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Welcome to Cleveland, the sub-prime capital of America
Welcome to Cleveland, the sub-prime capital of America | the Daily Mail
By DAVID JONES
Last updated at 23:00pm on 21st March 2008
Driving into Slavic Village this week was a surreal experience. The clock appeared to have turned back to the years when this clapboard-built suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, was the proud preserve of migrant Polish and Czech steel-mill workers, and epitomised apple-pie American charm.
Through the haze of a winter blizzard, one could make out what appeared to be the brightly embroidered curtains and flowers on the windowsills. And from their porches, many of the home-owners seemed to be waving a neighbourly greeting at our passing car.
Pulling up at the kerbside, however, the reality came grimly into focus.
Behind the neat picket fences, the majority of these quaint, turn-of-the-century properties stood abandoned and dilapidated.
The curtains, flowers and smiling figures weren't real at all: they were simply murals that had been painted over slabs of hardboard nailed across their windows and doors.
"We've decorated more than 100 houses like this so far," explained my guide Marlane Weslian, a local development officer who has lived here for 38 years. "It's just something to help those few folks who still live here feel a little bit better about their street.
"It also makes people less inclined to break in, because at least these homes look as though they've been cared for. If you cruise past at 25mph, you might even think they're really inhabited. It's our way of making a statement."
In Slavic Village, these days, statements are pretty much all they have left.
For to the shame of its 34,000 residents, many descended from the community's fiercely hard-working Eastern European founders, this vandalised ghost-town is now recognised as the epicentre of America's sub-prime mortgage catastrophe, and thus of the whole "credit-crunch" crisis that has paralysed the world's financial markets.
As Britain teeters on the brink of full-blown recession, it is Cleveland, an unloved city on the shores of Lake Erie, that will be remembered as the Ground Zero of this financial meltdown.
Welcome to the sub-prime capital of America. The unwanted title was conferred after the discovery that during the second quarter of 2007, when the crisis first began, there were more high-risk mortgage foreclosures per capita here than anywhere in the United States.
And in recent weeks, all manner of damning statistics have emerged to confirm that while the seeds of sub-prime doom may have been sown on Wall Street, it was in this Mid-Western outpost that they first took root, and spread most virulently.
In 2007, for example, there were 17,000 foreclosures in Cleveland and its surrounding county, a conurbation roughly the size of Manchester; five years ago there were just a few hundred. During the first 11 weeks of 2008, there have been a further 3,132, sparking fears that this year will be the worst yet.
Moreover, though "sub-prime" has become a byword for misery from Nevada to New Jersey, nowhere is the devastation so visible as it is in this once-great industrial city.
Almost three years ago, I witnessed the aftermath of both Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in New Orleans, and it is no exaggeration to compare the scenes of desolation in Cleveland with the trail of destruction left by those awesome natural disasters.
Here in Slavic Village house after graffiti-strewn house has been wrecked beyond repair by vandals. Their gaping doors creak eerily in the wind, and they have been colonised by drug-dealers, feral gangs and teenage squatters.
Some have been daubed with the phone numbers of hawkish, out-of-state vendors who have snapped them up by the job-lot and are reselling them at jaw-droppingly low prices.
Once-handsome three-bedroom, detached houses worth £50,000 a year ago are today on offer for as little as £2,500.
So how did Cleveland get into this hideous mess which threatens to plunge America, and, with it, the wider world, into a depression unrivalled since the 1930s?
It's a question that can get you into trouble when the bourbon starts to flow in the city's famous blues bars, but the words you hear most are "greed", "corruption", "naivety" and "incompetence".
If Hollywood ever turns the sub-prime fiasco into a financial movie, one of the key locations might be "Kellogg's Doggs": a street corner hot-dog stand in Slavic Village.
Its owner is Mark Kellogg, a slick young black entrepreneur, who branched out from selling fast food to become a downmarket mortgage broker with an easy line in patter and an eye for the main chance.
For according to a damning report prepared by local councillor Tony Brancatelli, it is Kellogg, and others like him, who must take much of the blame for wrecking the neighbourhood.
Mr Brancatelli has handed his dossier to the FBI and he says angrily: "The only thing that will slow down this rampant robbery is putting people like him in jail."
For his part, Kellogg claims that he simply took maximum (and perfectly legal) advantage of the new Wall Street-created climate of easy-come, easy-go lending. But whoever is right, his story neatly encapsulates the genesis of the disaster.
