Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Barry Ritholtz is a voice of reason in CNBC Kudlow Report (with Transcript) that features some questionable conclusions by CNBC reporter Diana Olick.


Below is a transcript of the last five minutes of the CNBC Kudlow Report with a "Swarm The banks" mini analysis. My preference is people link here if they want to refer to it as it took me longer than I care to admit to do the transcription.

If you need to reference a portion of the transcript below, Swarm the Banks would appreciate being credited as it is pretty much a thankless task.
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Diana Olick - ..."I have spoken to Obama administration officials today, who say they have been meeting all weekend and they are not calling for a national foreclosure moratorium.

Remember, yes, there was likely some kind of fraud in the document process but underneath all of it the bulk of the foreclosures that we were talking about here are valid foreclosures. Yes everyone has a right to a fair trial, and we need to have that fair trial in the paperwork, but the bulk of these borrowers were simply not paying their mortgages.

And once you get through the paperwork and figure out which dot, which I's need to be dotted and which t's need to be crossed your gonna come back to the same fact and that is, people aren't paying, they can't afford their home, they shouldn't be in them.

Larry Kudlow - hmmm.

Diana Olick - Now the question is, what do you do with the banks, well you know, there was rampant fraud you talk about that in the foreclosure process, well guess what, there was rampant fraud in the sub prime mortgage process and yet the government bailed out the big banks, so lets put that into perspective as well.....

(skip small portion of interview)

Barry Ritholtz - ..........But keep in mind, we're not talking about keeping people in houses who can't afford the mortgage who are delinquent, who are behind. The significance of this to the banks going forward is to make sure that the huge, huge build up of inventory of homes that they own, they want to able to actually sell those and make sure that the next buyer has a clear title, has the ability to buy that.

You know the clip that Diana did, showed the women saying, "Hey, is it really going to be my house, is this going to be a paperwork problem?" That's why the banks are stopping the foreclosures, voluntarily, to make sure their doing this right.

There is a massive set of problems, it's huge in Florida, its big in elsewhere, you can't have these document companies putting price lists for pick a fraud that you want, and that's actually now on the internet. You cannot have banks signing 300, 400 foreclosure documents in a day when they each require 45 minutes worth of paperwork. So it's not just dotting the I's and crossing the t's, it's making sure.

Hey Look, when you have people in Texas and Florida, being foreclosed on, and they paid cash, they don't have mortgages, something's wrong with that process, that has to be fixed"...

Olick - "yeah, those are, you're always going to see those stories"

Ritzholtz - (interrupting Olick) "No, no you NEVER see those stories, that has never happened before"

Olick - (attempting to talk over Ritzholtz "you're always going to see those stories, one story about a guy who loses his home, "No we did see it."

Ritzholtz - "no, that's historicially an impossibility"

Olick - "the bulk of that-

Ritzholtz - "that is a LEGAL impossibility"

Olick - "It's an impossibility what I'm trying to tell ya is you'll always find that one story

Ritzholtz - "but this has never happened before, you have banks sending people to change the locks on houses that aren't in foreclosure, you have all sorts of craziness going on.

You cannot have service processors dump hundreds of services in the sewer and claim they filed with people, and that's how you end up with a guy who doesn't have a mortgage actually having his house foreclosed on, the whole system has been turned upside down.

Olick - "That's a very small minority

Ritholtz - it should never happen, there should be a 100% never ever ever happen. Diana, if you came home and your stuff is all over your front lawn and your locks changed, that's just unnacceptable.

Olick - "I'm not arguing that, I'm not arguing that Barry, what I'm saying is, is that is a very small percentage of the people we are talking about.

Ritholtz - It should be zero, for most of american history it has been zero.

Olick - It should be zero, but you know what,

Ritholtz - It was zero for a long time.

Olick - But you know what, cops often knock on the wrong door in other cases as well. How many times do we hear cases of cops knocking on the wrong door because they think that a criminal is living there, that is what point I'm trying to make.

Kudlow - Alright, Diana, if she's got the property and her stuff is strewn over her front lawn, Barry Ritholtz and I are going to come down there and help her pick it up, that's point number one,

Olick - "No thanks"

Kudlow - "Point number two, Barry's making some powerful argumetns about the private property and the legal system, we will have more to be revealed, Diana thank you for helping us tonight, Barry thanks very much for the all the work you've done on this story.

End of Transcription by Swarm the Banks.

-Below is the actual video.



Another uneducated enemy of Foreclosure Victims, reporter Diana Olick of CNBC, appears on the Larry Kudlow show.

Diana Olick quote, "The bulk of foreclosures are "valid"."
Diana Olick, please define "bulk". Is bulk 90%, 95% are valid foreclosures? If "bulk" means just 5% were done fraudulently, that would mean anywhere from 50,000 to 200,000 HOMES A YEAR were fraudulently foreclosed upon. The reason for the variance is 4 million homes receive foreclosure notices a year, but around 1 to 1.5 million homes are actually foreclosed upon every year.
In the video above, no one mentioned how many hundreds of thousands of homeowners wanted to be part of HAMP, and basically were given the run around. To simply lump these HAMP victims into those who were unwilling to keep up on their mortgage payments is UNREASONABLE because a homeowner only becomes eligible for HAMP if they fall behind on their mortgage payments.

I suggest you suffering homeowners contact Ms. Olick and educate her on the other side of the foreclosure issue.

Ms. Olick twice made a two wrongs make a right argument. Ms. Olick would say that because a homeowner could be the victim of mistaken identity by the police in which a police might break down the door of their home and mistakenly arrest them, it was therefore acceptable for that homeowern to also lose their home through a fraudulent foreclosure as long as the "bulk" of foreclosures were legally accomplished.
Ms. Olick then used this same logic, but in reverse, for the banks, claiming that since the government bailed out the banks once before over the sub prime mortgage issue, doing it now over foreclosure fraud would be a no brainer.

So according to Olick, it's ok to break down the home of an innocent homeowner via mistaken identity, and it's also ok to subject home owners to fraudulent home foreclosure as long the "bulk" of foreclosures are not fraudulently done, and it's also ok to bailout the banks again because the government already did it once before. gasp.

wow, just wow.

Thanks to Barry Ritzholtz for being the voice of reason and mentioning that taking mistakenly taking someone's home should NEVER happen for a myriad of logical reasons and the fact that it is happening means SOMETHING is broken and needs to fixed.

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