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    The Monster: How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America--and Spawned a Global Crisis
    Unavailable
    The Monster: How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America--and Spawned a Global Crisis
    Unavailable
    The Monster: How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America--and Spawned a Global Crisis
    Ebook534 pages9 hours

    The Monster: How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America--and Spawned a Global Crisis

    By Michael W. Hudson

    4.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Who killed the economy?

    A page-turning, true-crime exposé of the subprime salesmen and Wall Street alchemists who produced the biggest financial scandal in American history

    "It's hard to have a guilty conscience if you don't have a conscience. Anything that benefited production - that benefited me and benefited my wallet - I'd do it."

    The sales force at Ameriquest Mortgage took this philosophy to heart. They watched the Hollywood white-collar-crime flick "Boiler Room" as a training tape, studying how to pitch overpriced deals to unsuspecting home owners. They learned how to forge signatures on mortgage paperwork and create fake documents in "cut-and-paste" operations they dubbed "The Lab" or "The Art Department."

    In this stunning narrative, award-winning reporter Michael W. Hudson reveals the story of the rise and fall of the subprime mortgage business by chronicling the rise and fall of two corporate empires: Ameriquest and Lehman Brothers. As the biggest subprime lender and Wall Street's biggest patron of subprime, Ameriquest and Lehman did more than any other institutions to create the feeding frenzy that emboldened mortgage pros to flood the nation with high-risk, high-profit home loans.

    It's a tale populated by a remarkable cast of the characters: a shadowy billionaire who created the subprime industry out of the ashes of the 1980s S&L scandal; Wall Street executives with an insatiable desire for product; struggling home owners ensnared in the most ingenious of traps; lawyers and investigators who tried to expose the fraud; politicians and bureaucrats who turned a blind eye; and, most of all, the drug-snorting, high-living salesmen who tell all about the money they made, the lies they told, the deals they closed.

    Provocative and gripping, The Monster is a searing exposé of the bottom-feeding fraud and top-down greed that fueled the financial collapse.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateOct 26, 2010
    ISBN9781429940047
    Unavailable
    The Monster: How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America--and Spawned a Global Crisis
    Author

    Michael W. Hudson

    Michael W. Hudson is a staff writer at the Center for Public Integrity, a non-profit journalism organization. He previously worked as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and as an investigator for the Center for Responsible Lending. The winner of a George Polk Award, Hudson has also written for Forbes, The Big Money, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and Mother Jones. He edited the award-winning book Merchants of Misery and appeared in the documentary film Maxed Out. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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    Reviews for The Monster

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    • 4/5
      In many ways this was the most painful book of the many I’ve read about the financial crisis, because it focused lower down on the chain: the subprime mortgages packaged in securitizations, telling the stories of the people who sold them (twenty-four-year-olds making $150,000 a year and blowing it on drugs and cars, using the money as an excuse not to look any further into what they were doing, or experienced salesmen who let the money seduce them too, unless they got so sick of themselves that they had to quick) and the people who signed up (often under incredible sales pressure, and even that wasn’t enough—there was plenty of outright fraud in what they were told and in forgery of their signatures on false documents), as well as the people who made the long-term, big money and walked away with almost all of it (in one case, also with an ambassadorship) and the regulators who tried to fight this system but lost again and again because the lenders were more politically powerful and willing to donate huge sums to keep it that way (and we all know that government regulation is a bad idea).It’s an enraging story and it’s not fixed, though I’m experiencing at least some schadenfreude with the recent Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruling pointing out that the entities foreclosing on a lot of these loans have no proof that they own them, because these experienced and sophisticated businesses who insist that unsophisticated homeowners are responsible for every piece of paper those homeowners (allegedly) signed—wait for it—didn’t keep actual records, or transfer them as the securitizers promised to do in the contracts they signed with the banks and investors. Ooops. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer industry.

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