inkbluesky

Subprime Loans = Primetime for Vampire Lenders

The subprime schemes are run through an intricate, intertwined system of loan brokers, mortgage lenders, Wall Street trusts, hedge funds, offshore tax havens and other predators. To entrap borrowers, the industry created an arsenal of arcane financial devices and maneuvers known by such exotic names as “exploding ARMs,” YSPs, teaser rates, low-doc mortgages, loan flipping and equity stripping. Ultimately, these schemes are scams, extracting high payments from the families, sucking out any equity they might build up and stealing their homes.

This is one of those economic stories, like the savings-and-loan scam of the 1980s, that are usually buried back in the business section of newspapers. But, just as with the S&L collapse, this debacle is growing too big to contain, and all of us need to be paying attention. The built-in traps of the subprime mortgage market have already taken the homes of more than a million people in just the past year, and the dangers are quickly rising for millions more.

Regulation has been a buzzword for a couple of decades now. Regulation is bad for business, bad for jobs, its just bad. Here we are a quarter of a century after the so-called Reagan deregulate revolution and the S&L scandals of the which all but the political history wonks have forgotten and we’re now  enjoying the sequel. Deregulation didn’t create jobs, they went to China and India. Deregulation didn’t make the middle-class stronger, their purchasing power has gone down while executive salaries have gone up. This crisis isn’t going away. Someone will have to pay and most of that will come out of the pockets of once again the pockets of the people who actually work for a living.

complimentary angles 

Balance: In Search of the Lost Sense 

“Balance,” which opens with the gutsy Holmesian salvo “Aristotle was wrong.” The error in question is Aristotle’s contention, advanced in his treatise “De Anima” in the fourth century B.C. and perpetuated ever since by kindergarten teachers around the world, that there are five, and only five, human senses: sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch. McCredie has made it his mission to crack this bit of dogma by elevating balance into the sensory canon, on the basis of its evolutionary antiquity (540 million years, give or take), its necessity for well-being and survival (it is likely impossible to live without), and its surprising relationship to human cognition. Balance, McCredie argues, “may prove to be the most primary — as in primordial, life-sustaining, essential — of all the senses.”

On rare occasions I’m ahead of the curve. Well to be honest most second year biology students are too. There is a mechanism in your brain that constantly monitors where and how your body is positioned in space. If you have tried the infamous office chair spin the first thing you ( your brain) tries to figure out after spinning  is how to orient you physically - head position is very important -  equilibrioception.