Voice of Revolution

Consequences of Neo-Liberal Agenda in U.S.

Promised Trickledown Prosperity Turns into Trickledown Homelessness

The neo-liberal trickledown line that the richer the rich become the more money and resources trickle down to the people has been proven false in practice. The real experience in North America, Europe and Japan has been the richer the rich become the more gross and widespread poverty becomes. Even the monopoly mass media are forced to admit that life itself is revealing that rather than money trickling down to the poor from the obscene wealth of the rich, it is gross poverty and homelessness. The reality is trickledown homelessness.

In a Reuters’ article widely published in the mass media the amended trickledown theory was expressed in the following way, addressing the developing tent cities in the suburbs, in this case in California. In an article entitled “Tent city in suburbs is cost of home crisis” the report says, “[The homeless] tent city is a symptom of the wider economic downturn. And it’s just a matter of time before foreclosed families end up at tent city, local housing experts say. ‘They don’t hit the streets immediately,’ said activist Jane Mercer. Most families can find transitional housing in a motel or with friends before turning to charity or the streets. ‘They only hit tent city when they really bottom out.’

“ ‘But it is not just homeowners who are hit by the foreclosure wave. People who rent now find themselves in a tighter, more expensive market as demand rises from families who lost homes,’ said Jean Beil, senior vice president for programs and services at Catholic Charities U.S.A. ‘Folks who would have been in a house before are now in an apartment and folks that would have been in an apartment, now can’t afford it,’ said Beil. ‘It has a trickle-down effect’.”

While the various Democratic candidates are commenting on the role former President Ronald Reagan, known for his “trickle-down” economics played, and claiming race and gender have nothing to do with the election, they are refusing to address the heart of the matter — the rights of the people and the inability of the existing economy to meet them.

Various studies, for example, show that the current housing crisis is hitting working families with lower incomes in general, and women and national minorities especially. Women and minorities make up a disproportionate segment of the “subprime” mortgages, stemming from the well-known and documented racism of the banks and mortgage lenders. Subprime loans are at higher interest rates and where banks often entice people to buy by offering lower rates for 2-3 years and then raising them dramatically. They account for about 13 percent of existing home loans but are about 55 percent of current foreclosures. It is largely African Americans and families where women are the heads of the household that are now being forced out of their homes and on to the streets. A new report estimates that the subprime mortgage crisis will cause African-Americans to experience wealth losses of between $72 billion and $93 billion over its duration. For people of color in general, the institutional racism of subprime lenders accounts for nearly double the wealth losses than for whites.

A study in Baltimore, for example, found that single women with children, most African American, account for about half of the families facing homelessness. The racism is such that the City of Baltimore is suing Wells Fargo, the main subprime lender in the area, for forcing black families to take subprime loans. National studies indicate that black women are five times more likely to be forced to accept subprime mortgages than white men.

Clearly the right to housing for all, the right to equality, the elimination of institutional racism and discrimination against women, are serious problems demanding solutions and thus serious election issues.

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Mortgage Crisis Hits States and Cities Hard

As more people are forced into foreclosure and losing their homes, tax revenue on new homes and property taxes for cities and states are down by billions of dollars. Given the continued demands of Wall Street for repayment on city and state debts and of the federal government to feed the Pentagon, local governments are facing serious difficulties contending with the extent and scope of the mortgage crisis. Local elected officials are again refusing the option of freezing debt payments or stopping war payments and are instead cutting funding for city jobs, public schools, libraries, assistance for the homeless, and other social programs.

“We are talking about a pretty tough fiscal environment for the next four or five years,” said Christopher W. Hoene, the director of policy and research for the National League of Cities. “Libraries, parks, after-school programs ... you’ll see lots of questions raised about cities’ abilities to fund them.”

A few months ago, many government officials felt they could weather the storm. They factored a downturn into budget calculations. They built up sizable emergency funds. But the rainy day they prepared for turned out to be a monsoon.

“We had predicted a slowdown, but not this much,” said Tim Nash, finance director for Greeley (population 90,000), a college town in a heavily agricultural region of north-central Colorado. Nash thought he was being prudent when he budgeted for 200 new housing starts in the city this year, down from 310 last year. He was not even close. Instead of the $2.6 million that Nash expected in sales taxes on new construction, Greeley will collect $1.2 million. Greeley has left vacant 49 city positions, most of them building inspectors.

