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Couple o’ topics on the brain here…

1. Camera Phone

You realize that’s a contradiction in terms don’t you?

On Monday, in the late afternoon, I was driving home after a rain storm had passed through. The sun shined through and I saw a rainbow. It was neat! I’d never seen one before except in pictures. In fact, I was so enthralled with it I thought, “Dang! If I had my camera, I’d take a picture!”

I was telling a friend about it and she said, “Can’t you take pictures with your cell phone?”

Well. Duh. Yeah, I can but…why the hell would I think to take a picture – with my CELL PHONE?!

Long time readers of this blog can figure that that’s not a mentality I can get into. To me, a cell phone is a cell phone is a cell phone. It’s supposed to be for making phone calls. But who the hell cares about making phone calls with a cell phone anymore?

2. Issue #1: Bedlam – Follow up

I turned on the TV during my lunch hour (which was before noon) on Monday and decided to change the channel from CNN. I watched The View and … she was there. On The View. Gerri Willis! AAAAHHHH!!!! 

And she was continuing the scare the crap out of everybody! And when asked by the ladies on The View who was to blame for the mortgage meltdown she cited lax lending guidelines and the banks.

Woah. Hang on. Let’s not lump “The Banks” into one big group and lay the blame at their collective feet. Yes, lax lending guidelines contributed greatly to the blow up of the mortgage market. No doc loans, no income verification and no down payment requirements spelled disaster from day one. But no one who originated these loans was concerned with any of that. Afterall, they had no intention of hanging on to those loans for the next 30 years. The loans were sold to the likes of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Countrywide, IndyMac, ect. who more than likely got a package of loans and may or may not have had any idea what they were getting. Or they did and figured to play hot potato with it and turn around and sell the loan again to someone else.

Not all banks did this. And there were a lot of fly by night mortgage companies that originated these loans, then sold them to investors elsewhere. The fly by nights are gone now, or being investigated by regulators and/or the FBI for fraud. Trust me tho’, they made their money while they could.

The fly by night mortgage originators/brokers/companies were not subject to the strict regulations that traditional banks are. Now Congress is considering tightening regulations to cover these mortgage brokers/companies. I wouldn’t be surprised if banks, as a whole, also end up with tighter regs. Like we need more! And like Congress really has a clue as to how to do it? Shall I cite RESPA? 

I won’t bore the non-bankers out there with what that is specifically, but Congress, in it’s attempt to protect the consumer, came up with a set of rules and regs for banks to follow and requiring banks to disclose various things to borrowers upfront. Which is great, I whole heatedly endorse this. But it would have been nice if they had come up with something that the average lay person could understand, and that the average lay banker could explain.

Folks, there’s a lot of places to lay blame for the mortgage mess, but let’s not, as it’s not going to change anything. Instead, let’s call this a lesson learned – a hard lesson learned for that matter. Changes in the system will have to be made to help protect consumers and help them so they can understand better what the hell they’re getting into. Changes also will have to be made to better combat fraud and to not take advantage of the sub-prime mortgage market in order to turn a quick buck.