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This Fall's Must Read: 'The Monster'

By Eric Lipman

"Exposes" of the subprime mortgage industry have been done before. But Public Citizen's Consumer Law & Policy Blog posted yesterday about a new book being released in a couple of weeks that sounds particularly juicy. And nauseating. The book is Michael W. Hudson's "The Monster: How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America -- and Spawned a Global Crisis." While I think the subtitle is a bit wordy, the excerpt available on publisher Macmillan's website has me ready to order a copy. The excerpt details the outright fraud and forgery witnessed by a former mortgage broker for Ameriquest at several of the company's offices. Selecting an excerpt from the excerpt was hard, because there are so many to choose from. Try this on: At companywide gatherings, Ameriquest's managers and sales reps loosened up with free alcohol and swapped tips for fooling borrowers and cooking up phony paperwork. What if a customer insisted he wanted a fixed-rate loan, but you could make more money by selling him an adjustable-rate one? No problem. Many Ameriquest salespeople learned to position a few fixed-rate loan documents at the top of the stack of paperwork to be signed by the borrower....

Full post as published by Legal Blog Watch on October 11, 2010 (boomark / email).