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Luke Ford
Lending Tree
Holidays Find Loan Crisis Spreading to Businesses and Neighbors
Other housing advocates asking the same questions have begun to look toward Wall Street for part of the answer. They note how investment banks made tidy profits and bonuses in recent years by scooping up batches of subprime loans to back lucrative securities. “They were telling lenders what kinds of loans to make,” said Kevin Connor, the author of a recent report on Wall Street’s role in the subprime crisis, sponsored by a coalition of housing advocacy groups. “They built this house of cards on the backs of homeowners.” Despite the losses taken by investments banks in recent months, housing advocates say that banking executives will still get their bonuses this year, and even chief executives who lost their jobs because of the mortgage losses walked away with multimillion-dollar severance packages. So some have proposed a new investment for Wall Street bonuses: an emergency fund that would help homeowners in distress.