Goldman Sachs Takes On New Role: Taking Away People’s Homes

SAN JOSE, Calif. — When California wildfires ruined their jewelry business, Tony Becker and his wife fell months behind on their mortgage payments and experienced firsthand the perils of subprime mortgages.

The couple wound up in a desperate, six-year fight to keep their modest, 1,500-square-foot San Jose home, a struggle that pushed them into bankruptcy.

The lender with whom they sparred, however, wasn’t the one that had written their loans. It was an obscure subsidiary of Wall Street colossus Goldman Sachs Group.

Goldman spent years buying hundreds of thousands of subprime mortgages, many of them from some of the more unsavory lenders in the business, and packaging them into high-yield bonds. Now that the bottom has fallen out of that market, Goldman finds itself in a different role: as the big banker that takes homes away from folks such as the Beckers.

The couple alleges that Goldman declined for three years to confirm their suspicions that it had bought their mortgages from a subprime lender, even after they wrote to Goldman’s then-Chief Executive Henry Paulson — later U.S. Treasury secretary — in 2003.

Unable to identify a lender, the couple could neither capitalize on a mortgage hardship provision that would allow them to defer some payments, nor on a state law enabling them to offset their debt against separate, investment-related claims against Goldman.

In July, the Beckers won a David-and-Goliath struggle when Goldman subsidiary MTGLQ Investors dropped its bid to seize their house. By then, the college-educated couple had been reduced to shopping for canned goods at flea markets and selling used ceramic glass.

Theirs is an infrequent happy ending among the hundreds of cases in which subsidiaries of Goldman, better known for sending top officers such as Paulson to serve in top Washington posts, have sought to contain bondholder losses by foreclosing on properties and evicting delinquent borrowers.

Goldman spokesman Michael DuVally declined to comment on individual cases or on the firm’s new role in bankruptcy courts.

Joining other Wall Street firms that bought millions of subprime mortgages, Goldman companies have gone to courts from California to Florida seeking approval to foreclose on the homes of middle- and lower-income Americans who couldn’t keep up with their loans’ soaring monthly payments.

Some borrowers were speculators or homebuyers who exaggerated their incomes on loan applications, thinking they’d always have an escape hatch because housing prices would keep rising. Others, however, were victims of fast-talking mortgage brokers who didn’t explain that the loans’ interest rates could rise to as high as 15 percent. Many borrowers who defaulted on their mortgages may never qualify for a home loan again.

In court encounters, Goldman and other Wall Street firms have faced the impact of their own wheeling and dealing. Many of the families being put on the street never would’ve gotten their big mortgages if investment banks hadn’t provided a seemingly insatiable secondary market for millions of loans to marginally qualified buyers.

Subprime borrowers were supposed to provide a safe income stream for investors who bought mostly high-grade, triple-A-rated bonds from Goldman and bigger subprime players, such as now-defunct Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch.

Now, millions of these borrowers have defaulted on mortgage payments, contributing to a historic slump in home prices and depressing the bonds’ value. Half the homes in some California neighborhoods have been subject to foreclosures or short sales, in which a home is sold for less than the mortgage balance, and either the seller or the lender takes a loss.

Earlier this year in Los Angeles, the Wall Street giant took possession of the home of Gladys Aguirre, a housecleaner who’s married to a construction worker. Together, the couple listed monthly earnings of $7,480, including $3,480 from a job she’d held for two months.

Aguirre originally took a $444,000 subprime mortgage on Sept. 1, 2005, from Argent Mortgage Co., a subsidiary of big subprime lender Ameriquest Mortgage Co., which shut down in 2007. The adjustable interest rate sent her monthly payments zooming to $3,800 from $2,479, and Aguirre couldn’t keep pace on that loan or a $119,000 second mortgage. She filed for bankruptcy protection.

Aguirre’s Los Angeles lawyer, Eber Bayona, declined to discuss her case, but said that subprime loans amounted to “setting up the person for failure” because interest rate adjustments hit borrowers with “shock payments.”

For example, he said, loan agents promised applicants that they could buy a $600,000 house for payments of $1,200 a month, and the buyers “never read the fine print … (and) didn’t know their interest would increase and that eventually they would lose their house and their money.”

In San Fernando, Calif., Dina Alfero-Pacheo qualified for two mortgages totaling nearly $500,000, with monthly payments starting at $2,004. By 2007, the payments had grown to $3,761. In a bankruptcy filing early this year, Alfero-Pacheo said she was a bartender earning $3,800 a month. Goldman bought her first mortgage from Argent and recently got title to the house, which had sunk in value to $280,000 from more than $500,000.

In Orlando, Fla., Adela Mendez seems to be someone who would’ve known the risks when she took a $164,000 mortgage from Argent on her home in 2005 and a $75,000 second mortgage a year later. In a bankruptcy filing this year, she listed her occupation as a loan specialist for Washington Mutual, a leading subprime lender that collapsed last year.

