The Monster
How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America--and Spawned a Global Crisis
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The rotten core of deceit and fraud that precipitated the collapse of the subprime mortgage industry receives a thorough examination from Hudson (editor of Merchants of Misery), a former Wall Street Journal staff reporter. This lengthy appraisal unambiguously attributes the 2008 financial collapse to "schemes that preyed on the weak with the help of large financial institutions," tracing the roots of the toxic system to late 1980s Orange County, Calif., where Ameriquest founder Roland Arnall pushed his employees to sell dubious high-interest mortgages at a hectic pace, and fraud, forgery, and hidden fees locked borrowers into loans they couldn't afford. At a rival subprime lender, FAMCO, salesmen followed "The Track" and "The Monster," techniques that made it all but impossible for borrowers to get out of financially ruinous deals. As business grew, Wall Street figured out how to package these high-risk loans and make money on reselling them, even as the original borrowers defaulted. With crisp prose and a brisk narrative, Hudson reveals a culture of willful blindness, baldly predatory behavior, and evasion of responsibility.
