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Day 13, Elizabeth Warren held hostage, pending the blockbuster career crushing expose that McMegan would like to write but at this point it’s not going very well and it is not like she is not getting any help from her friends (assholes!) at Reason who feel that, by providing her with unremunerated assistance, they run the risk of sanctioning their own victimhood.
So, like Dicken’s readers, we line the docks of the internet waiting for the promised next and final installment. Great expectations, indeed….
Meanwhile, the McSuedardles are buying a house but it is no fun because generations of poor stupid people messed things up for sophisticates such as, well, herself:
I’m pretty good with paperwork, and I understand all the terms being used (not to mention the laws being referenced), and I find it impossible to keep track of it all mentally–especially when you add in the tax returns, the W-2s, the bank statments and sworn certifications that all the money being used was legitimately earned or received as gifts. In fairness, we’re going through our credit union, which is apparently especially bureaucratic, but still–it’s very easy to develop a sort of attentional blindness and keep signing things. I requires heroic effort to read every document.
This illustrates, I think, the limits of transparency. Much of this paperwork is the product of earlier acts designed to help uninformed borrowers deal with the complexity of their loans. If you read and understand all of it, perhaps you do. But there’s so much of it that it’s relatively easier to overlook something.
You could simplify offerings–outlaw anything faintly exotic. Negative amortization loans, of course, and anything with a balloon payment–but many people got caught out by more ordinary ARMs, so maybe those should go too. The less martial version of this thought is embodied in the “plain vanilla” default option that Elizabeth Warren, among others, has been pushing.
But you quickly start harming more sophisticated homebuyers, or those with odd situations, in order to help the naive.
Word.
I feel the same way about childproof caps. Pushing and twisting at the same time just so little Cody won’t go into a coma?
Not fair.
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Paperwork is INTIMIDATING!!!
I requires a drink.
Megan, Megan…where to begin? “The limits of transparency”???? Is she truly so stupid that she thinks that ACORN/Freddie Mac/Fannie Mae were the real causes of the financial crisis? Or could it possibly have been, say, people who didn’t qualify for loans being given buckets of money to buy houses which were wildly overvalued, said mortgages then being bundled, sliced and diced, “securitized” and sold to even more suckers by Wall Street vampires? And who could have foreseen that the entire Ponzi scheme would collapse? Not our brave eco-blogger…but she just can’t understand why she has to read through a bunch of papers to buy a house now. Weak and simple-minded, as always. In a way I pity her.
Gee, I wonder if anyone in the course of explaining the mortgage crisis pointed out that some people took advantage of the fact that it’s “easy to overlook things” and put some nefarious things in the details of mortgages that ended up costing people their houses?
Yeah, I’m pretty sure they did. And if I recall, Megan’s explanation was the they just didn’t understand how awesome rich people are.
Ladies and gentlemen, the Business and Economics writer for the Atlantic.
It really is quite astounding.
Those are actually “Senior proof caps”.
Unless wingnut welfare counts as “legitimately earned,” I smell perjury. Oh wait, it says “gifts” too. Never mind.
This gets to the basic flaw of libertarianism in general. its very time consuming and basically impossible for any one individual to acquire and process every piece of information for every legal and economic decision we make every day. A simple trip to the grocery store would take months of research if it was left up to the individual to ascertain every detail of the quality, nutritional content, manufacturing guidelines, etc. of every item. If a large majority of the public is interested in similar information and similar safety and regulatory standards, doesn’t it make sense for them to pool their money together and have a public institution do that work for them? Heck, and this is ignoring the externalities like pollution by local factories that most of us don’t even bother think about since we don’t directly deal with those institutions.
The funny thing is that the basis for this argument against libertarianism is captured in the simple idea of “Asymmetric Information,” which, ironically, is the name of Ms. Jane Galt’s blog. In fact, a very large chunk of the economic conclusions she comes to are based on the idea that the assumption of perfect and symmetric information holds, when in reality, it rarely does. For a great number of her posts, all you have to do is say, “If you want to know why you’re wrong about this, look no further than the title of your own goddamn blog.”
