https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=M5VRTnH4ejc
I’m going to tell you my story, my personal tale, my personal journey through the tail end of the 2008 housing crisis. Now I’ve wanted to tell this for a while. It takes a while to get these things straight in my head and make sure you have enough contacts so that I can refer to enough things in case there are things that I need to refer to. So this is coming a little later than I expected. I’ve had it in my head for a while, but basically what happened to me was I lost a house. It was worth about half a million dollars, not an insignificant sum. It’s probably worth about the time I lost it, 500,000 house. You spend about 10% to try to protect your asset, not a bad financial move. So you could say 50,000 is a lot, 50,000 is a lot of money. I had it. I made a lot of money. I didn’t make a little bit of money. Made a lot of money. First of all, it’s already supporting a house worth half a million dollars. In an expensive state to live in, Massachusetts is very expensive to live in, living for a third of that cost in South Carolina, and now way less because the prices in Massachusetts since I moved have shot way up. And they’ve gone up a little bit in South Carolina. So it’s a big difference now. It was a big difference then. It’s a bigger difference now. So what happened? So it’s 2011. A very strange thing happened. I got a letter from my mortgage servicer that said that they had taken a bunch of money, in an escrow account for me and that I now owed more money on my mortgage. And by more money, I mean 30% more. So my mortgage payment went up by 30% overnight. I said, well, that’s strange. I knew a little bit of mortgage law. I’d had problems with a previous mortgage company. I reported them to the federal government. A couple of years later, I got a check actually out of that because there was a settlement involved. And in the immediate term when I reported to the feds, they actually took care of the problem right away. It was a similar sort of a problem with misbilling. Now a mortgage is a contract. And because I was a consultant my whole life, I’m fairly familiar with contract law. Right. And contract law is fairly straightforward. So that’s not like any great shakes. But understanding uniform commercial code and things like that is not everybody does that. A lot of attorneys don’t do that. But I had a familiarity with it. I didn’t have a full understanding of it. Again, I’m not making any claims in that direction. But I knew quite a bit about contracts because I had to sign a bunch of them. I had to read a bunch of them. I was constantly writing contracts. A mortgage is a contract. And there’s two components to your typical house mortgage experience. There’s a note, right, which is a promissory note to pay. And then there’s the mortgage. The note is secured. The mortgage is not. The note is security for the mortgage. One of the many, many, many mistakes that was made in 2008 was called separating the mortgage and the note. You can look this up. You know, whatever. Just standard stuff. There are technical reasons why you cannot ever do that. I’ll get into those. Another thing that happened was some of these notes and mortgages were being independently securitized. In other words, the notes were being treated as a security in and of themselves, even though they’re not separable from the mortgage, or at least when you do, you destroy the contract in some fundamental way. Because again, the mortgage is secured by the notes. If you separate the two, a bunch of funny things can go on. So the mortgage servicer that serviced the mortgage, they weren’t loaning me the money. They were just collecting the mortgage payments. They increased my mortgage payments by 30%. I said, that’s weird. Here’s a bunch of rules around when you can and cannot do this. Their claim was they had to put 2,000 escrow account. And I said, I didn’t authorize you to put an escrow on my mortgage. I’ve never had one before. What are you doing? And they said, oh, there’s unpaid taxes. I said, all the taxes should be coming to me. Why are there unpaid taxes? You shouldn’t even get a tax bill. You should even know about unpaid taxes. Unless they’re in collections, then maybe you know about them. You should even know what my tax bills are. They should come to me. They’re mine. They’re not yours. It can be. You can set up your mortgage so that they pay the taxes for you, but I didn’t set up my mortgage that way. There was no reason to. It costs more money to have them pay the damn taxes for you than you just pay them directly. Obviously, it costs them money. It’s going to cost you money. So they refused, which is illegal, to tell me what tax bill wasn’t paid, what they paid and where the escrow was. Now, by federal law, and I looked this up at the time. I actually knew it before that, but I looked it up again because things change. Feds change rules all the time and don’t tell you and screw you out of lots of money. Thanks, Bill Clinton. I