Wednesday, January 13, 2010

In Which Ms. McArdle Continues To Stick Up For Banks

And I continue to mock her, merely by copying selected parts of her items. Not taken out of context at all. (It's the Interthing, you may click directly for full context.) No, selecting just a paragraph or three isolates the more offending parts from the general noise & froth & allows focus on the inanities that glazed eyes may miss.

Banks need to be taught a lesson for their stupid lending It all sounds very emergent and spontaneous and Hayekian: a nation of freelance bank regulators. Every man his own bankruptcy judge!

All well and good, except that if you are walking away from a mortgage simply because the house is underwater, you have no authority to punish them. After all, the reason it was stupid to lend money to you is not that they were lending money to someone who probably couldn't pay it back; you can. The reason that it was stupid to lend money to you is that you're a deadbeat--a foolish deadbeat, who thought that house prices are a magic route to free money. That's not something they could reasonably have been expected to know. Also, "banks need to be punished for being almost as stupid and greedy as I am" doesn't have much of a ring to it.
No, the bank would have had no reason to know that "you're a deadbeat--a foolish deadbeat," because all that the banks had to say on the subject was to be sober, save & not take out any second mortgages because the bubble was about to burst. Remember?

Suggestions on reconciling the bold title part w/ the rest of the typing here are solicited:
Companies act like faceless automatons, so we should too.  This is not actually true.  Imagine a bank that actually did only what is specified in their contract with you, and not an inch more.  That would be a bank you'd like a lot less than any existing bank, and with good reason.  They are restrained by various norms, and competitive pressure.  This is not to say that they always behave well.  But they do not, in fact, simply live by the letter of the contract, and if you think they do, I invite you to read me the part in your contract where they have to provide a customer service person who speaks adequate English and doesn't burst into violent profanity when you ask for a mortgage modification.

Moreover, the way to punish them for behaving badly is either to regulate the bad behavior, or refuse to patronize banks that behave badly, not to simply walk away from your house loan.
You just sit there & hold this bag until we get those regulations passed & enforced, or until a too-big-to-fail institution goes under because it behaved so badly there was a run on it. We'll be right back.

7 comments:

FGFM said...

Imagine a bank that actually did only what is specified in their contract with you, and not an inch more.

Imagine a bank that keep updating the terms of its credit cards where your only options are to close the account or put up with the changes. Then you'd imagine just about every bank.

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...

Imagine a country that didn't let all the banks merge themselves into a few entities so large that they couldn't be allowed to fail.

Entities so large that their influence couldcould capture the government that is supposed to regulate them.

Then we wouldn't be where we are now.
~

Lurking Canadian said...

I hope you don't mind the occasional comment from a lurker. I've been enjoying your series on McArdle's series about underwater mortgages because her position baffles me.

First of all, she seems to be saying that people have an ethical obligation to pay back a pawnbroker if he decides the watch you pawned isn't worth what he thought it was worth. This is strange to me. Figuring out what your house is worth is the bank's job, not yours.

Stranger still is that she thinks the reason people should do this is so banks will keep lending cheap mortgages with favourable conditions. I don't get that part at all. In conditions of falling house prices, mortgages are stupid investments for a bank. Why would anybody expect them to accept something as collateral for a secured loan that will not hold its value? They *should* be charging higher interest, and demanding extra security in the form of higher down payments and co-signers and so on, no matter what some deadbeat does in Vegas. If housing prices start to go up, they will go back to easy terms, again, no matter what the deadbeats do in Vegas. Why does she think that this decision on the bank's part has anything to do with "ethics"?

Susan of Texas said...

Canadian, her motives are to restore the banks' reputations and buy a house. All her idiot statements flow from there.

Clever Pseudonym said...

What Susan wrote, and, as a general rule, your safest bet is to always assume that Megan is wrong or hasn't a clue what she's writing about, no matter what the subject.

fledermaus said...

I invite you to read me the part in your contract where they have to provide a customer service person who speaks adequate English and doesn't burst into violent profanity when you ask for a mortgage modification.

Oh my god, not even Megan is this stupid right? How could one sentence be so wrong in so many ways?

Anonymous said...

Megan's Bizarro world of banking in which banks have no way of knowing about people's credit risk because:

1) There's no agencies out there that track consumer creditworthiness.

2) They had no way of checking income levels or job status of borrowers.

3) They couldn't ask for any kind of down payment as a cushion in case of default.

I mean, does she know anyone in the banking industry? Has she used a bank? Has she ever read a news article about banking?