In a recent survey, 24 states reported that their tax collections had taken a hit because of the housing crisis. The 10 most affected states, including California, Nevada and Arizona, will lose a combined $6.6 billion in tax revenue next year, according to a report prepared for the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

The mortgage crisis cuts into tax revenue in several ways. The most obvious victim is property tax collection. Homeowners in foreclosure do not pay taxes on time. And as foreclosures spread, property values drop, dragging down assessments and collections.

To take one example: In wealthy Fairfax County, Virginia, property values were jumping 20 percent a year. Now values are flat or falling. The number of foreclosures has exploded, from fewer than 200 two years ago to about 4,000 this year. The resulting $220-million budget shortfall has officials warning of significant cuts in services, including spending on public schools. “Instead of having a soft landing, we’ve crashed,” said Edward L. Long Jr., a deputy county executive.

When the housing market is flat, governments also lose out on the many transaction fees tacked onto real estate sales. This revenue stream is down in several states, in a few cases by 20 percent or more. There is also a decline in sales tax revenue. If people are not buying homes, they are not buying refrigerators and washing machines to furnish them. Nationwide, orders for durable goods have been flat for the last four months. (November saw the first slight uptick: 0.1%. Economists had been hoping for 2.2%.) On average, states receive about a third of their revenue from sales taxes.

The fallout has been most severe in California, where -officials are grappling with a $14 billion gap. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has ordered agencies to immediately cut funding by 10 percent. In Florida, the legislature recently took emergency steps to close a budget shortfall estimated at $2.5 billion over the next 18 months. Lawmakers raised tuition at state universities by 5 percent and cut money for long-term nursing home care for the poor.

In Nevada, Governor Jim Gibbons ordered a 4.5 percent across-the-board cut. In Arizona, state Senator Bob Burns will be making cuts of 10 percent to a budget that looked balanced six months ago but is now in the red. “We’re not even sure we’re at the bottom yet,” said Burns, a Republican who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee.

“Education and healthcare are usually politically untouchable, but we have to put those on the table now. We have to include just about everything, really,” Burns said. “If we do not make some serious moves in ‘08 and ‘09, we’ll be out of savings. And out of gimmicks.”

In Kansas City, Missouri, Evelyn Craig, the executive director of reStart Inc., an interfaith ministry to the homeless, is facing massive cuts. Missouri levies a $3 recording fee on all real estate documents. That money, about $5 million in 2007, is used to support programs like reStart, offering free shelter, hot meals, addiction counseling, parenting classes and other services for the homeless.

The demand for such services is rising fast as more and more families lose their homes to foreclosures. But the incoherence of the current system is such that while need is greater, the program will see half its funding cut. These are crimes being committed against the most vulnerable, while the loansharks on Wall Street are fed their billions upon billions.

We demand: Stop Paying the Rich! Increase Funding in Social Programs!

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For Your Information

Data and Anecdotes of Homelessness & Poverty

Tent City in Suburbs is Cost of Home Crisis
Dana Ford, Reuters, California, December 21, 2007

Between railroad tracks and beneath the roar of departing planes sits “tent city,” a terminus for homeless people. It is not, as might be expected, in a blighted city center, but in the once-booming suburbia of Southern California. The noisy, dusty camp sprang up in July with 20 residents and now numbers 200 people, including several children, growing as this region east of Los Angeles has been hit by the U.S. housing crisis.

The unraveling of the region known as the Inland Empire reads like a 21st century version of The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck’s novel about families driven from their lands by the Great Depression. As more families throw in the towel and head to foreclosure here and across the nation, the social costs of collapse are adding up in the form of higher rates of homelessness, crime and even disease. While no current residents claim to be victims of foreclosure, all agree that tent city is a symptom of the wider economic downturn. And it is just a matter of time before foreclosed families end up at tent city, local housing experts say. “They don’t hit the streets immediately,” said activist Jane Mercer. Most families can find transitional housing in a motel or with friends before turning to charity or the streets. “They only hit tent city when they really bottom out.”

Steve, 50, who declined to give his last name, moved to tent city four months ago. He gets social security payments, but cannot work and said rents are too high. “House prices are going down, but the rentals are sky-high,” said Steve. “If it wasn’t for here, I wouldn’t have a place to go.”