A decade ago, when the mortgage market was opened up to America's disadvantaged masses (the poorly-paid or unemployed who would previously have been refused credit and lived in rented accommodation) lenders needed sharp men like Kellogg to push their new products.
Companies such as Argent Mortgage, who supplied 726 sub-prime loans in Slavic Village alone, almost half of which have since been foreclosed, welcomed the new brokers, even though many had scant experience or training.
Like old-fashioned street pedlars, these salesmen would go from door to door in poorer neighbourhoods, most of them occupied by Black or Hispanic families, offering to fix loans with no questions asked and no need for proof of earnings.
These mortgages became known as "liar loans", or "no-doc loans", because borrowers could simply invent a job and income to get the amount they needed.
Never having enjoyed the privilege of borrowing before, those who were lured with wild promises didn't think to read the small-print, which stated that the interest rate would start high, at, say, 9 per cent (back then, four points above the federal rate) - and soar ever higher, reaching as much as 13 or 14 per cent.
This week, I sat in on one of the four-times-weekly "group therapy" sessions for these hapless pawns at the Eastside Organisation Project (EOP), which helps sub-prime victims to fight back against the detested "sharks".
Among them were prison officer Andre Bogard, 40, and his wife, Kimberley, a 39-year-old teaching assistant. Having rented modestly all their married lives, they were persuaded in 2001 to move with their five children into a smart, £78,000 home of their own.
Waving aside Kimberley's poor credit record, their estate agent introduced them to a broker who fixed up a £68,000 mortgage.
At first, the £750 monthly payments seemed affordable on their combined salaries of £2,000 a month, but as first-time homeowners, they claim, they "didn't think" to check the terms, a refrain I heard often this week.
Had they done so, they would have seen that the interest was set at a whopping 11 per cent, more than twice the rate for regular mortgages to lower-risk families.
Worse, because they still could not afford to buy the property, even with the mortgage and a modest deposit of just £650, they also signed a promissory note - again (they say) without realising it - agreeing to pay the vendor the shortfall of £9,350 in instalments.
But this arrangement, which they have since been advised was illegal, increased their outgoings by £200 a month - which they could not afford.
"We stopped paying the seller his money, so he tried to take the property back and we had to file for bankruptcy," Kimblerley explained, as her husband gazed ahead blankly. "When we looked into it, we found out our mortgage had been sold on to a different company and we didn't even know where they were based. It's been a big mess.
"I heard lately that it's affecting you folks over in England and we're sorry. But they don't tell you what was really involved when they give you these loans. We just thought we were achieving the American dream of home- ownership. We'd never even heard of this word 'sub-prime'."
At least the Bogards seem likely to keep their smart, five-bedroom home - for now, at least. For that, they can thank the Eastside Project, who mix diplomacy with rather more direct action.
In one memorable protest, they sent two buses packed with angry sub-primers to picket the s****y home of Mike Garmone, a regional vice-president for their arch-enemy, Countrywide Financial Corp, America's biggest mortgage lender, which is now being investigated for fraud for its part in the sub-prime crisis.
Before leaving, they lambasted him through loud-hailers, leafleted his neighbours, and deposited hundreds of plastic model sharks across his manicured lawn.
"Nobody likes our tactics, which is precisely why we use them," says EOP director Mark Seifert.
Families such as the Bogards, for whom we should feel some sympathy, even if they were breathtakingly na've, represent typical sub-prime victims. However, the predatory brokers who exploited Slavic Village had bigger fish to fry.
Their game was to convince ordinary Joes, some of whom had never held down a steady job, much less run a business, that they could get rich quick by taking out not one, but many sub-prime loans, and starting buy-to-let businesses.
By chance, the old Polish and Czech district was perfect for such exploitation. Many of the old clapboard homes had fallen into disrepair; yet inflated property prices coupled with a new fashion for inner- city living had made them desirable again, rather like areas of London during the Eighties.
Spotting their opportunity, the sub-prime salesmen facilitated deals for small-scale investors under which the homes could be bought cheaply then given a lick of paint and put back on the market at four times the original price.
When prospective buyers baulked at the new prices for the renovated homes, they were advised to look at the prevailing economic trends. Property prices were on the up. And besides, they could always rent them out and sit back for a couple of years to reap a handsome profit.
