Matt Taibbi’s latest Rolling Stone story is about a Florida foreclosure court that accelerates foreclosures to the benefit of banks. In addition to the gross miscarriage of justice that Taibbi details, another interesting question is why nobody else is writing in depth about this subject.
When the housing bubble first began to collapse, there was a lot of good reporting (such as the This American Life series) that detailed that there was plenty of greed to go around. Mortgage brokers pushed qualified borrowers into risky mortgages, some buyers bought and sold homes just to cash out, and others used their home equity line of credit like an ATM. But now that the inevitable foreclosures have really started to accelerate, the general attitude is that people who didn’t pay their bills are getting what they deserved. There’s little or no discussion of the role of the banks, nor is there a recognition that the reason that mortgage paperwork is screwed up is because a lot of mortgage brokers were essentially criminals.