Nationally, foreclosures are at an all-time high. Filings are up nearly 100 percent from a year ago, according to the data firm RealtyTrac. Officials say that as many as half a million people could lose their homes as adjustable mortgage rates rise over the next two years. California ranks second in the nation for foreclosure filings — one per 88 households last quarter. Within California, San Bernardino County in the Inland Empire is worse — one filing for every 43 households, according to RealtyTrac. […]

But it is not just homeowners who are hit by the foreclosure wave. People who rent now find themselves in a tighter, more expensive market as demand rises from families who lost homes, said Jean Beil, senior vice president for programs and services at Catholic Charities U.S.A. “Folks who would have been in a house before are now in an apartment and folks that would have been in an apartment, now can’t afford it,” said Beil. “It has a trickle-down effect.” [...]

At Home in the Parking Lot
Millie Jefferson, Weekend America, Minnesota, December 22, 2007

Home for the holidays, of course, means different things to different people. For more than 80 homeless people in Kirkland, Washington, “home” during this holiday season is a church parking lot. In the Seattle area, there are two officially sanctioned tent cities. They’re part of the area’s shelter system. The tent cities move every three months or so. They are collectively run by residents, and have strict codes of conduct. They also have things like garbage service and showers. And unlike most homeless shelters, couples can stay together in the tents. That makes life seem a little more like home especially during the holidays. The following are from interviews:

James: Everybody here are people just like anybody else. They just don’t have a house, and they just don’t have a car. Some have jobs and some don’t. But everybody needs something. A roof over their head, a family to call a family, a Christmas to call a Christmas. A lot of people here, their Christmas is their tent. I am going to have a Christmas whether I am in a tent or not.

Stephanie Hanson: You know, I have never been homeless before, so it’s kind of a new thing to me. It’s not the same as having your own place where you can just go to the kitchen or make yourself a pizza or something like that, because here we just have a microwave and coffeepot. So you know you don’t have that luxury. You know it’s a major culture shock for somebody who has never been homeless before. You know, it wasn’t always this way. I had a husband and I have a son. We had been living in Spokane, and we had a two bedroom apartment, and everything was great. My son was in school. Then something happened. I had a nervous breakdown, and I decided to leave my family. And so I lost my family, and that’s what happens. My son has been in foster care for a year and a half.

Pinellas County Deputy on Homeless Patrol
Thomas Michalski, Tampa Bay Newspapers, Seminole Florida, December 26, 2007

Deputy Tim Myers is a nine-year veteran of the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office. Before that he was a St. Petersburg cop for six years. Janice Wiggins is an outreach specialist with Clearwater-based Directions for Mental Health, Inc. Together they are the sheriff’s homeless outreach team for the Lealman area, and anyplace else in the county that might need their expertise. Homelessness brings up visions of scruffy characters standing on street corners with their hands out. But it is, in fact, a major problem throughout Pinellas County and it is not getting any better.

The team was created by Deputy John Fitzgerald because of the large concentration of homeless people in Lealman, a community nestled between Pinellas Park and St. Petersburg that has large concentrations of street people. Homeless police teams are nothing new. Clearwater, St. Petersburg and Pinellas Park have them. “Most homeless people want to get off the streets,” Myers said. “Many do work and not all are drug or alcohol abusers.”

During a recent meeting at Pinellas Hope, a tent city on the outskirts of Pinellas Park created by Catholic Charities, Myers was quick to point out that all 232 tents are filled with 260 people. Some are married and non-married couples who share tents. Wiggins, meanwhile, said working with street people has opened her eyes. “Many lost their homes and property through no fault of their own,” Wiggins said. They slid into poverty due to illness that created massive medical expenses. Others suffered circumstances triggered by job loss or other economic conditions.

Both Myers and Wiggins believe that the lack of affordable housing in Pinellas County drives people into the streets. “Many homeless people work, but at jobs that pay about $6-an-hour,” Wiggins said. “That equates to about $50-a-day. You do the math.” Many believe that street people live off government handouts. Some do receive social security that amounts to about $700-a-month. That does not go far when it comes to rent, food, utilities and other costs. “A lot of homeless people do not qualify for government financial or other assistance simply because they work,” Wiggins said. “They make too little to live on and too much for help.”

