, despite two court orders telling it to stop.
Stung by the whip of bad reviews, OneWest announced it was turning to charitable giving at the beginning of the new year.
“With a seed of $10 million, OneWest Bank announced this week that it has created a nonprofit foundation to help develop the communities it serves,??? reported Monterey County Herald on January 2.
“The Pasadena-based bank, which took over failed IndyMac in March, established the foundation ‘to actively invest’ in priorities such as affordable housing, health care, education, financial literacy and rehabilitating underserved communities, foundation bank officials said.
??? ‘We are very committed to supporting the community in meaningful ways through our charitable efforts, including significant contributions from our employees in community service activities,’ ??? foundation Chairman Steven Mnuchin said in a statement.???
Community service. Affordable housing. Fine words.
“The bank has 72 retail branches in Southern California and total assets of $24 billion,??? one news story on OneWest informs.
Let’s see.
10 million / 24 billion = 0.000416666667
In other words, another ‘achievement in giving’ worth the stink eye. The amount is OneWest/Satan’s Bank equivalent of pocket lint. Maybe less.
IndyMac did the things all the banksters are now accused of in the US. It specialized in really risky subprime lending and then went tits after the people at the top made a killing on the Ponzi scheme. Prior to the death of Lehman Brothers and the big bailout, the FDIC stepped in and saved it.
In the reorganization, some superwealthy guys took over and renamed it OneWest.
OneWest’s business model, as told in news stories on it, is to continue the certified nasty practices of the Wall Street financial giants.
That is, it profits off distressed holdings by using the taxpayer-funded government guarantees for detoxifying its subprime lending. OneWest is not small or community-oriented, unless you consider forclosing on people’s homes nationwide using taxpayer money as guarantee profit margin against what would be certain losses to be goodness for communities.
One fellow on the web explains it this way:
Several times per week, I get phone calls from attorneys. These calls all start out the same. “I am unable to get loan modifications done through a lender. What can I do???? The first question I ask is if the lender is Indymac/One West. Invariably, it is.
When OneWest took over Indymac, the FDIC and OneWest executed a “Shared-Loss Agreement??? covering the sale. This Agreement covered the terms of what the FDIC would reimburse OneWest for any losses from foreclosure on a property. It is at this point that the details get very confusing, so I shall try to simplify the terms.
Some of the major details are:
OneWest would purchase all first mortgages at 70% of the current balance
OneWest would purchase Line of Equity Loans at 58% of the current balance.
In the event of foreclosure, the FDIC would cover from 80%-95% of losses, using the original loan amount, and not the current balance.
The site I’m about to direct you to is Bankster Law! It deals with my corporate neighbor, OneWest in Pasadena. The author relates his grinding battle with IndyMac and OneWest in Pasadena over a home construction loan. Yes, they are as bad as you think.
The trouble begins when IndyMac begins to fail — it’s money is all gone — and it starts misleading customers while short-changing them. The author finds IndyMac has reneged on the construction loan, declaring it complete with the house still unfinished.
Want to learn something of the system? Read Bleak House by Charles Dickens. You can download or read it on Gutenberg. Do you want to have your soul (and money) drained by Mr. Vholes? Do you want your mind stolen like poor Flite? Do you want your home to go to rack and ruin like Bleak House?
An excerpt, on “Bankster Psychology:
Deadbeat peasants won’t pay their bills! Let us pretend that the economy has nothing to do with people’s ability to pay. And let us also pretend that the bankster stealing doesn’t have anything to do with the economy! And let’s ignore the deadbeat bankster bailout, that has NOTHING to do with anything!
———-
The peasantry is being programmed by the banker run media to be selfish and jealous of others. So that when one is ripped off, others do not care. Why should you have a free house, they are trained to ask. As if your paying will make their paying more bearable. Wouldn’t it be wiser to ask why the bankers should be able to print free money at everyone’s expense.
And on OneWest:
My trouble with Pasadena began when I was given a loan from the original IndyMac Bank, FSB. Honestly, I liked most of the people I talked to from that bank. Those were the good old days when bankers did not hide their last names. When if you had a problem, a Vice President would give you his cell phone number and tell you to call him at home if necessary. This is when many of the California bankers had sunny Cali-style personalities and were not just churlish brutes. I only remember one lady that sounded like a goon, and I’ll bet you she is still working there at OneWest Bank …
[Later] OneWest Bank takes over. A filthier set of churlish thugs you cannot imagine. It seemed that they liked to call people even before payments were overdue in order to demand money …
06/23/10
Desperation hit a new high in Pasadena today.
At lunch time, on the corner of Lake and Walnut — directly in front of Satan’s Bank of Pasadena, aka OneWest — there was a thirtysomething man in a suit with a signboard. The signboard pleaded: “Hire Me!???
It said he had a B.A. and “experience.??? “Help me win for my family,??? it added.
Right beside him, a man who looked like Santa Claus, except in a hardware store man’s clothes. He has been begging for the last two weeks. And directly across the superhighway, two people have been regularly camped out for it seems like … at least a year or two.
If you’ve never been to Pasadena, the corner of Lake and Walnut is the place to be if you’d like to be seen with your alms cup. It’s high vehicular traffic for most of the day. And there’s are always a good number of pedestrians, particularly at lunch time, when many come boiling out of Satan’s Bank and head across the street to Ralphs or north thirty yards to Teri & Yaki.
Holding up a sign of desperation on this corner is a good tactical move. If you want someone from the local newspaper, the Pasadena Star-News to notice and get interested in your story, it’s high visibility and impact.
After all, no one ever checks out the guy living out of his van on El Molino. Or the half a dozen or so who regularly scrounge through my apartment building’s dumpster.
03/12/10
The Wall Street Journal: 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.
“During a recent protest outside his Walnut Street bank headquarters, OneWest CEO Terry Laughlin came down with the bank’s head of mortgage services for a little face time with borrowers,??? reported the Pasadena Star-News recently.
“The idea was to ‘reach out’ Laughlin said, and see what he could do or say to help them with their home loans – which they angrily – and frequently – complain have yet to be modified.???
“Steven Mnuchin’s OneWest filed to take a 90-year-old woman’s house after a 27-cent payment error,” reads Politico.
And, yes, yes, there was a song …
Go, that was 2010 – 2012 and nothing ever changes. It’s worth saying again and again, part of the Obama administration’s failure was doing nothing about this when everyone was begging for bankster heads.
anon said,
December 1, 2016 at 6:02 pm
I guess the “drain the swamp” slogan was shortened from “Drain the swamp so it’s easier to find the strongest and most vile of the bottom dwellers, then appoint them to cushy cabinet positions.”
Serious question for debate: Will adding Sarah Palin to this cabinet improve it or worsen it? Remember, I’m not just approaching this subject from the Klown Kar of Komedy angle.
So, a coworker-friend in another section has been keeping me updated on another coworker who loudly supported Trump. Today, this Trumper said that he hopes Trump will soon “…grow up and become more presidential.” My friend, to his credit, managed to avoid laughing out loud.
George Smith said,
December 2, 2016 at 9:41 am
Palin, Veterans Administration. Hard to say. She’s incompetent at all levels but I don’t think it’s in her to want to purposely screw up things more for vets. I’m sure she’d demoralize employees. Kind of a cosmetic appointment if it happens.