looked it up. Now, they’re required to tell you how much is in the account, when it was placed there, and what the account number is. So I wrote to them and said, you need to provide all this information. In the meantime, I got another mortgage payment due. I paid the correct amount of the mortgage, not the amount they were asking for, the amount previous, thinking, oh, this will give them the hint that no, you’re not raising my mortgage rate arbitrarily because that’s illegal and unlawful and not ethical or moral. Can’t change the terms of contract in the middle without notification. Zero contracts work like that. In fact, fairly sure in most states, it’s illegal to write a contract where the conditions change without notification. And obviously, obviously it’s a bad thing to do. You don’t do that to anybody ever under any circumstances. Contract not contract. You just don’t change the rules without warning and without proper preparation time. So I contacted them and I said, not paying your bills until you get me this information, which you are federally required to provide to me. I contacted the Massachusetts Banking Commission. They said, oh, federal rules can’t do anything, which was shocking to me. I was like, hey, why do we have a banking commission? What good are you guys? Which by the way, I got no answer to. It’s almost like they knew they were useless and powerless and shouldn’t have jobs. I don’t know. So then I said, oh, this is weird. I better see what’s going on. Now this is the middle of Obama and HARP and the bank bailout. They had just started the HARP program up and they had started up this new program to help you resolve problems with the mortgage. So I said, all right, I’ll check out this program. It was a free program for the federal government. You just go down, fill out the paperwork, blah, blah, blah. They had little workshops on how to fill out all the paperwork. So I go down there, I fill out all the paperwork. I work with these guys. Takes about a month. Make no progress. They’re frustrated. They’re like, yeah, sometimes the banks just refuse to accept the government money and they take your house. And I was like, they, excuse me, what? The government is offering to make all the payments. Why would they then take your house? Something’s up. Fast forward. We’ll just fast forward about the HARP program because I don’t want to, I don’t want to HARP. Ha ha. On HARP and HAMP and all that nonsense. Didn’t get utilized. Most of the money didn’t get used by the banks. A lot of money gets spent on, and I’m not saying this is a bad thing. I’m just saying this happened. A lot of money gets spent on organizations to train you to take advantage. The portal that they had to submit paperwork to make sure the banks didn’t take houses. There were a lot of good people working those programs. Some of them were volunteers, I’m sure. I’m sure the ones being paid weren’t getting paid a huge amount of money. Maybe some of them were. Maybe there was some impropriety there. I don’t know. I didn’t see any. They were very upfront with me about their frustrations trying to make this work and having the banks just not accept the paperwork that they were supposed to accept, that they had agreed to accept. Sometimes they’d accept it. Sometimes they wouldn’t accept it. Most of that money got unused, or a significant percentage of it got unused. So the banks weren’t accepting those bailouts. They were refusing those particular bailouts, the bailouts that they had gotten in the transition between George W. Bush and Obama, where they just pushed a trillion dollars or whatever into the mortgage market. Actually, more. Because prior to that, they had bailed out the banks through Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. That was Barney Frank, the senator from, oh, congressman from Massachusetts, who ran that outfit, which is a scam, by the way. For Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are scams. They’re scams. They weren’t always scams. They didn’t start out that way. They were scams by the time George Bush was in office. He actually tried to warn Congress about it and was jeered at for real, this video of it. And then like some months later, Fannie and Freddie needed a trillion dollar bailout or something stupid. That was just before 2008, by the way. Two bank bailouts, not one, two. So a lot of this hard money went unutilized by the banks. And at the expense of people losing their houses, it’s important to note. And it’s weird. Like you should wonder why that would happen. That’s very strange. So in my case, I get to the point where they’re actually getting serious about foreclosure like a year later. So I’m like, I got to do something about this. At the time, I had some side jobs working for attorneys. So I was like, all right, I’ll just ask around. And I found probably one of the better real estate attorneys around. Massachusetts is a very weird system. They have what’s called a housing court. Now housing court is a weird name for a kangaroo