B of A Reducing Loan Balances

While millions of Americans are foreclosing on their homes, Bank of America has stepped in by offering significant mortgage loan reductions—”the industry’s boldest move yet,” according to The Wall Street Journal. Struggling homeowners with subprime and other risky mortgages will be offered reductions as high as 30 percent on their loan principal. So far banks have been reluctant to reduce principal amid the financial crisis, instead offering lowered interest rates or extending the life of repayments. But these measures haven’t been enough to convince homeowners to hang on to their bum houses, which may never regain their purchase value. Bank of America’s approach reduces loan balances to the home’s current estimated value, and the bank estimates that at least 45,000 customers will qualify for the program.

Don’t ask questions! That’s negative!

Barbara Ehrenreich is an author of such books as The Hearts of Men which contended feminism ruined the nuclear family; Nickel and Dimed:  On (Not) Getting By in America, where she exposed the stupidity of the poor are poor because they refuse to work.  Her latest book, Bright-Sided:  How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, takes on optimism and positive thinking.  She says Americans are simply too damned cheerful, and she ties this to the mortgage crisis, our media, even our religion.

She says that although Americans stress positive thinking more than any other culture, happiness is elusive if you compare us to other countries.

In an interview with Megan Hustad, Ehrenreich said, “it relates to all this work we do to make ourselves be more positive. Positive thinking is imposed on people in a lot of settings. If you’re in the typical corporate workplace, you are exhorted to be positive. You’re told nobody wants to be around a negative person—which could mean somebody who just raises questions now and then, questions like ‘Isn’t our subprime exposure dangerously large here?’ People were fired for that in ’05 and ’07, right up until the end of the housing boom. You just could not say something like that.”