Wiggins said there are about 4,000 people on the waiting list for Pinellas County Housing Authority dwellings. Some homeless live in camps located in wooded areas that are equipped with stoves, tents, bedrolls and even furniture. “No one wants to be homeless,” Wiggins said. “No one enjoys living on the streets.” “Working this job opened my eyes and those of my wife who never understood the seriousness or extent of the problem.”

U.S. Mayors’ Report: Hunger and Homelessness Intensify in U.S. Cities
Debra Watson, www.wsws.org, December 30, 2007

The number of people hungry and homeless in U.S. cities rose dramatically again in 2007, according to the annual report on hunger and homelessness from the U.S. Conference of Mayors. The 23-city Hunger and Homelessness Survey was released in late December.

Requests for emergency food increased in four of every five cities. Among 15 cities with quantifying data, the median increase in requests for food was 10 percent and in some cities it was much higher. Detroit and some other cities reported seeing more working poor among those seeking food. In Detroit, emergency food requests shot up 35 percent over the 12-month period ending in October. Officials there noted that “due to a lack of resources, emergency food assistance facilities have had to reduce the number of days and/or hours of operation.”

Thirteen of 19 survey cities reported they could not meet the demand for emergency food. Los Angeles was one of the major cities reporting difficulties in serving the growing need. An official in LA said: “Emergency food assistance facilities have to turn away people. According to the LA Regional Foodbank, over 30 percent of their food pantries have had to turn clients away and pantries that do not turn clients away are providing less food.

“In 2002, a food pantry would provide an average of eight to ten different USDA commodities per distribution. This holiday season, food pantries are providing three USDA commodities. Food pantries are tasked to serve more clients with the same amount of resources they had six years ago. Twenty-one percent of overall demand for emergency food assistance goes unmet.”

Across all cities, an average of 15 percent of families with children looking for emergency food must be turned away. Nine in 10 of the cities sampled for details on the urban hunger crisis say they expect increases in food requests next year. City officials said specific factors exacerbating hunger over the past year were the foreclosure crisis, the high prices of food and gasoline, and the lack of affordable housing. Decreased social benefits such as public assistance and the eroding value of food stamps were also listed as particularly acute problems. Lack of donated food and commodities and insufficient funding were listed as the most important reason for turning away the hungry.

Economic issues such as unemployment and poverty along with high housing and medical costs were most cited by responding cities as the major causes of chronic hunger. Substance abuse and mental illness were the least cited.

Homelessness

In 20 of the cities included in the survey, 193,183 people had stays in emergency shelters and/or transitional housing in the past year. The average duration was six months for families and five months for individuals, down from eight months last year.

The mayors’ survey statistics capture unduplicated stays in city temporary housing facilities, meaning if shelter was provided, a stay lasting weeks or months would be counted as just one unduplicated stay. The survey found that nearly one in four unduplicated shelter stays were by members of family groups. The ratio of family members to singles was found to be roughly equal in homeless counts compiled elsewhere, documenting sheltered homeless on any given night.

In general, cities reported actual increases in households with children in their transitional or emergency housing over the past year. Nine in 10 cities said that more permanent housing was needed to mediate the problem of homelessness. Thousands of beds to house the homeless were added in the surveyed cities, yet half the cities reported they turn people away some or all of the time. In Phoenix, 7,000 to 10,000 are homeless on any given night and 3,000 cannot be sheltered due to lack of beds.

Individual city profiles come from the broad range of U.S. cities that participate in the report. They have widely different average per capita incomes and are located in various parts of the country. For example, Santa Monica, California, a city of 83,000 with a per capita income of $58,000, reports 728 singles and 142 households with children were sheltered homeless in 2007. In contrast, Philadelphia, with a population of 1.4 million and a poverty rate of 23 percent, reports 8,103 individuals and 5,300 households with children in this category.

These profiles show only those individuals that find shelter. Miami, a city of 360,000, reported only 735 families and 365 individuals were in sheltered housing for some duration during the past year. Des Moines, a city half the size of Miami but in a much colder climate, reported 3,632 families and 2,436 individuals were sheltered homeless in 2007. [...]

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Dark World of International Usury

U.S. Economic Crisis and the Mortgage Rescue Plan

K.C. Adams

President Bush and his Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson announced a Mortgage Rescue Plan on December 6. The plan was characterized as a response to the crisis of home foreclosures and falling house prices that is sweeping the U.S., especially in California, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Ohio.