court. But really, it’s just a kangaroo court full of kangaroos who make kangaroo decisions because they’re kangaroos. This is not a serious place. These are not serious people. They do not understand rule of law, or maybe they don’t care about rule of law. I don’t know which it is. They have a very specific charter, which I, of course, being me, read. And look, they bypass a lot of the rules that you would go through in a normal court case, which is why we filed in the Superior Court and the housing court at the same time. One of the rules that they specifically cannot violate is depositions. So you are allowed to depose in one of these cases. Now because it’s a foreclosure, I have an action against me. Fair, I have an action against me. I am the defendant in a case. Okay, I’m a defendant in a case. We were also the plaintiffs in a case because we were claiming unlawful foreclosure. We went to court a number of times, probably a dozen, like actually in the court in front of a judge. So we’re going to court. And what I see are a bunch of people losing their houses because they can’t afford an attorney. The problem I run into is that by the time this gets down to foreclosure, I get contacted by Deutsche Bank. Now I know who Deutsche Bank is because I’ve heard them in the news, but I’ve never done business with Deutsche Bank in my life. I’ve never signed a single piece of paperwork ever to this day with Deutsche Bank’s name on it. I’ve never entered into a partnership agreement, a contract, a payment agreement, an invoicing agreement, any kind of legal, formal or informal agreement with Deutsche Bank ever, even indirectly at all. The interesting thing was when this first all started, I had contacted my loan servicer and said, look, I know what you guys are doing. I want to talk to whoever owns the mortgage and deal directly with them because you guys, as the servicer, have screwed up and they should not be paying a price for that. They refused to tell me who had the mortgage, which is weird and illegal, just to be clear. Federally, state, ethically, uniform commercial code, completely illegal again. And by this time, he had decided, speaking with the lawyer that I got, right when I got him, I said, all right, well, we can go to the feds and report this, I guess. And he’s like, yeah, you should do that while we go to court. Great. So we’d already been to court once. Judge was a happy little hint. If you go to court, make sure your lawyer knows the clerk, not the judge. Worry about the judge. Worry about the clerk. The judge was initially going to rule against us. However, the clerk went on to school with my attorney. I knew my attorney and they both took the same course in real estate from the same renowned professor, real estate professor in Massachusetts, stood up, talked to the judge right in front of everybody and explained to him, nope, this guy knows what he’s talking about. You should listen to him. And the judge decided to give us a chance, which is very nice of him. Now there’s a lot of vagaries and details in this case that are weird and strange. I don’t want to highlight all of them. That would take too long. It would bore you. It gets kind of esoteric. We were waiting on a decision in Massachusetts that had already been brought to the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, so the high court of Massachusetts. And that decision actually did fall in our favor. And yet our case dragged on. Why I don’t know. This is a five year case on something which should be 10 minutes. One of the things I found out was that when you file a foreclosure in any state, but especially in the state of Massachusetts, you have to come up with paperwork that you file with your foreclosure showing that you have possession of the note because you need possession of the note to foreclose on the house. In the time that they had gotten around to the foreclosure, the original loan servicer that serviced my loan had gone bankrupt mysteriously and had been taken over by the federal government. I found through much research paperwork for the agreement to take over the loan servicer by the federal government. It stated quite clearly they were to destroy. All of their notes. The notes were being purchased by the federal government. When the federal government purchased the notes, the mortgage obligation ceased to be an issue legally, contractually. Can’t collect on the mortgage. There’s no mechanism to do so in almost every state, by the way. But particularly in Massachusetts. Now, meanwhile, I’m waiting for the federal government. Now, mind you, I dealt with the federal government about a mortgage issue years before and they dealt with it. This time what came back from the same agency was not, in fact, from the same agency. It was from the Consumer Financial Protection Board, which is a little thing that was ginned up by Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who, let’s be clear, is evil. She lies about everything, she says. People in Massachusetts are well aware, at