Yes. This has been another installment of short answers….
Credit Union? Not very libertarian of her. Also, not sure if her “in fairness” refers to the fact that she’s applying to a credit union out of noblesse oblige, or just “in fairness” sort of forgiving their socialistic inefficiency.
Also, ahem, “in fairness,” I should point out that all those documents to which she refers have been required for RE loans for years and/or decades, and are not the result of recent post-financial-crisis regulatory requirements.
I have very sad news. Baby Tripp is not getting a legal Daddy after all. Bristol is quitting the engagement. Levi may have another “bun” in the oven. Or that could be misinformation.
Jebus, the maiden with the family background of intimidating academic brilliance feeling challenged by the paperwork of buying a house even though she understands all the terms being used and all the laws being referenced!
If she doesn’t tread carefully here, she might succumb to the danger of developing an inkling of empathy with the masses of mortals not blessed with her congenital intellectual firepower and her well-rounded education and arrive at the conclusion that this process might be prone to abuse.
Can our heroine save herself from that frightening possibility and preserve her immaculate libertarian innocence?
Oh and Megan, have somebody else do the numbers!
Numbers are hard even for an alleged economist. Why not hire an accountant to take care of these menial tasks and contribute to the reliable trickle down concept, for you see the accountant would take his money earned and buy beer cozies which in turn would cause a boom in business for beer cozy manufacturers creating an untold number of jobs. It’s really that simple.
SHE … IS … USING… A… CREDIT… UNION…
Har har haraharahrahar
I see–McArdle’s going to destroy Warren with hints and vague warnings.
Yeah, that jumped out at me too — using a credit union… in God’s own country of free enterprise and capitalism… isn’t that like sleeping with the enemy? What — First Amalgamated Bank of Exploitation & Extortion wouldn’t talk to you, Megan? Is your credit score really that bad? Maybe if you claimed to belong to some special needs minority (say, children of academics who inherited their parents’ shoe size instead of IQ) you’d get a special deal.
She’s gonna be even more puzzled by foreclosure. And divorce.
Suderman still hasn’t tagged her. Also.
I assume part 2 has not appeared yet?
I heard this woman on Marketplace last week – was astonished to hear her name after what sounded almost reasonable talking. I might have been fooled.
But, thanks to TBogg, I have read (gag) her writing. “I requires heroic effort to read every document.”
What, McMegan is writing in Ebonics now?
I can’t tell much difference between McArdle’s writing and that found in Kanye West’s original tweets.
Daddy not comfortable signing affadavits for that little wedding present, Megs?
You could simplify offerings–outlaw anything faintly exotic.
Um..that would be called “regulation”, Ms. McArdle.
The lack of self-awareness is stunning, yet somehow completely predictable.
I’m sure McMoron will dive right into the challenge of home ownership, by doing some boneheaded move like hiring “Joe the Plumber” to fix a faucet. The “after the deluge” column will be amusing.
McMegan is just whining because she really doesn’t understand any of it (we already have ample evidence of her level of reading comprehension) and she is getting writer’s cramp signing everything. don’t they know they are just supposed to take her word for everything and just fucking give her the house?
We have our mortgage at a CU, and they gave us a simple, one-page summary of all the terms and conditions that was remarkably easy to follow. Even though, yes, signing for a mortgage is a remarkably stressful thing to do. I guess Megan McSmartie hasn’t sussed out the right credit union yet.
Is it possible that Suderman hasn’t tagged her because she’s already foreclosed?
I requires update to my bachelor’s degree in English literature from the University of Pennsylvania.
I also requires update to my “before the age of 30″ bio snips. Evidently not being able to keep attention on a job for more than one year is a winning skill set at the New Atlantic.
And, of course, I find her lack of faith in the free market… disturbing…
This is good news for John McCain.
