Ex-CBO Staffer’s Warnings About Foreclosures Ignored

[girl gone mad]

Dr. Lan Pham, a former senior staffer financial economist for the Congressional Budget Office, was fired from the organization for her attempts to quantify the economic implications of foreclosures and foreclosure fraud. The CBO rejected her analysis and even dismissed the notion that foreclosures cause a negative hit to the economy. The letter, from February 2011, was just released publicly today.

Pham made the allegations in a letter to Charles Grassley, the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. She said that her time at CBO, which barely lasted 3 months, made her doubt the accepted view that the body gives non-partisan, dispassionate analysis of economic and budgetary issues. Alternative viewpoints are “suppressed” and “questioned,” often by CBO Director Doug Elmendorf, according to Pham.

Specifically, Pham wrote repeatedly about banking and mortgage issues in October 2010, when issues of foreclosure fraud and robo-signing were first coming to light in the mainstream. “I was repeatedly pressured by the CBO Assistant Director, Deborah Lucas, in charge of the Financial Analysis Division not to write nor discuss issues in the banking sector and mortgage markets that might suggest weakness in these sectors and their consequences on the economy and households,” Pham alleges. Lucas sought to keep Pham’s writing out of the assessments of economic growth that CBO makes, and to suppress any public writing about the impact of mass foreclosures and the housing collapse.

http://news.firedoglake.com/2012/03/16/ex-cbo-staffers-warnings-about-foreclosures-ignored

[Ruby the Liberal]

1. Thats pretty damning.

CBO is *supposed* to be above all of that.

Wow.

[girl gone mad]

2. She gave an interview to Zero Hedge.

If what she is saying is accurate, the CBO has been captured by Wall Street.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/terminated-cbo-whistleblower-shares-her-full-story-zero-hedge-exposes-deep-conflicts-impartial-

[Ruby the Liberal]

3. It gets a little weird at the end

but is she saying that they went through her house?

"Later, I came home to find some papers had been moved and could no longer find some important documents pertaining to this case."

[amandabeech]

4. Thank you for posting.

There appears to be little out there in the internets about this, but I agree with you that the capture of the CBO by Wall Street Group Think is truly frightening. I suppose, though, that having any faith in them at this point was like beliving in the Tooth Fairy.

I live in the DC area, but I have never been able to see myself staying in the same place long term, and, consequently, I have not purchased any real property. However, I look around me and see so many, many houses and condos that must have changed hands since the MERS mess started about ten years ago. There has been oodles of speculation, and many residences have flipped. If I were to purchase, which I can't see, I would not go near anything that has changed hands since the '90s, if that were possible.

As ZH points out, sorting through this mess could take decades, and perhaps a century (my view) because the banksters will put all their wealth into trying to prevent judicial sunlight from seeing as much of this muck as possible.

One of the problems will be the fact that most state court judges are elected, and must raise funds. The individual litigation on quiet title actions and foreclosures happen at the state level. Of course, there are states with non-judicial foreclosure, I can see that a quiet title action would raise considerable issues with respect to any buyers of foreclosed property, whether a court was involved in the foreclosre or not.

Although I am generally not a critic of big government, I sometimes wonder whether the smaller government types are right only because the government cannot seem to get control of itself against huge private interests. Perhaps we should pick the most important programs and guard them very carefully. That's hard to write in the face of incredible need, but all finance agencies are captured and the situation at the Mineral Management Service was utter irredeemable.

Again, thank you for posting.