WARNING: Sub-Prime Loans

Ameriquest is full of hot air ...

It is indeed unfortunate that unsophisticated and trusting first time home buyers, often times with poor credit, have been placed in untenable loans by unscrupulous lenders. The most egregious offender and the nation's largest sub-prime lender, Ameriquest Mortgage Company, has agreed recently to pay $295 million in restitution to consumers and make sweeping reforms of practices that states allege amounted to predatory lending.

While driving home last Monday from Hattisburg, MS after visiting my son and daughter-in-law, I listened mesmerized to an NPR report about Ameriquest and their deceitful lending practices. It seems as if Ameriquest and its mortgage lenders knew no lie was too outrageous or promise too vague to tell in order to secure a loan. Borrowers who couldn't really afford the first month's mortgage at the time the loan docs were signed, quickly found themselves overwhelmed when their loans ballooned to unsustainable levels. Their next stop was usually bankruptcy and foreclosure.

Any loan officer at Ameriquest who didn't RUN from the company during training should have had their head examined. It seems that in some offices part of the training involved watching the film Boiler Room. Boiler Room was a forgettable film from 2000 in which to impress his father, a young man gets sucked into an unscrupulous stock brokerage firm. Eventually, he must sacrifice himself to bring down the company. The hero of this fictional brokerage company is the protagonist from yet another move featuring financial crooks, Gordon Gekko from Wall Street, who is famous for the line "Greed is good"!

Ameriquest's CEO Roland Arnall was recently appointed Ambassador to the Netherlands by the Bush Administration. Hmmm... Orchestrate a scheme by which 1000's of unsuspecting citizens lose their homes through foreclosure, become a billionaire in the process, give millions to politicians, and become a US Ambassador to the Netherlands. God Bless America!