least most of them, if they’re honest, intellectually honest with themselves, that she worked for insurance companies and banks, and never for individuals. Scott Brown, who was the senator before her, incidentally, did work for individuals and in fact had a case with her against her. She was on the insurance side and he was helping a person. Because, you know, that’s what you should do. Insurance companies can afford to lose money. The person probably can’t. Little hint. The Consumer Financial Protection Board’s charter was to make sure you got an answer from a bank. I had written up a rather nice and extensive letter to them explaining what the problem was and the numerous violations involved. They forwarded that over to the bank. The bank wrote a letter. The letter made a bunch of claims that were provably false that the CFPB could have looked up. They sent the bank letter along to me and said, your case is closed. I said, this does not absolve them of wrongdoing. In fact, they’ve kind of admitted to it. What are you guys going to do? And they said, oh, you already closed your case. Sort of sounded like you didn’t open a case. Just waited for them to give you a letter that said literally anything, including something that was easily refuted by looking at the records that you have access to. And yet you’re unwilling to do this. I tried to get the case reopened and could not. It’s a little mysterious there, but it should make you wonder. So far I’ve done nothing wrong still, or at least nothing anyone can point to. Legally I’m well within my bounds. And technically, from a legal perspective, from a contractual perspective, according to UCC, according to state law, according to federal law, I should own my house. I’m the only registered person in existence with the county. With that address, the other entities listed don’t exist anymore. So why don’t I own my house? Meanwhile, we’re fighting in the, quote, kangaroo housing court. We also did file in the Superior Court. The Superior Court said we don’t want to hear from you. Go through the housing court and we’ll follow it. At some point my lawyer got fooled into stopping that and separated the cases. And the Superior Court closed their case, left it all the housing court. Probably his mistake. I’m sorry I let that happen. Mind you, this is a five-year period. When we first started going to court, this one lawyer was listed. I didn’t recognize his name. A different lawyer showed up. And we were like, well that’s strange. Eventually they switched lawyers. And this time they were listing a lawyer who allegedly worked for, I think it was, I don’t know, one West Bank? I think it was called One West Bank. For whoever bought the assets from the federal government that used to be owned by my mortgage servicer. Now, there were no assets. There was no paperwork. No one ever contacted me. All of which is illegal, by the way, but whatever. And if the assets weren’t transferred and they don’t seem to have been, then fine and fair. But then I own my house and you don’t because it’s not yours. Because you don’t have any paperwork to back this up. The foreclosing entity is still Deutsche Bank. Why Deutsche Bank? When Deutsche Bank tried to figure out who had my mortgage, they refused to tell me. That’s a hint. Maybe they didn’t know. Deutsche also would have voided both contracts, by the way. Just saying. There’s a lot of legal chatter about whether or not you can separate the mortgage and the note. But actually you can’t. If you separate the mortgage and the note because the note is actually registered at the county deeds office and the mortgage is registered nowhere, there is zero way, technically. I’m speaking technically. Right? I’m telling you physically, mathematically, in the real world, the thing that has to be true. There is no way for you to know if the note has more than one mortgage associated with it. In other words, take the full value of the house and sell it four times as mortgages. No one would know. Now you may say, hey, what about these payments? I will admit I do not understand how the math works on that. But I can tell you this was done and that it worked for a very, very long time and that no one caught it. Go to Wikipedia, look up Taylor Bean and Whitaker. They were making up addresses wholesale. They were selling fancy houses on fantasy streets and selling those mortgages and making a fortune. Ironically, Deutsche Bank sued their auditor because their auditor didn’t catch that there was 4 billion, which I find ironic because they were playing the same game as Taylor Bean and Whitaker, exact same game. I was like, really guys? You’re suing them. Really? For this, which you’re complicit in and participating in right now, such is life. So, effectively, the attorney that’s showing up is supposed to be being paid for by the loan servicer. But they’re not the foreclosing entity and they don’t represent the foreclosing entity. So, eventually, I got pissed at my lawyer and I said, get him thrown out of the court. He