frank miller

[David Morris]

http://boingboing.net/2011/12/01/chase-exec-we-tricked-naive-b.html

An award-winning Chase vice-president has gone public with accusations
that his bank deliberately tricked naive borrowers into taking out
high-commission loans they could never pay back (his team wrote $2B in
loans during the subprime bubble), putting the lie to the narrative
that subprime was about greedy borrowers taking money they knew they
shouldn't.

One memory particularly troubles Theckston. He says that some account
executives earned a commission seven times higher from subprime loans,
rather than prime mortgages. So they looked for less savvy borrowers —
those with less education, without previous mortgage experience, or
without fluent English — and nudged them toward subprime loans.

These less savvy borrowers were disproportionately blacks and Latinos,
he said, and they ended up paying a higher rate so that they were more
likely to lose their homes. Senior executives seemed aware of this
racial mismatch, he recalled, and frantically tried to cover it up.

Theckston, who has a shelf full of awards that he won from Chase, such
as “sales manager of the year,” showed me his 2006 performance review.
It indicates that 60 percent of his evaluation depended on him
increasing high-risk loans.

In late 2008, when the mortgage market collapsed, Theckston and most
of his colleagues were laid off. He says he bears no animus toward
Chase, but he does think it is profoundly unfair that troubled banks
have been rescued while troubled homeowners have been evicted.