Mark Kellogg - whose calling card bore the slogan "Where there's a will, there's a way, let's get you qualified today" - was by no means the only one to dabble in these murky waters.
According to Councillor Brancatelli, one young couple who became convinced they could reinvent themselves as a wealthy landlords, after meeting Kellogg three years ago, were Lakeisha Williams, 28, and her then-partner, Irving Johnson.
Loaded with credit card debt, Miss Williams was living in the U.S. equivalent of a council flat with her two children, and earned peanuts as a nursing home assistant. Johnson had no discernible job.
However, when Kellogg called to make his sales pitch, he spotted an old lawn-mower jutting from the boot of Johnson's car, and had a brainwave. "For the mortgage application he described Irving as a 'landscape gardener' on $70,000 a year," says the councillor.
Incredibly, though Johnson had a zero credit rating, this claim enabled the couple to buy 11 sizeable clapboard houses, financed with loans totalling $1million.
The mortgages came from four of America's biggest sub-prime lenders. (Today, all these companies have gone out of business: justifiable reward, one might think, for their shocking irresponsibility.)
"A few times I was rejected by the banks, but Kellogg always found somebody to borrow from," Ms Williams recalls.
Inevitably, the couple's property investment scheme started to go wrong almost immediately. The tenants to whom they rented out were themselves classic sub-prime material - often trashing the properties and falling into arrears with the rent.
Then the couple were hit with unplanned-for property tax, insurance demands and urgent repair bills they couldn't pay.
As quickly as it had arisen, their empire vanished. Today, the homes are boarded up and the homeless, bankrupt Ms Williams, who declines to say what became of Johnson, sleeps on her mother's threadbare sofa with her youngest daughter.
"I was a victim," she told me. "Kellogg was so convincing with his sweet-talk. I think he should go to jail because he's messed up a lot of people's lives, not just mine."
It is for the FBI to decide whether she gets her wish, of course. But there are many, many others like her, not just in Cleveland, but right across America. And since so many people are culpable in this scandal it is perhaps unfair to single out a handful of expedient small-time brokers as the sole culprits.
They were, after all, simply milking a deeply flawed system for all it was worth. No, the true architects of this disaster are to be found not in Cleveland, or other U.S. suburbs, but in Wall Street, where fat-cats sought ever more inventive ways of chasing profits.
Eager to cash in on the rapidly-expanding sub-prime market, they agreed to lend vast sums to mortgage companies, often borrowing billions from other banks in order to finance their schemes.
In normal circumstances, such massive loans would be secured against assests - in this case, the actual properties that individual mortgage-borrowers had bought.
But there was a problem. Because sub-prime mortgages are known to be vulnerable, with borrowers often unable to meet their repayments, some banks were loath to take on the risk.
For the Wall Street sharks, the way round this difficulty was to package sub-prime loans together with much more secure mortgages in one large "wholesale" parcel.
These packages were then traded on the global money markets, with banks from right across the world buying and selling them on again, often without checking (or caring about) the true nature of the sub-prime risks they contained.
While property prices were on the rise and the economy was thriving, this scarcely mattered. But when American house prices began to fall, and sub-prime homeowners began to default on their loans, the whole house of cards began to topple, and banks the world over were forced to confront the true nature of the liabilities they had taken on.
Given that high-risk borrowers now comprise 12.75 per cent of the entire $10,200 billion U.S. mortgage market, it is easy to see why almost no major bank has escaped the fall-out. And, of course, with the markets so volatile, few banks are now willing to risk further exposure by offering new loans to one another.
As a result, the flow of money on the global markets has dried up - the so-called "credit crunch". The result is the worst global banking crisis in decades.
As Britain, too, starts to share the pain of this sub-prime debacle, one would like to report that it has, at least, shamed the Land of Opportunity into a reappraisal of its skewed values.
Turning on my TV last night, however, I was greeted by a gushing "infomercial" by a slick-talking super-salesman called Russ Whitney, a former meat-packer who claims to have quickly amassed a multi-million fortune by wheeling and dealing in bargain basement real estate.
His latest wheeze holds seminars for investors on how to "profit from foreclosures" - advising them how to snap up sub-prime properties that have come back on to the market after being seized by the banks.
Even now, with the pillars of capitalism crumbling, it would seem America still hasn't learned her lesson.