admitted to the judge he does not work for Deutsche Bank. Therefore, he cannot be the lawyer for the foreclosure. Foreclosure is being done by Deutsche Bank. They’re asking for paperwork. We’re not getting it. Where finally we got to the point where housing court ruled against us, we went to the appeals court. Appeals court ruled in our favor and said, no, no, no, no. They can wait for this other Supreme Court ruling to come down. Supreme Court ruling took about five months, I want to say, six, something like that. And it came down in our favor. And I was like, this is great. House is mine. Good to go. There was an appeal. It was a tangential appeal. It shouldn’t have affected the case. A lot of lawyers told me that, but the judge allowed it. Dragged on for another like three years. In the meantime, I said, let’s depose these little bastards. So we sent our deposition, did a deposition for the loan service. We served Deutsche Bank with a deposition. Where’s the paperwork? Show us the paperwork that you ever had any sort of interest in this house of any kind, which to date they hadn’t actually provided to anyone, including the court, which is required by the court to do a foreclosure. Funny is going on there, huh? So effectively, the judge refused to issue an order to go to the deposition. So they skirted the deposition, which is illegal and unlawful. And outside of the scope of the judge, the judge has to issue the order. Did not get to depose the bank. A lot of back and forth. I had letters from them early on from their original attorney stating, we do not now, nor will we ever have the mortgage in our, the note rather in our possession. And I said, sounds good to me. They’re in violation of the law. You can’t foreclose. Can’t foreclose. If somebody has possession of the paperwork of the note, they can foreclose. Without possession of the note, you can’t foreclose. It’s that simple. Submitted that as evidence into the case. Eventually, the judge somehow ruled against us. We went to the appellate court and said, the judge can’t rule against us. What’s going on? The appellate court would have agreed, except the other side made an argument that they had a letter from me stating that I knew that they had the mortgage, the note that they had held at one time, the note. And I said, I never said that. In fact, I’ve only ever said the opposite. I’ve claimed they couldn’t have had the note. They never touched the note. And their attorney told me they never had the note and never would have the note. And we submitted that into evidence in the case. Little weird. And so the appellate court ruled in favor of the bank. And they just went through the foreclosure like that with no hearing at all. At all. What’s going on there? I don’t know. But that’s what happened. Very strange. Now, I’m not so upset about that. Although, aside from blowing 50 grand, I lost a half a million dollar piece of property. But it’s just material stuff. Whatever. I bought a house for cash down in South Carolina. I survived. I don’t know if I’m going to survive this latest legal onslaught, but you know, fingers crossed, we’ll see. A lot of people lost their house to banks that didn’t own the property ever. And in fact, it was the lawyers that were taking the houses, not the banks. Lawyers had bought the banks out of their remaining alleged interest. They were taking people’s houses, not even the banks. And they were flipping those houses. And I know this because being me, I made sure the house didn’t get repaired for five years. I had a roof leak in it and contacted them and said, you’re going to come down and fix this and they, well, you’re going to contact this person and that person and these persons. And I tried contacting all of them and nobody came down to fix the house. And I was like, you guys are claiming it’s your house. You got to fix it. You’re in the housing court claiming that you’re a landlord. A landlord. I got the house condemned. I had a roof leak. The city condemned it two months before the foreclosure hearing. We had the foreclosure hearing. Judge is yapping along and I’m like, judge, the house is condemned. The attorney is like, what? And the judge is like, well, why didn’t you tell him? He’s a housing court judge. I’m like, well, first of all, that’s not my job. The city sent the owner of record a notice that the house is condemned. The city does the house condemnation, not me. I don’t do that. That’s the city job. That takes away the occupancy permit. It makes it much more expensive to do anything with the house. Much more. Because now you’ve got to get it re-inspected and then everything has to be up to code. Everything. Like, if I had kept the house, I could have just fixed it as it was and things that were out of code were out of code and nobody would have done anything about it because you can’t. Everything’s grandfathered in. The minute you pull the occupancy permit, nothing is grandfathered in and anything that’s even a little bit out of code has to be brought up to current code. I