Countrywide’s Ex Top Pigs Return to the Trough for Another Hit

from the inscrutable and laudable UppityWoman:

You remember Countrywide Financials don’t you? The King of subprime lending piggishness?

Stanford Kurland was their President and Second Banana to that other porky pig, CEO Angelo Mozilo, a guy you wanted to smack when you just looked at his smug overly-tanned face.

These are the two thieves, along with their top executives, who led the charge of “teaser rates” that ballooned on unsuspecting borrowers, facilitating the housing mortgage crash. These are also the guys who handed out VIP loans to certain members of Congress as well–also known as “Friends of Angelo”. And what friends they were! Countrywide was the sweetheart of Fannie Mae. Fannie Mae couldn’t stop writing glowing reports on how great Countrywide was while they cheerily cooperated by handing out subprime mortgages to people who could barely make payments before the variable rate hike hit them.

Birds of a feather bringing down America together.

Countrywide went down in shame, but its Chief Pigs didn’t go down in shame with Countrywide. No sir. It didn’t put a chink in their routine.

Kurland and some of his fellow Countrywide bilkers found a way to return to the trough like the slop pigs that they are–while the financial and housing sector they helped to tank crumbles around them. No problem for them though. First they handed out mortgages people couldn’t pay for. Next, they bought up a boatload of those mortgages for pennies on the dollar–and now they are pretending to be the Good Guys by “helping” to adjust the mortgages. It’s all in a day’s work for demons like these guys. They are now profiting from the very crisis they helped to create, and they are doing it off the backs of the taxpayers–with the government’s blessing. They even have the arrogance to call their venture PennyMac. Think about that one.

Stanford L. Kurland, Countrywide’s former president, and his team have been buying up delinquent home mortgages that the government took over from other failed banks, sometimes for pennies on the dollar. They get a piece of what they can collect.

“It has been very successful — very strong,” John Lawrence, the company’s head of loan servicing, told Mr. Kurland one recent morning in a glass-walled boardroom here at PennyMac’s spacious headquarters, opened last year in the same Los Angeles suburb where Countrywide once flourished.

“In fact, it’s off-the-charts good,” he told Mr. Kurland, who was leaning back comfortably in his leather boardroom chair, even as the financial markets in New York were plunging.

As hundreds of billions of dollars flow from Washington to jump-start the nation’s staggering banks, automakers and other industries, a new economy is emerging of businesses that hope to make money from the various government programs that make up the largest economic rescue in history.

They include big investors who are buying up failed banks taken over by the federal government and lobbyists. And there is PennyMac, led by Mr. Kurland, 56, once the soft-spoken No. 2 to Angelo R. Mozilo, the perpetually tanned former chief executive of Countrywide and its public face.

Here’s someone who sums these pigs up best.

But to some, it is disturbing to see former Countrywide executives in the industry again. “It is sort of like the arsonist who sets fire to the house and then buys up the charred remains and resells it,” said Margot Saunders, a lawyer with the National Consumer Law Center, which for years has sought to place limits on what it calls abusive lending practices by Countrywide and other companies.

There is something very obscene about all of this Double-Dipping while America crumbles. But do we see Congress upset about this? Have we heard a word from Congress on what these two guys are up to? Well ok, maybe we can’t expect to hear from their buddy of VIP Loan fame, Chris Dodd, but how about the rest of Congress?

:::Crickets:::