“I requires heroic effort to read every document.”
No. Just time and probably a magnifying glass. A heroic, nay, epic achievement would be you shutting your lying libertarian gob. And what’s this bitch doing using a credit union. Isn’t that socialistic or something?
P.S. Daddy’s buying the house. Or most of it. That Atlantic gig can’t pay well.
Beyond the libertarian schtick that everyone knows is hogwash, this woman is incredibly mean.
Sophisticated? HER? A dung beetle has more class.
Here, let me shorten that up for ya, Megs.
But you quickly start harming…those with odd situations like brain damage and sociopathy.
TBogg, if you ever retire from rattling the American wingnut cage aux folles, Canada could use you.
The infestation of wingnuts is getting bad up here.
REALLY BAD.
I was thinking the same thing — I recall the first time I ever bought a home, sometime around 1972, there were all those endless papers to sign. Just like there are now.
But Little Meg thinks everything that has just been discovered by her is somehow new to the rest of the world. What a pitiful twit she is.
Christ on a crutch, this is the Atlantic’s ECONOMICS EDITOR? What the FUCK is wrong with those morons???
So the harm is that it takes soooo loooong that it ties up “sophisticated homebuyers’” valuable time? How many billion pages does she conclude each person has to sign, on average?
X, it’s worse than that. IIRC a lot of people who qualified for a traditional mortgage were instead steered into the Ponzi mortgages (because the commissions were higher), which even they could not support when interest went up and values went down. With a normal mortgage they would have had a better chance. Let’s hope McMegan doesn’t get a McMortgage for her McMansion.
Let’s hope she does. It would serve her Mcright.
[SIGH] At times like this, just being the spawn of a family of intellectuals must be h*ll.
I don’t understand why she didn’t just fork over a few of her libertarian gold coins and accept a key from the squinty-eyed person claiming to be the owner. I’m guessing the bureacratic bastard insisted on biting the coins, so she retaliated by demanding to try the key and checking to insure that they actually got rid of the popcorn ceilings, and it escalated into a full blown nanny state exchange.
High-larious. Maybe when she was waiting in line to get the newest electronic gadget she should have been reading this.
Megan didn’t vote in 2008 because she forgot to register.
Her attempt to register a car involved more trouble than The African Queen
Did anybody expect the mortgage to go smoothly?
So…is she saying we should shoot all the lawyers? ‘Cause I could be down with that. If she just wants to free her beautiful mind up for other things then, well, we’re all supposed to accommodate the wealthy in whatever way we can, no?
They really ARE making buyers jump through more hoops now than they were a few years ago – I did a refinance when I remodeled and added on in 2002; then when the rates fell over a point from where I was early last year, I refinanced again, which brought the monthly payment down over $200. BIG difference. In 2002, I just had to present fairly minimal records even though I was borrowing through a reputable local mortgage company. In the refi last year, when I sent summary pages of investment accounts, etc, they came back and said, “no, we have to have EVERY PAGE of it.” And so on, all the way through. I’m guessing this is a response to the “liar loans” and other crap that was going on.
Still though, compared to when I first bought the house at the end of ’93, it was fairly simple. Back then you had to put down 10%, and thanks to having a different kind of work history (working several part time jobs rather than one full-time) than most, I had to get a co-signer. And also write out a big explanation about why the credit company that claimed I had not paid them on a timely basis (after paying over half the cost of a couch that took over 6 months to arrive, I finally said, “I’m not paying any more until I get my couch”) was full of shit.
As usual, McMegan has no clue what she’s talking about.
You people -made- me look, dint u?
“Or take the Mortgage Disclosure Improvement Act. My bank offers something called “freedom lock” which allows you to reset your rate lock if rates fall. However, thanks to the MDIA, you must lock seven days before closing, because you can’t do anything to the mortgage that changes the APR without giving the buyer seven days to review. Now, I don’t really need seven days to calculate my APR, but I can’t waive the provision, because otherwise, the naive would be too easily taken advantage of. So if rates fall next week, I’ll be stuck with a higher payment.
