While I'm in a ranting state of mind, I'd like to ask how many of you are seriously ready to demand that our credit laws be rolled back to what they were 10-15 years ago. Many of you are too young to remember when credit laws protected both creditor and the people who were promising to pay when the money is due. Believe it or not, it wasn't that long ago.
In the past 10 years, our "lawmakers" have caved to the wishes of large banks and big business to the point of handicapping all but the highest-income individuals in the U.S. They were busy passing laws that none of us "regular folks" had any idea were being passed. It was done very quietly. First, they changed the rating system. It seemed innocuous enough: instead of simply reporting our pluses & minuses and assigning a letter grade to each individual or couple, they wanted to use a numbered scoring system. What they didn't tell us was HOW the creditors would be reporting to the agencies and how harshly the agencies would be allowed to grade for any infraction or late payment. Or how the agencies would assign a value for each dollar of income, thereby making it impossible for *average* wage-earners to achieve a decent credit score. Forget the lower income families entirely: their scores would be so low that they wouldn't qualify for any form of credit.
Bankruptcy laws were changed so a bankruptcy would be reflected on a person's credit record for 10 years instead of the 7 years all other debts were allowed to be included in the calculation.
Then the frosting on the cake came into play: lenders were given free reign to charge whatever interest rate and fees they felt like charging (within VERY loose limits), based on whatever standards they decided to set for each level of a borrower's numeric credit score. Voila! The big-money boys ended up with virtually ALL of the power at their fingertips to make ridiculous amounts of money off borrowers and bleed us all as dry as possible. Thus, our credit scores would inevitably plummet, making us prime targets for the big-money boys once again.That cycle has been perpetuated until only a minuscule fraction of the citizens are able to get an interest rate that is even slightly affordable. Lawmakers finished throwing us to the wolves by taking all remaining borrower protections away.
And now everybody wonders how we got to the point of having this mess with all those sub-prime mortgages? Come on! I say we organize a revolt to demand that our borrower protections are reinstated. Anybody with me on this?