Not only did Mendez fall 11 months behind on her mortgage payments, but her home’s value also plummeted to $100,000. Goldman Sachs Mortgage, which bought the Argent loan, took the house — and at least a 50 percent loss.

Alfero-Pacheo and Mendez, whose cases are detailed in court records, couldn’t be reached to comment.

The Beckers charged that in their case, Goldman engaged in years of obfuscation and resistance.

“In bankruptcy court, they tried to portray us as incompetent or deadbeats,” said Celia Fabos-Becker, blinking back tears as she sat with her husband in their living room, with boxes of mortgage-related documents surrounding them.

The couple thought they’d made a safe bet in 2000 when they opened a retail jewelry business in two San Diego County areas populated mainly by military personnel.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, however, brought big military call-ups, sapping their market. After a wildfire ravaged much of the area in 2002, the Beckers refinanced their house to generate some $70,000 in cash to prop up their two stores. They wound up with an adjustable-rate, subprime loan from WMC Mortgage Corp., an arm of General Electric’s GE Money unit, and a 10.75 percent second mortgage with the same lender.

A second wildfire in 2003 all but killed their business and left the couple reeling financially as interest-rate adjustments pushed the mortgage payments higher.

“We’d gotten to the point where I was cutting my own hair. I was cutting his on occasion,” Fabos-Becker said.

“And trolling the Goodwills,” Tony Becker said.

Tony Becker, an engineer, took short-term contract jobs amid the technology bust. Celia Fabos-Becker, meanwhile, found a provision in the mortgages that allowed the borrower to push payments to the end of the loan term in the event of a disaster such as the two fires.

When she wrote to Paulson, however, lawyers for Goldman denied that it owned the Beckers’ mortgages. So did Germany’s Deutsche Bank, a trustee that was holding thousands of subprime mortgages Goldman had converted to bonds.

To stall foreclosure, the Beckers wound up negotiating “forbearance agreements” with Ocwen Loan Servicing, a Florida company, that required the couple to pay several thousand dollars under the threat that their house would be auctioned off in a week or a month, Fabos-Becker said. Their monthly payments rose to nearly $3,300 from $2,650.

The couple already had taken Goldman and Morgan Stanley, another Wall Street firm, to arbitration over their $325,000 in stock market losses, accusing the investment banks of misleading investors about public offerings.

On the same day in June 2006, Goldman sued to end the arbitration, and Ocwen filed papers seeking to foreclose on the Beckers’ home.

In desperation, the couple filed for bankruptcy protection. With no money to hire an attorney, they acted as their own lawyers.

As the months dragged on, Fabos-Becker finally found a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission confirming that Goldman had bought the mortgages. Then, when a lawyer for MTGLQ showed up at a June 2007 court hearing on the stock battle, U.S. District Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California demanded to know the firm’s relationship to Goldman, telling the attorney that he hates “spin.”

The lawyer acknowledged that MTGLQ was a Goldman affiliate.

That was an understatement. MTGLQ, a limited partnership, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Goldman that’s housed at the company’s headquarters at 85 Broad Street in New York, public records show.

In July, after U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Roger Efremsky of the Northern District of California threatened to impose “significant sanctions” if the firm failed to complete a promised settlement with the Beckers, Goldman dropped its claims for $626,000, far more than the couple’s original $356,000 in mortgages and $70,000 in missed payments. The firm gave the Beckers a new, 30-year mortgage at 5 percent interest.

That lowered their monthly payment to $1,900, less than half the maximum $4,000 a month their subprime loans could’ve demanded.

Fabos-Becker, 60, said that the trauma has left her hair “a lot grayer.” Much of the stress would have been alleviated, she said, if a law required lenders to identify themselves, especially to borrowers facing hardships.

“I take solace,” Tony Becker said, “in knowing that I was up against the worst possible opponent — the biggest, strongest investment bank in the world.”

(Tish Wells contributed to this article.)

(This article is part of an occasional series on the problems in mortgage finance.)

COMING TUESDAY

Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms turned to secret Cayman Islands deals to draw overseas investors, including European banks and other foreign financial institutions, to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in securities tied to risky U.S. home loans. Unlike U.S. investors that lost money on the securities, however, these overseas institutions have fewer legal options.

Posted on Monday, November 2, 2009

Source: McClatchy

2 thoughts on “Goldman Sachs Takes On New Role: Taking Away People’s Homes”

  1. America, and the world, is now being subjected to a ‘hostile raid’, a ‘hostile takeover’.Why are all commodities gaining (HUGELY!) while the U.S. Dollar seriously staggers, like a drunken sailor? Why is there no incentive for new business startups, or true innovation? Why? Because the Market is RIGGED. The entire U.S. Economy is one giant PONZI-scheme…Bernard Madoff made ONE BIG mistake – he ripped off RICH people. Wall St. rips us all off, every day.

