One regret I’ve had (among a whopper list) is that I’ve never been a homeowner, though, for many years I was eligible for a VA loan via the GI Bill.
Nowadays owning a home can be disastrous.

In 2008, there were more than 3 million home-foreclosure filings, up 81 percent from 2007 and 225 percent from 2006 — fast forward to fall 2012: “You have all these empty houses in the midst of a large population that has a real need for decent housing, but you cannot put the two together, because the income stream you have isn’t sufficient to satisfy the banks,” Harvey explained (City University of New York professor David Harvey).

(Illustration found here).

Nothing satisfies insatiable greed — part-n-parcel of the financial sector, including the home loan department.
Although the need is there, there’s also future bank money there — in August there were 1.47 million U.S. homes in some stage of the foreclosure process or owned by banks and of the 620,751 in lenders’ possession, only about 15 percent are listed for sale (via Bloomberg).
And although the number of foreclosures fell sharply in the second quarter of this year, foreclosure sales’ share of all U.S. home purchases grew in the April-to-June period.
Banks are certainly not people unless its the asshole end.

One of biggest assholes came into play again last week in a continuing show of nefarious underpinnings.
From CBSLA:

The owners of a modest home near Twentynine Palms lost their cherished possessions after a bank mistakenly foreclosed their residence.
A crew broke into Alvin and Pat Tjosaas’ desert home and took everything after being directed by Wells Fargo to secure the structure.
The couple, however, didn’t have a mortgage on the home.
Alvin said the deputy sheriff said, “Good news, we know who took (your possessions)…Wells Fargo.
Bad news, your stuff is all gone.”

Wells Fargo responded: “We are deeply sorry for the very personal losses the Tjosaas family suffered as a result of their home being mistakenly secured and entered by an outside party hired to address a different nearby property. We are moving quickly to reach out to the Tjosaas family to resolve this unfortunate situation in an attempt to right this wrong.”

And apparently that’s just business as usual — last spring $3.1 million was awarded to a New Orleans homeowner in a case where a federal bankruptcy judge called Well Fargo’s handling of home loans “highly reprehensible” and “…perhaps more disturbing is Wells Fargo’s refusal to voluntarily correct its errors.”
In an emailed statement, Tom Goyda, a Wells Fargo spokesman said: “The ruling handed down by the court in an individual bankruptcy case covers allegations going back more than six years and ignores significant changes in servicing practices that have occurred since that time. We believe that there are numerous factual and legal problems with the opinion and are reviewing our options regarding an appropriate legal response.”

From HuffPost this past week: And the Tjosaas’ destroyed vacation home isn’t the only evidence of Wells Fargo’s foreclosure failures either. The bank allegedly threatened foreclosure on a dying cancer patient in July, after her medical bills made it almost impossible for her to meet her mortgage payments. In addition, one California foreclosure victim committed suicide in the midst of a legal battle with Wells Fargo in May.

Most-odd and seemingly, this current stage of the life of planet earth is gripped by two words which sound just-about, nearly-alike — fiscal, and, physical.
The former is a fatal ruse, the latter, though also fatal, is not subterfuge (unless you’re a Republican) and is obvious as rain.
The financial industry never had from the beginning a ‘moral compass‘ to lose, despite some whining to the contrary, and the 2008 meltdown went quickly worldwide.
Bankers lead the way, which lead to a clatter of real estate sales — between 1999 and 2005 real house prices went on a sustained surge, which lead to this: “It began to really take on a life of its own when people saw how much money they could make in housing,” he said. “Before long, everybody was pushing along the momentum of this train.”
Until ‘this train‘ ran off the rails and has since never really got back on track — and also despite an entire industry still embedded to this day with …an illusion of a “perpetual money machine” allowing financial institutions to extract wealth from an unsustainable artificial process.

In London on Monday, trial begins for a ‘rogue trader‘ who perpetrated $2.3 billion fraud at Swiss bank UBS between 2008 and September last year:

Reacting to the allegations, Nick Leeson, the original “rogue trader” who in 1995 brought down Barings Bank and served three years in a Singapore jail, said they could illustrate a lack of regulation and control within banks.
“Rogue trading is on the increase.
The latest scandals are just a sign that the culture is running riot without any checks in place,” the Briton told the Independent newspaper last month.
“The rules may be tighter but the behaviour is getting worse.
At the moment there is contempt and disdain for the rules.”

And in the spirit of the essence, this the financial code of the heart:

Despite the colossal losses, UBS’s chief executive at the time, Oswald Gruebel, refused to step down.
“I am responsible for everything that happens in the bank.
But if you ask me if I feel guilty, then I would say no,” Gruebel said.

This financial holier-than-thou bullshit is under examination in the US Senate — like for instance, the JP Morgan $5.8 billion f*ck-up last May blamed by JP Morgan on a UK near-rogue trader, call-sign, the “white whale” –  but regrettably, nothing will come of these ‘investigations‘ of Wall Street, the root cause being is all them, bankers and Senators together, are from the same class, and on the same bottom line, and they really don’t give a shit:

The Senate panel is unencumbered by many of the political restraints faced by other congressional committees.
As a permanent fixture in a chamber whose members only have to run for office every six years, the panel has the resources and the appetite for spending months or years issuing subpoenas, interviewing witnesses and poring over documents.
The subcommittee’s work also stands out in a town where investigations and white papers often dissolve into partisan strife.
By a tradition unique in Congress, the minority party’s staff is involved throughout the inquiry.
Members from both parties tend to stick together when presenting conclusions.

Yet wouldn’t at least those assholes Wells Fargo hired for that house hit in 29 Palms have broken some kind of law — any sane person would think it’d be criminal to carry out such a heavy-handed, take-away-n-destroy mission like against the possessions of Alvin and Pat Tjosaas, and then later be able to just shrug-off the whole episode?

What realistic horror will sieve humanity first?
The fiscal or the physical?