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Keiser Report: Warren Buffett's Interest Rate Apartheid (E743)
- So the smiling curmudgeony Santa rosy cheeks, turns out to be the skeevy old slumlord, Mr. Potter after all......
[font size=3]Warren Buffett's mobile home empire preys on the poor[/font]
Billionaire profits at every step, from building to selling to high cost lending
Public Integrity & The Seattle Times
By Daniel Wagner Mike Baker
12:30 am, April 3, 2015 Updated: 8:57 pm, April 6, 2015
[font color=gray]Kirk and Denise Pitts purchased their mobile home in 1997. They still owe more than $39,000 on the home and land, which were valued at $33,100 in 2013. Here, the Pitts and their son, Caine, stand in front of their home in Knoxville, Tennessee. Daniel Wagner/Center for Public Integrity[/font]
Editor's note: This is a joint investigation of The Center for Public Integrity and The Seattle Times.
Denise Pitts walked into the pawn shop not far from where she bought her mobile home in Knoxville, Tennessee, and offered up her wedding rings for $100. Her marriage wasn’t over, but her husband was battling cancer and, Pitts said, her mortgage company told her the only way to keep a roof over his head would be to sell everything else.
Across the country in Ephrata, Washington, Kirk and Patricia Ackley sat down to close on a new mobile home, only to learn that the annual interest on their loan would be 12.5 percent rather than the 7 percent they said they had been promised. They went ahead because they had spent $11,000, most of their savings, to dig a foundation.
And near Bug Tussle, Alabama, Carol Carroll has been paying down her home for more than a decade but still owes nearly 90 percent of the sale price — and more than twice what the home is worth.
The families’ dealers and lenders went by different names — Luv Homes, Clayton Homes, Vanderbilt, 21st Mortgage. Yet the disastrous loans that threaten them with homelessness or the loss of family land stem from a single company: Clayton Homes, the nation’s biggest homebuilder, which is controlled by its second-richest man — Warren Buffett.
MORE
Billionaire profits at every step, from building to selling to high cost lending
Public Integrity & The Seattle Times
By Daniel Wagner Mike Baker
12:30 am, April 3, 2015 Updated: 8:57 pm, April 6, 2015
[font color=gray]Kirk and Denise Pitts purchased their mobile home in 1997. They still owe more than $39,000 on the home and land, which were valued at $33,100 in 2013. Here, the Pitts and their son, Caine, stand in front of their home in Knoxville, Tennessee. Daniel Wagner/Center for Public Integrity[/font]
Editor's note: This is a joint investigation of The Center for Public Integrity and The Seattle Times.
Denise Pitts walked into the pawn shop not far from where she bought her mobile home in Knoxville, Tennessee, and offered up her wedding rings for $100. Her marriage wasn’t over, but her husband was battling cancer and, Pitts said, her mortgage company told her the only way to keep a roof over his head would be to sell everything else.
Across the country in Ephrata, Washington, Kirk and Patricia Ackley sat down to close on a new mobile home, only to learn that the annual interest on their loan would be 12.5 percent rather than the 7 percent they said they had been promised. They went ahead because they had spent $11,000, most of their savings, to dig a foundation.
And near Bug Tussle, Alabama, Carol Carroll has been paying down her home for more than a decade but still owes nearly 90 percent of the sale price — and more than twice what the home is worth.
The families’ dealers and lenders went by different names — Luv Homes, Clayton Homes, Vanderbilt, 21st Mortgage. Yet the disastrous loans that threaten them with homelessness or the loss of family land stem from a single company: Clayton Homes, the nation’s biggest homebuilder, which is controlled by its second-richest man — Warren Buffett.
MORE
6 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
- He thinks she 
- It's reported as failing here in the US largely because of the threat it poses to the established monied interests. It was legitimized once a federal judge ruled it was a form of currency (for the purpose of legitimizing the seizing of it, of course).
Electronic money will be all the rage long as we don't let them take total control over the Internets. And since the banks use it too, that'll be difficult to do. It'll take time, but the collapse that's coming will open the doors wide.
