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2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: PSA: How many people here who love to hate "Wall Street" actually know what it means? [View all]RiverLover
(7,830 posts)29. Well stated. Here's an example of that~
......Over the last two years, private equity firms and hedge funds have amassed an unprecedented real estate empire, snapping up Spanish revivals in Phoenix, adobes in Los Angeles, Queen Anne Victorians in Atlanta, and brick-faced bungalows in Chicago. In total, Wall Street investors have bought more than 200,000 cheap, mostly foreclosed houses in some of the cities hardest hit by the economic meltdown. But they're not simply flipping these houses. Instead, they've started bundling some of them into a new kind of financial product that could blow up the housing market all over again.
No company has bought more houses than the Blackstone Group, one of the world's largest private equity firms. (Its many investments include Hilton Hotels, the Weather Channel, and SeaWorld. Among its institutional investors are Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, and JPMorgan Chase.) Through its subsidiary, Invitation Homes, Blackstone has picked up houses through local brokers, at foreclosure auctions, and in bulk purchases. Last April, it bought 1,400 houses in Atlanta in a single day. In Phoenix, some neighborhoods have a Blackstone-owned home on just about every block. As of November, Blackstone had acquired 40,000 houses, most of them foreclosures, worth $7.5 billion. Today, it is the largest owner of single-family rental homes in the nation.
Blackstone's deep pockets$248 billion in assets under management and a $3.6 billion credit line arranged by Deutsche Bank for buying housesallow it to outbid individual buyers, driving up local real estate prices and pushing families out of the market. "You can't compete with a company that's betting on speculative future value when they're playing with cash," says Alston. "Institutional investors are siphoning the wealth and the ability for wealth accumulation out of underserved communities," adds Henry Wade, cofounder of the Arizona Association of Real Estate Brokers.
But buying houses cheap and then waiting for them to appreciate isn't the only way Blackstone is making money on these deals. It wants your rent check, too. In November, after many months of hype, the firm released the first-ever rated bond backed by securitized rental payments........
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/01/blackstone-rental-homes-bundled-derivatives
This is just wrong, and we can count on Hillary and any other conservative to do nothing to curb it. Bill Clinton enabled it to begin with, after all. RWrs do what they do.
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PSA: How many people here who love to hate "Wall Street" actually know what it means? [View all]
hill2016
Nov 2015
OP
Yeah,it's a street in Manhattan that symbolizes wealth and greed. It's just a street.
virgogal
Nov 2015
#1
The best answer is here. It's not a simple "fraud" model. It's how the capitalistic world works
Sancho
Nov 2015
#19
Sanders voted for Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000, it aided in the finanical crisis.
Thinkingabout
Nov 2015
#60
Yes, please lecture us about how we don't know what we're talking about - that will win us over.
reformist2
Nov 2015
#15
Banks use our deposits to gamble with & we bail them out if they lose at the table.
RiverLover
Nov 2015
#16
Michael Lewis has written many good books on it. I suggest the OP read some of them.
Electric Monk
Nov 2015
#52
Are you supporting Clinton? Are you sure? have you checked? Check again. Are you still sure?
Scootaloo
Nov 2015
#55