This year, falling house prices have diminished existing home equity by over $1 trillion. Home foreclosures hit an all-time high in the third quarter. The Mortgage Bankers Association said the percentage of mortgages entering the foreclosure process reached 0.78 percent during the July-to-September period surpassing the previous high of 0.65 percent set in the second quarter. The percentage of homeowners who have fallen behind on their mortgage payments climbed to 5.59 percent in the third quarter — the highest level since 1986. The percentage of subprime mortgages in foreclosure reached a record of 4.72 percent, a percentage poised to increase dramatically as more introductory “teaser” interest rates reset higher.

The mortgage crisis is one aspect of a gathering economic storm leading inexorably towards a recession, which emerges from the trend towards relative and absolute impoverishment of the U.S. working class. The neo-liberal anti-social agenda is exerting unrelenting downward pressure on the U.S. standard of living, resulting in the inability of more and more people to pay for the necessities of life including their mortgage or rent, and failure to keep up with their car, credit card and student loan payments. Neo-liberalism allows to flourish the full destructive consequences of the basic contradiction within the U.S. capitalist economy between its aim to protect and expand private wealth as much and as fast as possible (mainly in the form of capital) and in so doing restrict the claims of the working class on the added-value it produces and distributes, and limit the social programs on which the people depend.

The U.S. state and political system are firmly under the control of the most powerful monopolies and are incapable of renewing themselves or the economy. Their response to every crisis is failure, war and repression. This mortgage plan is yet another example of the ruling elite failing to address the real underlying economic problems and contradictions. Only the working class armed with its own advanced consciousness and independent political program can save the U.S. from a looming economic, political, military and social disaster.

Mortgage Rescue Plan

The U.S. economic plan is typical in its origin. The executive branch, through the Treasury Department, acts as a coordinator for the most powerful owners of monopoly capital. The plan is essentially under the private control of those monopolies directly involved and does not include any government restrictions on finance capital. It merely shifts a small amount of the burden of the crisis for a short time from one area to another without addressing the reality that something that is not produced cannot be consumed. High real estate prices, which were deliberately inflated by monopoly capital, do not reflect intrinsic value and when houses or other real estate are realized at high prices, money must be taken from elsewhere in the socialized economy. The same holds true for the parasitical interest payments and fees paid on the inflated mortgages. The chickens are coming home to roost and this plan is a pathetic smokescreen clouding the scale of the problem and the ramifications for the entire U.S. socialized economy and many institutional investors worldwide.

Treasury Secretary Paulson, who is unelected, as are all members of the U.S. Cabinet except President Bush and Vice-President Cheney, made this very clear in his remarks. (Paulson’s brief remarks are analyzed in another article.) Mr. Paulson is the former CEO of Goldman Sachs one of the world’s largest centers of finance capital, which is currently mired in losses of billions of dollars of unrecoverable outstanding loans.

It should be remembered that when it comes to matters of high finance including the dark world of international usury, elected officials play a very limited role. For example the U.S. Federal Reserve, which is a private consortium of the most powerful U.S. financial institutions, plays a distinctly state role issuing U.S. currency, lending newly issued money to private banks, setting interest rates and directing U.S. imperialism’s campaign for worldwide dollar hegemony.

The voluntary plan put together by the Treasury Department and some of the most powerful monopolies sets guidelines to identify qualified homeowners who would be eligible to avoid having their subprime mortgages reset at a higher interest rate.

The Treasury Department issued the following guidelines:

• Plan to focus on subprime, first-lien, adjustable-rate mortgages, and particularly once-popular 2/28 and 3/27 loans. Under such plans, mortgage rates were fixed only for the first two or three years of a 30-year loan.

• Loans originating between January 1, 2005, and July 31, 2007, whose interest rates will reset for the first time between January 1, 2008, and July 31, 2010, would be eligible for a five-year interest-rate freeze.

• Only owner-occupied homes would qualify for a rate freeze.

• The plan is not binding on all mortgage industry players, but would stand as a set of best practices and guiding principles.

• Some plan provisions might be applicable to troubled prime and Alt-A loans, though not second liens.

• Plan says target borrowers should be contacted about the program four months prior to the date their interest rates are set to be increased.

