Winter of our discontent.

• Author: Walker, Dave
• Position: Letters to the Editor - Letter to the editor

"Homeowners Out in the Cold" (by Tram Nguyen, November issue) is a disgraceful reflection of what happens when the richest nation in the world is run by banks and Wall Street. While average Americans lose homes and investments, the banks have been making money.

Until someone in our shameful government grows a set and confronts these crooks, we the people will be beholden to the very industry that continues to ruin people's lives and, even worse, profits from it.

Dave Walker

via e-mail

Any efforts to find workable responses to the housing crisis are not furthered by the poor reporting and causal analysis found in Nguyen's article.

Nguyen starts with the assumption that homeowner-borrowers are always the victims, but she doesn't make a convincing case.

Berenice Ramos, we are told, lost her home in 2008. Her husband worked in construction and they moved to Antioch in 2003, buying a house in 2005. They had $40,000 for the down payment for a fixed rate mortgage, but a real estate broker (not a lender) convinced them to take out an adjustable rate mortgage. Wanting to "make more money" in a few years when they would refinance, the Ramoses went with an ARM. At some time, the Ramoses fell behind by two months, so they approached Washington Mutual for a modification. Negotiations continued for a year, during which time the Ramoses made six mortgage payments of $4,000 each. We are asked to believe that during this period between 2005 and 2008, while the Ramoses were delinquent on the mortgage, exhausting their credit cards to make six payments, they "poured about...