The Bureau of Justice Assistance, a component of the U.S. Department of Justice, released a report indicating that the answer to the housing crisis, at least in part, is making sure that that pesky word, “confidential” does not get in the way of public and private institutions being able to share information about you and anything that might have to do with potential real estate transactions that you are involved in.
As usual, this is couched in well-intentioned terms – and I suspect the participants in the study believed what they were saying, such as “A lot of the laws that were designed to protect consumer privacy give cover to the bad guys because they know banks can’t talk to each other. We need to figure out a way to let banks talk to each other about bad actors…They need to have an explicit protection for doing that.”[1]
That’s right: that word “confidential” should be up for interpretation, especially when it has anything to do with your real estate investing transactions.
There is a precedent being set that enables anyone with “the common good” in mind to ignore the rules, and that is a dangerous precedent to set. I can think of some other perfectly legal and even critically important real estate investing practices that are presently being painted in a pretty dark light. This is just one step on the way for lenders to paint real estate investors and any other middle-men making money in the financial markets – right out of the picture.
Your comments and questions are welcomed and encouraged.
[1] DSnews.com
Wait a minute…
Was not a big portion of this economic meltdown caused by backroom Washington politics, bankers and Wall Street traders?
Not to mention the naïve greedy homeowners buying toys with perceived home equity??
When will sunshine laws apply to them?
This does not bode well for most of what is left of privacy laws in America.
As for the backroom deals mentioned, no that is not what has caused the financial meltdown in this country. The financial meltdown causes being blathered about on most of the news media and made public in Congress has had little to do with what happened. They are little more than a symptom of the real issues and have little to no actual effect.
The rules causing the housing crisis have been openly passed, starting with Carter, and furthered by Clinton. I am just naming presidents here, there were plenty of others involved, look up Red Lining if you want to see where the housing crisis started. Very little of the mess with our economy is actually done behind closed doors.
The part that is done behind closed doors involves the Fed and the IMF which we have snowballs chance in hell of learning anything about. They have done tremendous harm not just to our economy but the world economy.
All of this mess has little to nothing to do with sunshine laws and it is only those people listening to the politicians with no real understanding of world economy that think otherwise. Do not look at the smoke and mirrors of Washington if you want any real answers. All of he answers are written out clearly in the last two hundred years of history of this country. We are not in Kansas any more! Look behind the curtain for real answers.
It’s amazing how you guys see anything and everything this administration does as the end of civilization as we know it. Efforts to catch criminals and to avoid another crash like the one caused by 8 years of the reign of incompetents, are just a grand conspiracy to bring communism, or some other “ism” you know nothing about, to America.
If the last administration was as patriotic as it pretended to be, while it was tiptoeing through the tulips with oil sheiks, they would have had an eye on Wall St. crooks who created these phony investments which paid off if the market failed. But blind faith in the market, and the religion of Reaganism brought this country to its knees.
Thank God the world now sees that Reaganism is dead and we can put a spike in the heart of that phony, failed philosophy.
And as is so typical of far right extremists, you (or your alter ego here, ‘Chris’) blame poor people for the crash. That is pretty disgusting. The CRA had absolutely nothing, ZERO to do with the crash. In fact, most CRA lenders were local banks who were very conservative and they didn’t do liar loans. One more example of how the likes of Faux News has misinformed the population.
Listening to your side after the last 8 years of you telling us that trickle-down would be good for us all if we would just “let the market work” is like visiting Bernie Madoff in jail for investment advice.
No one in their right mind would do it.
Is that the best you’ve got, Jay? I publish your comments only so everyone can get a good chuckle from someone who doesn’t seem to have a good attachment to reality. Besides, this post is about confidentiality and whether our right to privacy should be shattered for the benefit of bigger government. This post isn’t about your infantile reflection of history. Regardless, your prattle amuses me. — Bryan Ellis
All these laws are… excuse my french bullshit, in general they are completely ignoring the Constitution, which is suppoused to be the main law of the Nation. The Constitution was designed by very smart people to protect the right of the citizen of the United States as indivuals first, before actually considering groups. Therefore the so called ” common wealth” that the Feds are using as excuse to violate our rights, should not be before individual human being rights, otherwise we will ended up in a community with a complete different Government system… far away from a Democracy.
But this is only my humble opinion,
IM
NJ, Real Estate Broker
I BELEIVE ONE OF THE MAIN PROBLEMS THAT CREATED THIS MESS IN THE REAL ESTATE MARKET WAS THE CREATION OF THE FICO SCORE. ALL THE LENDERS CAME OUT WITH STATED INCOME STATED ASSETS BASED ON A FICO SCORE. ALSO YOU HAD EVERYBODY AND THERE MOTHER IN THE MORTGAGE INDUSTRY WHO COULDN”T SPELL THE WORD MORTGAGE. THEY PUT PEOPLE IN MORTGAGES THEY COULDN’T BASED ON THERE FICO SCORES. TO DATE NO ONE HAS MENTIONED FICO SCORES THEY ARE JUST BLAMING THE BROKER.
My financial information was stolen by a clerk who worked for my mortgage company along with thousands of other mortgagees. Just imagine if all banks had everybodys information how many clerks could sell this information to the bad guys!. What are the chances of finding out who did it?
We’d all be in the soup!!!!! Even with privicy in effect thieves take and abuse the individulal.
This is a blatant invitation to grant temtation to anyone who is desperate to sell such lists of information. Millions of us qualified persons would be scrambling to get their credit cleared up, not just investors the comor everyday person is as such high risk if this goes forward
Frankly, I’m much more concerned with a private company like Google driving through every neighborhood in America and collecting personal info from every single wi-fi network they detected. This is not some conspiracy theory that came from Faux News or the Glenn Beck show, this actually happened. They did it while they were photographing every street in America for Google maps.
Modifying lending requirements to avoid going through another Bush recession/depression is actually pretty wise.