Welcome to Cleveland, the sub-prime capital of America | the Daily Mail
By DAVID JONES
Last updated at 23:00pm on 21st March 2008
Driving into Slavic Village this week was a surreal experience. The clock appeared to have turned back to the years when this clapboard-built suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, was the proud preserve of migrant Polish and Czech steel-mill workers, and epitomised apple-pie American charm.
Through the haze of a winter blizzard, one could make out what appeared to be the brightly embroidered curtains and flowers on the windowsills. And from their porches, many of the home-owners seemed to be waving a neighbourly greeting at our passing car.
Pulling up at the kerbside, however, the reality came grimly into focus.
Behind the neat picket fences, the majority of these quaint, turn-of-the-century properties stood abandoned and dilapidated.
The curtains, flowers and smiling figures weren't real at all: they were simply murals that had been painted over slabs of hardboard nailed across their windows and doors.
"We've decorated more than 100 houses like this so far," explained my guide Marlane Weslian, a local development officer who has lived here for 38 years. "It's just something to help those few folks who still live here feel a little bit better about their street.
"It also makes people less inclined to break in, because at least these homes look as though they've been cared for. If you cruise past at 25mph, you might even think they're really inhabited. It's our way of making a statement."
In Slavic Village, these days, statements are pretty much all they have left.
For to the shame of its 34,000 residents, many descended from the community's fiercely hard-working Eastern European founders, this vandalised ghost-town is now recognised as the epicentre of America's sub-prime mortgage catastrophe, and thus of the whole "credit-crunch" crisis that has paralysed the world's financial markets.
As Britain teeters on the brink of full-blown recession, it is Cleveland, an unloved city on the shores of Lake Erie, that will be remembered as the Ground Zero of this financial meltdown.
Welcome to the sub-prime capital of America. The unwanted title was conferred after the discovery that during the second quarter of 2007, when the crisis first began, there were more high-risk mortgage foreclosures per capita here than anywhere in the United States.
And in recent weeks, all manner of damning statistics have emerged to confirm that while the seeds of sub-prime doom may have been sown on Wall Street, it was in this Mid-Western outpost that they first took root, and spread most virulently.
In 2007, for example, there were 17,000 foreclosures in Cleveland and its surrounding county, a conurbation roughly the size of Manchester; five years ago there were just a few hundred. During the first 11 weeks of 2008, there have been a further 3,132, sparking fears that this year will be the worst yet.
Moreover, though "sub-prime" has become a byword for misery from Nevada to New Jersey, nowhere is the devastation so visible as it is in this once-great industrial city.
Almost three years ago, I witnessed the aftermath of both Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in New Orleans, and it is no exaggeration to compare the scenes of desolation in Cleveland with the trail of destruction left by those awesome natural disasters.
Here in Slavic Village house after graffiti-strewn house has been wrecked beyond repair by vandals. Their gaping doors creak eerily in the wind, and they have been colonised by drug-dealers, feral gangs and teenage squatters.
Some have been daubed with the phone numbers of hawkish, out-of-state vendors who have snapped them up by the job-lot and are reselling them at jaw-droppingly low prices.
Once-handsome three-bedroom, detached houses worth £50,000 a year ago are today on offer for as little as £2,500.
So how did Cleveland get into this hideous mess which threatens to plunge America, and, with it, the wider world, into a depression unrivalled since the 1930s?
It's a question that can get you into trouble when the bourbon starts to flow in the city's famous blues bars, but the words you hear most are "greed", "corruption", "naivety" and "incompetence".
If Hollywood ever turns the sub-prime fiasco into a financial movie, one of the key locations might be "Kellogg's Doggs": a street corner hot-dog stand in Slavic Village.
Its owner is Mark Kellogg, a slick young black entrepreneur, who branched out from selling fast food to become a downmarket mortgage broker with an easy line in patter and an eye for the main chance.
For according to a damning report prepared by local councillor Tony Brancatelli, it is Kellogg, and others like him, who must take much of the blame for wrecking the neighbourhood.
Mr Brancatelli has handed his dossier to the FBI and he says angrily: "The only thing that will slow down this rampant robbery is putting people like him in jail."
For his part, Kellogg claims that he simply took maximum (and perfectly legal) advantage of the new Wall Street-created climate of easy-come, easy-go lending. But whoever is right, his story neatly encapsulates the genesis of the disaster.