I don’t know that we’re striking the wrong balance; I don’t need a quarter point lower rate so badly that we should expose millions of unsophisticated homebuyers to danger of being cheated. What worries me is that there’s little recognition that we have to strike a balance–or for that matter, even that there are tradeoffs. Everything that ever disadvantaged someone is automatically assumed to be a terrible product feature that ought to be eliminated. That instinct is what most worries me about the new CFPA.”
This is the worst writer in the history of all writing. This is smudging.
What a disappointment after the rant on the fixed rate mortgage. When you drive to the train station for a train wreck, the segway going off the sidewalk is just not enough.
Excellent, excellent takedown of the libertarian fallacy. Megan thinks that, because she has a dictionary of financial terms, she “understands” all this stuff and how it works in real life. In fact, it’s the sheer accumulated weight of all this bullshit that runs people down, but Megan insists that any complication to the process that has its origin in government is an unforgivable abrogation of her rights as a free person, while any complication that’s a result of the financial industry that she worships trying to three-card monte its customers out of a few more bucks is “choice” and therefore good.
That’s why she hates Elizabeth Warren; she recognizes that Warren has this bizarre, inexplicable hoodoo called “empathy” that she doesn’t understand, is threatened by, and therefore must be banished along with its wielders.
God, this woman’s sheer oblivious self-righteousness! She sits there and observes that getting a mortgage is difficult and involves processing a ton of information that is confusing even for her, with her advanced degree and all goddamn day to decipher the paperwork, and what does she do with that observation? She convinces herself that it’s the fault of those other dummies who want to buy homes, with their damn regulations that are so unfair to “sophisticated” people like herself.
Dylan should have included a verse, How many times must some people be smacked by the clue stick before even they can’t deny reality any longer? Well, it would scan if he said it, but you get the idea.
“…especially when you add in the tax returns, the W-2s, the bank statments and sworn certifications that all the money being used was legitimately earned or received as gifts.” Yep, that’s just the kind of nightmare that financial regulation brings on. When the govt. forces risk back into lenders’ equations, they’re going to start requiring all kinds of crap like this. Don’t be surprised when they start checking i.d. and calling employers.
I think she has just written her own epitath.
Besides, what can we expect from the poor dear? Don’t you all remember, her calculator doesn’t do big numbers?
Wow, tax returns AND W-2s! How onerous.
Much of this paperwork is the product of earlier acts designed to help uninformed borrowers deal with the complexity of their loans.
How much, exactly? And how much is not actually required by government but by the lender? Does she really think lenders in her libertarian wonderland would require LESS documentation of ability to repay?
The final (for now) irony, or whatever it is, is that Megs feels she has to–or, out of vanity, wants to–share her personal experiences with us: the iPhone line. The pink salt. The gawd-help-us RECIPES. The “hey, this is HARD” mortgage travails.
Why? Who asked her? It’s a “blog”? So what? But I tie this to her libertarian narcissism. It would be a public service for someone to explain to the intelligent public this or that economic event as it happens. But this nitwit thinks she’s a PERSONALITY, whose private life is as interesting and significant as anything happening in the public sphere.
Of course, if she were a good prose stylist, then it w– Oh, never mind.
Bad person! You killed the Perfect & Costless Information Fairy!
I find it very amusing that she’s mad that the naive homebuyers made it so hard for the sophisticated homebuyers like herself to buy–after going on and and and on about how she just doesn’t understaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand. Wanker.
I recommend “The Idiot’s Guide to Buying or Selling a Home for Dummies”
Seriously. I used ‘em when buying direct from seller. I had to come up with all the same paperwork stuff she lists before the great naif’s buyin’ the farm swindle. Grow up, girl!
Can’t wait until she encounters the concept of having to pay a title company to research the title — for a refinancing!
The Bob Dylan reference in the title was spectacular, by the way.