knew what I was doing. Lawyer gets pissed. Lawyer’s like, your honor, we weren’t notified. And I was like, A, not my job. B, yes you were. City notified you. And my fault, you had two months. You guys are the ones not fixing the house. We had already reported that to the court. Court refused to do anything about it. We already reported that to the court. So I don’t want to tell you about the no notification thing. You get as much notifications you could possibly get, other than, you know, writing it across the sky or flashing it on the freaking, you know, prime news. We weren’t going to get any better notification. It wasn’t going to happen. And why was the lawyer pissed? Either his client didn’t tell him, which is fine. But even so, why would he care? Because he owned the house. That’s how I figured that out. The lawyer, my lawyer was perplexed. He’s like, why does he care? He has nothing to do with him. He’s just an attorney for a bank. Oh, no, he’s the one that actually owns the house. So he’s using the Deutsche Bank name to steal my house. Little note. That particular lawyer, along with a couple of others that, you know, were buzzing in and out of the case, were known as ambulance chasers previously. In other words, let’s say they didn’t have the highest reputation among their peers. Now, this is a problem for the legal community. They should be just barred period, end of statement, full stop. Nobody likes them. They all know that they’re not the best people in the world. Get them out of your profession, man. Otherwise, it’s not a profession. You ruin your own profession. Very. Look, I’ve got a lot of friends who are lawyers. I used to work for lawyers. I’m still in a case now. Right. I like my lawyer. I like his partner. Lawyers are good. But it’s not a profession if you let scumbags in and you keep them there. That’s on you. It’s not on them. That’s on you. Scumbags are going to scumbag. You’re going to kick them out. You kick them out of the club. They know you’re not a lawyer anymore. We’re going to pull your license. When I have a board hearing, which we have the facilities to do, we’re going to kick you out. Not hard. Not hard. By the way, all lawyers and other people who work for the court are officers of the court. They are supposed to report illegal or bad behavior on the part of anybody in a court, including other attorneys. This never happens, by the way. Might be why people don’t like attorneys. Might be why people don’t like judges. Judges should be getting ratted out for this sort of bad behavior all the time. And they’re not. And so should other attorneys and social court officers. Sometimes the court officers in the court are just mean for no reason. And that behavior should be ratted out. Sorry, but someone’s got to say what’s going on. So, yeah, I can tell you in my research what I did not find. And what was widely reported at the time. There’s one report on CNBC that I remember. I don’t remember who made it or where it came from. It was shocking. And I really didn’t write it down because there was a lot of reporting back then. And who knew if it was right? It was on CNBC. The guy said, might have the numbers a little bit off, but actually I think they’re right. It was 3 trillion of mortgage value. In other words, there were only assets to cover a quarter of the collections. So it sure looked like there was four times as much debt as there were assets. That’s interesting. How do you loan four times as much debt on assets when you’re not supposed to loan over 100%? And by and large, they didn’t. Like, typical loan was 80%. He may have been accounting for the 20% equity rules or the 15% equity rules or whatever. And there were exceptions to that. And back then, there was still the 110% mortgage valuation nonsense that they loan you. I never did any of that. I had more than 20% equity in my house the whole time I owned it. The whole time. I never had less than 20% equity ever. Even when the housing market dipped, I had way more than 20% equity. So the question is, how did that happen? I don’t know if that number is real. But another thing is tranches and this second order derivative garbage. Most of that didn’t happen. That only affected 1% of the home mortgage market. 1%. 1%. If you’re going to tell me that a 1% corruption of your mortgage market caused the whole thing to collapse, I’m going to say there’s something funny going on. Now what makes more sense is if you have a 20% missed payment rate, which causes some kind of domino effect, there could be a problem there. But it’s a temporary cash flow problem. It’s not a market instability problem. Unless, of course, you’ve actually loaned out four times more money than you have assets to cover. Because that 20% is not 20%. It’s 80%. Now, the problem is that the mortgage market is not going to collapse. Now you can see why a big bailout might be necessary. Because if 80% of the market goes away, now you have a cash flow problem. You need massive cash injection immediately to cover those