A decade ago, when the mortgage market was opened up to America's disadvantaged masses (the poorly-paid or unemployed who would previously have been refused credit and lived in rented accommodation) lenders needed sharp men like Kellogg to push their new products.
Companies such as Argent Mortgage, who supplied 726 sub-prime loans in Slavic Village alone, almost half of which have since been foreclosed, welcomed the new brokers, even though many had scant experience or training.
Like old-fashioned street pedlars, these salesmen would go from door to door in poorer neighbourhoods, most of them occupied by Black or Hispanic families, offering to fix loans with no questions asked and no need for proof of earnings.
These mortgages became known as "liar loans", or "no-doc loans", because borrowers could simply invent a job and income to get the amount they needed.
Never having enjoyed the privilege of borrowing before, those who were lured with wild promises didn't think to read the small-print, which stated that the interest rate would start high, at, say, 9 per cent (back then, four points above the federal rate) - and soar ever higher, reaching as much as 13 or 14 per cent.
This week, I sat in on one of the four-times-weekly "group therapy" sessions for these hapless pawns at the Eastside Organisation Project (EOP), which helps sub-prime victims to fight back against the detested "sharks".
Among them were prison officer Andre Bogard, 40, and his wife, Kimberley, a 39-year-old teaching assistant. Having rented modestly all their married lives, they were persuaded in 2001 to move with their five children into a smart, £78,000 home of their own.
Waving aside Kimberley's poor credit record, their estate agent introduced them to a broker who fixed up a £68,000 mortgage.
At first, the £750 monthly payments seemed affordable on their combined salaries of £2,000 a month, but as first-time homeowners, they claim, they "didn't think" to check the terms, a refrain I heard often this week.
Had they done so, they would have seen that the interest was set at a whopping 11 per cent, more than twice the rate for regular mortgages to lower-risk families.
Worse, because they still could not afford to buy the property, even with the mortgage and a modest deposit of just £650, they also signed a promissory note - again (they say) without realising it - agreeing to pay the vendor the shortfall of £9,350 in instalments.
But this arrangement, which they have since been advised was illegal, increased their outgoings by £200 a month - which they could not afford.
"We stopped paying the seller his money, so he tried to take the property back and we had to file for bankruptcy," Kimblerley explained, as her husband gazed ahead blankly. "When we looked into it, we found out our mortgage had been sold on to a different company and we didn't even know where they were based. It's been a big mess.
"I heard lately that it's affecting you folks over in England and we're sorry. But they don't tell you what was really involved when they give you these loans. We just thought we were achieving the American dream of home- ownership. We'd never even heard of this word 'sub-prime'."
At least the Bogards seem likely to keep their smart, five-bedroom home - for now, at least. For that, they can thank the Eastside Project, who mix diplomacy with rather more direct action.
In one memorable protest, they sent two buses packed with angry sub-primers to picket the s****y home of Mike Garmone, a regional vice-president for their arch-enemy, Countrywide Financial Corp, America's biggest mortgage lender, which is now being investigated for fraud for its part in the sub-prime crisis.
Before leaving, they lambasted him through loud-hailers, leafleted his neighbours, and deposited hundreds of plastic model sharks across his manicured lawn.
"Nobody likes our tactics, which is precisely why we use them," says EOP director Mark Seifert.
Families such as the Bogards, for whom we should feel some sympathy, even if they were breathtakingly na've, represent typical sub-prime victims. However, the predatory brokers who exploited Slavic Village had bigger fish to fry.
Their game was to convince ordinary Joes, some of whom had never held down a steady job, much less run a business, that they could get rich quick by taking out not one, but many sub-prime loans, and starting buy-to-let businesses.
By chance, the old Polish and Czech district was perfect for such exploitation. Many of the old clapboard homes had fallen into disrepair; yet inflated property prices coupled with a new fashion for inner- city living had made them desirable again, rather like areas of London during the Eighties.
Spotting their opportunity, the sub-prime salesmen facilitated deals for small-scale investors under which the homes could be bought cheaply then given a lick of paint and put back on the market at four times the original price.
When prospective buyers baulked at the new prices for the renovated homes, they were advised to look at the prevailing economic trends. Property prices were on the up. And besides, they could always rent them out and sit back for a couple of years to reap a handsome profit.
