Steve Mnuchin is the Forrest Gump of the financial crisis — he managed to participate in all the worst practices on Wall Street
—Senator Elizabeth Warren, on his record of peddling financial toxic waste at the Vampire Squid, which he followed by running a bank (Indymac) which was the worst on foreclosure servicing in the nation.
Mnuchin is Trump’s nominee for Treasury Secretary.
Swing states
There appears to be an interesting correlation between rates of foreclosure and states where Hillary Clinton underperformed.
This is not a surprise. Tim Geithner admitted that all of the foreclosure aid programs were about helping the banks by screwing the ordinary people. as I’ve occasionally noted over the years:
I don’t expect anyone to really come up with the perfect explanation for why Clinton lost and Trump won the presidential election. But I do spend some time looking at these maps:
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I was involved, to a small degree, with homeowners, activists and lawmakers that tried to deal with the issues and problems in the foreclosure crisis, some of which is documented in David Dayen’s excellent new book, “Chain of Title“. As Dayen documents, the government response to the issues was ultimately terribly unsatisfying and at best, had the effect of sweeping the issue under the carpet.
The consequences of the government’s response played out in this presidential election.
Clinton was aware of the problems caused by the wave of foreclosures: last fall the NY Times reported that the campaign was frustrated that the crisis had displaced so many homeowners that their database of voters was disrupted. Perhaps this is why the campaign’s get out the vote efforts in Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota and other states were much less effective than the campaign had hoped for. Some reports were that up to [25%] of the voters the campaign contacted were actually Republicans or potential Trump voters. In fairness, Clinton was probably concerned about the economic plight of affected homeowners and communities than she was about the technological issues it caused, but that was hardly the dominant campaign message.
How much of an impact would a compassionate outreach have had on these neighborhoods? It’s also worth remembering that the people hit by the foreclosure crisis were generally middle class – prior to the crisis they owned homes, held jobs, were members of the community. Where were they by the time the 2016 election came around?
Certainly, it’s a complicated issue and made more complicated by the fact that the Obama Administration didn’t cover themselves in accolades during the mess.………
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Of course, it’s easy to second guess the campaign now. I, and many others, spend hours over several years trying to get the Obama Administration or state governments to improve their response to the foreclosure crisis. By 2016, many of the people I worked with back in 2011 to 2013 on housing issues were exhausted and frustrated. I can only imagine how the people living with the foreclosure crisis must have felt.
Still, a few thousand votes in three key states would have been enough to change the outcome of the election. And when you compare these maps, it’s hard not to see the lost opportunities.
In choosing between the banksters and their victims, Obama went with the banksters, and Hillary Clinton, with her close ties to Wall Street, was in a situation where the optics were particularly indefensible.
That’s according to a new study that shows that riders with African-American-sounding names are more likely to wait longer to be accepted for a ride or have their trip canceled than people with white-sounding names. The results are contained in a working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Researchers from MIT, Stanford University, and the University of Washington studied almost 1,500 rides on defined routes in both Seattle and Boston.
In the Seattle experiments, the researchers found that people with African-American-sounding names typically had to wait 29 seconds for an Uber acceptance and 23 seconds for a Lyft acceptance, compared to just 21 and 19 seconds respectively for riders with white-sounding names.
Results from the Boston experiments show more of a problem for Uber. Here, the researchers found that riders with African-American-sounding names had Uber rides cancelled 10.1 percent of the time, versus just 4.9 percent of the time for those with white-sounding names. Results for Lyft journeys actually showed a small skew in the opposite direction.
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Similar approaches have been posited by academics for adoption by Airbnb, which itself struggles with the issue of discrimination, as Edelman has shown in the past. But these kinds of services have been built on the use of information sharing as a means of building trust and creating a more efficient service (not that it always works). Any move away from that model will be a big step for Airbnb, Uber, or Lyft.
Still, it is a step that needs to be taken. “At Uber and Lyft, as at Airbnb in my findings, platform design all but invites service providers to discriminate,” says Edelman. “Consumers should demand more of these platforms—and so should regulators.”
The has been ongoing enforcement actions with regard to rental housing and taxis for decades, and the so-called “sharing economy” is predicated on the half baked idea that “because internet” we can do away with all those pesky regulations.
The world does not work that way, and has never worked that way.