Obama ``deal`` with the banks to cost taxpayers $40 billion, page 2

No they are not asking for a free ride on their mortgage.

Of course they are. What country are you living in? Turn on the radio, read the news, listen to the TV stations. It's all over the press. Listen to the demands of the Occupy Movement.

Distressed borrowers are going public with loud, vocal demands for lower payments on their mortgages, principal reductions, etc. They are making bold claims in the press about their "distressed" situation, and how they want a lower payment to "keep their house". I hear this daily in the news, don't you? (Or are you living in a cave somewhere? No pun intended.) Google and YouTube are full of videos of people claiming hardship on their mortgage.

Yes, and it is an invalid contract once the bank illegally transfers it to someone else, which is pretty much standard practice because this how how they are able to sell derivatives on that contract.

Nonsense. If I lend you $100,000, I have the right to sell that note to anyone I choose. In fact, in the loan agreement, I will even place legal verbiage that gives me the right to sell the note to anyone I choose. Notes are bought and sold all the time, and have been for centuries. It is only in recent years where we have seen notes bundled together and sold en masse to investors on Wall Street - Now, that is a different subject altogether.

But, regardless of who owns the note, or who sold the note, the fact is that the borrower still owes the money. The borrower still signed a mortgage contract stating that they owe $100,000. We can debate all day long about who legally is the lender-- the bank originating the loan or the investor purchasing the loan-- but the fact that the borrower owes the money does not change one iota.

In case you haven't noticed, the banks have been quite profitable, and for the above-listed reasons

Again, we're not living on the same planet. Take Bank of America. They are profitable despite their Residential Mortgage fiasco in their takeover of Countrywide Mortgage. That is because they have diverse income streams from other parts of the bank, not because of mortgage losses. In fact, that is the sole division of the bank that isn't profitable right now -- Mortgages.

In fact, we have had record bank failures over the last decade, all stemming from the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Banks are most emphatically not profiting from distressed and defaulted borrowers. Banks lose big-time when borrowers default. To think that banks somehow make money off of defaulted loans is simply false, especially given the fact that real estate market values have plummeted by 30-50% or more in some parts of the country, and won't return to bubble levels for many decades, if ever. Banks are awash in defaulted loans, and this means losses, not profits.

The FDIC has been closing banks down week after week for several years now. They have closed hundreds of banking institutions. And you call this profitable? Really?

Those are loaded questions, so I'm sure we can find some right-leaning people who would like those things too...

No, I have never seen one right-wing conservative in the media ever once say that they agree with giving a free ride to defaulted borrowers. Most right-wing conservatives believe in legality of signed contracts, unlike the radical leftists we see in, for example, the Occupy Movement, which does not respect the rule of law or the legality of contracts.

Maybe the banks are not benefiting, but the CEOs of banks are certainly benefiting from those bonuses...

Bonuses earned from 100+ hour work weeks, enormous stress on health and family, and pressures that the average Joe couldn't handle. Regardless, we live in a capitalistic society, and when your bank earns a profit, you get paid -- whether that means you are CEO, or a lower-level middle manager, that is how capitalism works. You get a share of the profits. Are the bonuses outrageous? Yes. But this is America, not Communist Russia. We believe in free enterprise, and competition. And goodness knows that banks have taken it in the chops from the media, the government, the regulators, and even their consumers. Goodness knows they deserve every penny they earn.

Again, the only party that benefits from this recent legislation in this original thread is distressed borrowers and defaulted borrowers. People that can't pay their mortgages, that's who benefits. The banks don't benefit. They have to work with these deadbeats and spend time, energy, and money on loan counselors to work with these people. Banks lose, distressed borrowers win. Why? That's what Occupy wants.