losses. Interesting, isn’t it? If you’ve got a market where 20% or 25% of your market fails, and that causes a cash flow problem, you never had a market to begin with. There was something funny going on all along. A few more interesting facts. It was always assumed that Fannie and Freddie would guarantee mortgages. Almost all of our mortgage paperwork was sold overseas to overseas banks in Europe. Those banks were buying our houses. There are exceptions to this. Use a local credit union and get a loan from them. They don’t sell their mortgage stuff. They don’t sell their debt. They deal with it all locally, much more stable, better for the community, better for you. Less likely you’ll get foreclosed on, so long as you’re making your payments. You will get foreclosed on your mortgage. You will get foreclosed on quicker, that’s for sure. But don’t be a deadbeat. Problem solved. At the end of the day, the federal government was bailing out foreign banks with that bailout. Not local banks. If you watch the big short, and maybe you should, maybe you shouldn’t, there’s a lot of stuff on that that’s just wrong. Deutsche Bank never owned my property, ever. They never had an interest in it. They may have been told they had an interest in it at some point, but actually they did not. It’s basic fraud. No, really. It’s just people saying, we own this, when they didn’t. That’s really all 2008 ever was. If you go back and look, it was a savings and loan crisis. It’s identical to the 2008 housing collapse. I read an article once, I should get, it was a very long time ago. Probably 2011 or 2012. The guy said, he was a county banking regulator in California. He found improprieties in the state of California, and he was a very good lawyer. He was a county bank regulator in California. He found improprieties in this county bank, I forget what the name of it was, and his claim was, they got bailed out in the savings and loan scandal. They changed their names and switched counties in California to avoid being caught by the same regulators that caught them last time. According to him, the new name of that bank or loan servicer was Countrywide Mortgage. That’s what the guy claimed. He wrote a whole article about it. I don’t know how true it was. I didn’t really go into that. I just said, sounds about right. You look up the savings and loan scandal, you look up Taylor B. and Whitaker, you look up 2008, and you go, oh, isn’t that interesting. All to bail out foreign banks, not U.S. banks. Not that U.S. banks didn’t get bailed out. They got bailed out from what you saw in The Big Short. There’s a couple points in The Big Short where they say something very interesting that should sort of pique you as to who the good guys and bad guys might have been there. The movie has a portrayal of who the good guys are. And they’re the guys that saw the thing and knew it was coming. But if you listen real close to the dialogue, you’ll notice at two or maybe three points, I don’t remember now, they make the observation that, hey, if the mortgage market is fraudulent and these guys are basing this money on the mortgage market, and these guys are basing this on bad debt, and we’re making a bet against that bad debt, how are we ever going to collect any money? Well, isn’t that a good question? You’re not going to collect any money. Some of them did. Some of them got wiped out, by the way. There was an interview with at least one guy at the NBC who said basically, yeah, our bank should have had some ungodly billions of dollars and they settled for much less, he said, to save people’s houses. Now that didn’t end up happening, by the way, which was one thing he was mad about. He’s like, look, we took less money because they said they were going to save these houses for people, and in fact, they didn’t. He got scammed too, by the federal government, just so we’re clear who the bad guys really are here. Also, those guys that made the bet against the mortgage industry, they’re not angels. They may have been right about something and maybe they tried to expose it correctly and couldn’t and said, well, at least we can profit off it, but they’re profiting off it. And you’ll notice even in the movie, they get their bailout from the government. They don’t, their money doesn’t come from the bets they made against the banks. Their money comes out of a negotiation with the government. That’s why they have to settle for less money than they actually should have made. And they all worked away, tens of millionaires or whatever, good for them, good for them, I’m not, whatever. But they were bad guys playing a bad game and they knew it. Not so good. And I get it, you’re stuck in that world and that’s what you do. Fair. But also, you’re in that world with those people and you know what you’re doing and you saw it clearly. So you knew there was no money to back your bet. You could have hit red all day long, but the casino was already bankrupt. Where were you getting your money from? My tax dollars. You know, the guy who had his house stolen.