Mark Kellogg - whose calling card bore the slogan "Where there's a will, there's a way, let's get you qualified today" - was by no means the only one to dabble in these murky waters.
According to Councillor Brancatelli, one young couple who became convinced they could reinvent themselves as a wealthy landlords, after meeting Kellogg three years ago, were Lakeisha Williams, 28, and her then-partner, Irving Johnson.
Loaded with credit card debt, Miss Williams was living in the U.S. equivalent of a council flat with her two children, and earned peanuts as a nursing home assistant. Johnson had no discernible job.
However, when Kellogg called to make his sales pitch, he spotted an old lawn-mower jutting from the boot of Johnson's car, and had a brainwave. "For the mortgage application he described Irving as a 'landscape gardener' on $70,000 a year," says the councillor.
Incredibly, though Johnson had a zero credit rating, this claim enabled the couple to buy 11 sizeable clapboard houses, financed with loans totalling $1million.
The mortgages came from four of America's biggest sub-prime lenders. (Today, all these companies have gone out of business: justifiable reward, one might think, for their shocking irresponsibility.)
"A few times I was rejected by the banks, but Kellogg always found somebody to borrow from," Ms Williams recalls.
Inevitably, the couple's property investment scheme started to go wrong almost immediately. The tenants to whom they rented out were themselves classic sub-prime material - often trashing the properties and falling into arrears with the rent.
Then the couple were hit with unplanned-for property tax, insurance demands and urgent repair bills they couldn't pay.
As quickly as it had arisen, their empire vanished. Today, the homes are boarded up and the homeless, bankrupt Ms Williams, who declines to say what became of Johnson, sleeps on her mother's threadbare sofa with her youngest daughter.
"I was a victim," she told me. "Kellogg was so convincing with his sweet-talk. I think he should go to jail because he's messed up a lot of people's lives, not just mine."
It is for the FBI to decide whether she gets her wish, of course. But there are many, many others like her, not just in Cleveland, but right across America. And since so many people are culpable in this scandal it is perhaps unfair to single out a handful of expedient small-time brokers as the sole culprits.
They were, after all, simply milking a deeply flawed system for all it was worth. No, the true architects of this disaster are to be found not in Cleveland, or other U.S. suburbs, but in Wall Street, where fat-cats sought ever more inventive ways of chasing profits.
Eager to cash in on the rapidly-expanding sub-prime market, they agreed to lend vast sums to mortgage companies, often borrowing billions from other banks in order to finance their schemes.
In normal circumstances, such massive loans would be secured against assests - in this case, the actual properties that individual mortgage-borrowers had bought.
But there was a problem. Because sub-prime mortgages are known to be vulnerable, with borrowers often unable to meet their repayments, some banks were loath to take on the risk.
For the Wall Street sharks, the way round this difficulty was to package sub-prime loans together with much more secure mortgages in one large "wholesale" parcel.
These packages were then traded on the global money markets, with banks from right across the world buying and selling them on again, often without checking (or caring about) the true nature of the sub-prime risks they contained.
While property prices were on the rise and the economy was thriving, this scarcely mattered. But when American house prices began to fall, and sub-prime homeowners began to default on their loans, the whole house of cards began to topple, and banks the world over were forced to confront the true nature of the liabilities they had taken on.
Given that high-risk borrowers now comprise 12.75 per cent of the entire $10,200 billion U.S. mortgage market, it is easy to see why almost no major bank has escaped the fall-out. And, of course, with the markets so volatile, few banks are now willing to risk further exposure by offering new loans to one another.
As a result, the flow of money on the global markets has dried up - the so-called "credit crunch". The result is the worst global banking crisis in decades.
As Britain, too, starts to share the pain of this sub-prime debacle, one would like to report that it has, at least, shamed the Land of Opportunity into a reappraisal of its skewed values.
Turning on my TV last night, however, I was greeted by a gushing "infomercial" by a slick-talking super-salesman called Russ Whitney, a former meat-packer who claims to have quickly amassed a multi-million fortune by wheeling and dealing in bargain basement real estate.
His latest wheeze holds seminars for investors on how to "profit from foreclosures" - advising them how to snap up sub-prime properties that have come back on to the market after being seized by the banks.
Even now, with the pillars of capitalism crumbling, it would seem America still hasn't learned her lesson.
