LOOK IN THE MIRROR DOUCHE BAG

BANZAI7 NEWS--NYT reports John Course-on, president and C.E.O. of the Mortgage Bankers Association and Douche Bag of the Year Wannabe, recently told The Wall Street Journal that homeowners who default on their mortgages should think about the “message” they will send to “their family, their kids,  their friends and other big debtors like Ben Bernanke.” Curse-on was implying that homeowners — record numbers of whom continue to default — have a responsibility to make good like AIG did (100%) with its Goldman Sachs derivative losses.

Businesses — in particular Wall Street banks — make such calculations routinely. Morgan Stanley recently decided to stop making payments on five San Francisco office buildings. A Morgan Stanley fund purchased the buildings at the height of the boom, and their value has plunged. Nobody has said Morgan Stanley is immoral — perhaps because no one assumed it was moral to begin with.

But the average American, as if sprung from some Franklinesque mythology, is supposed to honor his debts, or so says the mortgage industry as well as government officials. Former Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. declared that “any homeowner who can afford his mortgage payment but chooses to walk away from an underwater property is simply a nasty low down rotten speculator — and one who is not honoring his obligation and should be held fuly accountable!”

Paulson presumably was not so censorious of speculation during his 32-year career at Goldman Sachs and to underscore his point made shure that AIG was forced to pay Goldman Sachs 100% of its pound of bailout flesh.