    What is needed, is to cut out, entirely, from the U.S. economy, the Rothschild-owned Goldman Sachs’ ‘Fed’. Print U.S. Notes, through the U.S. Treasury, and have those backed by gold. Re-monetize silver. Any attempt to restore ‘honest money’ and re-introduce a ‘gold standard’ must cut out the foreign-owned central banks, and print any currency as U.S. Notes, via the US Treasury – with no role, whatsoever, for foreign-owned, central banks…

    Bob Chapman Explains Silver Market Manipulation, Take Down By Bullion Banksters!
    https://socioecohistory.wordpress.com/2011/05/09/bob-chapman-explains-silver-market-manipulation-take-down-by-bullion-banksters/

    650 Years Ago:
    How Venice Rigged the First, and Worst, Global Financial Crash by Paul Gallagher Printed in the American Almanac, September 4, 1995.
    http://american_almanac.tripod.com/pbgbardi.htm
    (Comment: International Bankers, Rothschilds, Rockefellers, et al (Ashkenazi/Khazarian ‘Jews’) – sit atop the secret society structure, globally. Fiat (paper) money is their game. All foreign currencies are pegged to the US Dollar, and the US Dollar was taken OFF the gold-standard, in 1971, under tricky-Dick Nixon. The U.S. Dollar is constantly on the precipice, ready to CRASH, at a moment’s notice, along with ALL the other fiat (paper) currencies. This is why they viciously attack the price of silver. ‘Venetian’ Bankers infiltrated the British Empire, and created Freemasonry. They infiltrated the American Empire, on numerous occasions. President Andrew Jackson ‘killed the [Central] Bank’ – that’s what it says on his gravestone – ‘I killed the bank’. Freemasonry (like the Bolsheviks were, and the ADL) is, fundamentally, ‘Jewish’ (http://www.rense.com/general50/zionss.htm) Governments, globally, tend to have a disproportionate membership in Freemasonry. Any wonder then, that governments are more into serving the Bankers (Ashkenazi/Khazarian ‘Jews’), than they are in serving their own people/citizens? (Hmm…Caesar, Kaiser, Khazar…very interesting!)

    How The Venetians Took Over England and Created Freemasonry
    Conference Address by Gerald Rose, Schiller Institute Conference, September, 1993
    Printed in The American Almanac, November 29, 1993
    http://american_almanac.tripod.com/venfreem.htm

    The Secret of Oz (William T. Still)
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swkq2E8mswI

    The Money Masters (William T. Still)
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXt1cayx0hs

    New World Order: Ancient Plan of Secret Societies (William T. Still)
    http://www.amazon.com/New-World-Order-Ancient-Societies/dp/0910311641/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1305448871&sr=1-6

    The History of the Money Changers
    http://www.iamthewitness.com/DarylBradfordSmith_Bankers.htm

    “Economists continually try and sell the public the idea that recessions or depressions are a natural part of what they call the ‘business cycle.’ The timeline below will prove that is simply not the case. Recessions and depressions only occur because the Central Bankers manipulate the money supply, to ensure more and more is in their hands and less and less is in the hands of the people. Central Bankers developed out of money changers, and it is with these people we pick up the story in 48 B.C. below:”

    Do You Know Where You REALLY Live?
    http://freedom-school.com/do-you-know-where-you-really-live.pdf

    The ‘American’ Empire, since the establishment of the so-called ‘Federal’ ‘Reserve’ in 1913 (owned by Goldman Sucks/Rothschilds) – has been an extension of the British Empire/City of London/’Crown Corporation’/Rothschilds, et al. This is why the American Military is used as a ‘global’ police force. Primarily in the Middle East (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, etc.) – to use up the foreign oil resources, BEFORE tapping into the vast oil and natural gas resources that exist right here in the U.S., as well as to establish a central bank or fiat currency system there – tied to the US Dollar, of course! And, to rape these countries of all their economic and natural resources! Ultimately, their wish is to destroy the national economies of the world (can you say Greece? Ireland?) – introduce a one-world currency (just ask George Soros) – possibly destroy this, too (then offer another of THEIR pre-planned “solutions”) – always toward more centralized control over every living and non-living thing on the planet! And, their ultimate STATED goal? De-population.

    Crash JP Morgan – Buy Silver! Episode 96, The Keiser Report
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wN0rcNJXFfI

    The Silver Bullet and the Silver Shield “The BEST article written on silver in Ten Years!”- Jason Hommel
    http://dont-tread-on.me/the-silver-bullet-and-the-silver-shield/

    By buying up silver (and some gold) – we can totally usurp the Banksters – we, effectively become OUR OWN CENTRAL BANKERS…

    Reply

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