• Borrowers must be making timely payments at present and not have missed two months of mortgage payments in the previous year to qualify for a rate freeze.

• Eligible borrowers cannot have a loan-to-value ratio of more than 97 percent and must be facing an interest rate spike, typically 10 percent or greater.

• Mortgage servicers will help borrowers refinance in a way that avoids costly pre-payment penalties for abandoning the loan early.

• The program identifies three general classes of troubled borrowers according to their ability to pay, two of which potentially would be eligible for relief:

1) Strong borrowers facing a rate-reset. They will be shepherded into conventional, fixed-rate mortgages, such as those available under the Federal Housing Administration.

2) Borrowers who may be eligible for a rate freeze. A formula comparing a borrower’s current credit score with a score assessed at loan origination will help determine whether a borrower can get a “fast-track” rate freeze.

Borrowers with credit scores of less than 660 that have not increased by 10 percent or more since the origination of the mortgage will be fast-tracked for a modification.

Borrowers whose credit scores have climbed may still qualify for a freeze if they meet other tests.

3) Struggling borrowers who are deemed not able to afford even a modified loan. They would face foreclosure.

Secretary Paulson explained why a collective approach was necessary: “The current system for working out those problem loans would not be sufficient to handle the anticipated 1.8 million owner-occupied subprime mortgage resets that will occur in 2008 and 2009.” Economists estimate however that the plan would only affect some portion of the less difficult cases about 10-12 percent of all subprime Adjustable Rate Mortgage resets. It would exclude those who are delinquent on their payments — about 22 percent of all subprime borrowers, according to First American Loan Performance. Among those not qualified are borrowers whose introductory rates expire before January 1, 2008. This excludes around $57 billion in subprime loans scheduled to be reset at higher rates in the final three months of this year.

Mortgage companies could also exclude borrowers who they conclude are making enough money to afford higher monthly payments. Barclays Capital, extrapolating from a similar program recently unveiled in California, estimates that only about 12 per cent of all subprime borrowers or 240,000 homeowners would get any relief.

Comments in the monopoly-controlled mass media reveal disagreement within the capitalist class regarding the plan:

“The critical component of President Bush’s program will be what he provides to move worthy homeowners into long-term fixed rate mortgages. What is needed is a mechanism to provide permanent financing — fixed-rate, long-term mortgages.” - Peter Morici, University of Maryland.

“Without question, the Bush administration’s mortgage rescue plan will exacerbate, not alleviate, the problems in the housing market. As the plan will sharply reduce the ability of new buyers to make purchases, it really amounts to a stay of execution and not a pardon. The result [of the plan] will be additional downward pressure on home prices, despite the fact that in the short term fewer homes will be sold in foreclosure than what might have been without the rescue plan.” - Peter D. Schiff, Euro Pacific Capital

“One thing should be clear at the outset: investors in these assets (securitized mortgages such as Asset Backed Commercial Paper) will be much better off (i.e. the value of their claims will be higher than otherwise) with this proposal rather than the alternative of letting millions of homeowners default on their mortgages.” - Nouriel Roubini (Wall Street Journal)

“Some analysts say that more than a third of all subprime borrowers could have qualified for cheaper conventional loans at the outset.” - Associated Press

“At least one thing is clear about President Bush’s plan to help people trapped by the mortgage meltdown: it is an industry-led plan, not a government bailout. Although Mr. Bush unveiled the plan at the White House on Thursday, its terms were set by the mortgage industry and Wall Street firms. The effort is voluntary and it leaves plenty of wiggle room for lenders. Moreover, it would affect only a small number of subprime borrowers. The plan was the target of criticism from consumer advocates who said its scope was too narrow, and from investment firms, who said it went too far. Others warned that the plan, by letting some stretched homeowners off the hook, could encourage more reckless borrowing in the future. Investors typically lose 40 percent or 50 percent on homes that go into foreclosure, and the cost of shielding borrowers from a big jump in rates can be much less than that.

“Tom Deutsch, deputy director of the American Securitization Forum, which represented investment funds in the negotiations, made it clear that any rate freeze would be strictly voluntary and based on what investors decided was in their self-interest. “This is not a government bailout program,” Mr. Deutsch said. “This is an industry-led framework for providing the best market standards and practices. There is no mandate here.” (Excerpts from On Mortgage Relief, Who Gains the Most? New York Times)

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