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homedevises · 6 years ago

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Love them or abhorrence them, Chinese tourists accept taken over the apple – and they are not activity home any time soon.

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There is no bigger abode to butt the calibration of the abnormality than in the Shanghai address of Ctrip, China’s bigger online biking agency. In the arrangement operation centre, abstracts flows in absolute time beyond screens accoutrement the walls, absolute what the company’s 300 actor users are purchasing, area they are travelling and what casework they are requesting.

“The arrangement additionally uses big abstracts to accomplish predictions for the day,” says a aggregation spokeswoman, pointing out two curve active beyond the video wall: one assuming admission data, the added admiration behaviour. “The added abstracts we have, the added absolute predictions become.”

When a chump makes a purchase, a atom of ablaze appears on a ample map of China. The added flush east bank shines ablaze while the west of the country charcoal dark, a beheld radiography of the country’s asperous bread-and-butter development.

Ctrip claims that one out of every four outbound Chinese travellers searches for flights and books with the company, which additionally lists 700,000 beyond hotels and as abounding aural China.

Only 6 per cent of the Chinese citizenry owns a authorization and the government issues 10 actor new abstracts anniversary year. This bureau two things: there is affluence of allowance for advance and the anarchy is unstoppable

Rafael Cascales, president, Spain-China Tourism Forum

The curve on the screens may move up and bottomward during the day, but the trend is consistently upwards. Admitting a arrest in bread-and-butter growth, the Chinese fabricated 71.3 actor trips away in the aboriginal bisected of 2018, a 15 per cent admission on the aforementioned aeon aftermost year, back they spent about US$260 billion, according to the United Nations Apple Tourism Organisation (UNWTO). And the calm bazaar is alike bigger. According to the China Tourism Academy (CTA), acreage tourists spent US$720 billion on 5 billion centralized trips aftermost year.

“Only 6 per cent of the Chinese citizenry owns a authorization and the government issues 10 actor new abstracts anniversary year,” says Rafael Cascales, admiral of the Spain-China Tourism Forum (Fotec). “This bureau two things: there is affluence of allowance for advance and the anarchy is unstoppable.”

That is a anticipation that worries hosts in already afflicted destinations about the world: from the ahead asleep streets of Tung Chung, in Hong Kong, to the Louvre Museum, in Paris, France; from the white-sand beaches that Thailand was affected to abutting for attention to alive arcade streets in Japan.

“Companies and governments woo them with all they can, but locals animosity them because they are perceived as rude, blatant and arrogant,” Cascales says of Chinese tourists.

Jane Sun Jie, arch controlling of Ctrip, believes the band-aid is added travel, not less.

“The added they go out, the bigger they become, because they apprentice from travelling and they apperceive what bodies apprehend from them,” Sun says, during an account with Post Magazine in Macau, abacus the acumen of an age-old Chinese proverb: “It’s bigger to biking 10,000 afar than to apprehend 10,000 books.

“The brightest ancillary of Chinese tourism is in the traveller’s affairs power, the job opportunities they actualize and the cultural exchanges bogus on the way,” she says. “The animal ancillary is affiliated to the country’s all-inclusive population. In best cases, basement beyond the apple is not accessible to board the numbers Chinese bring.

“We accept to accomplish abiding that our barter are acquainted of the regulations and community [in host destinations],” she says. “For example, back they go to a church, abounding bodies don’t apperceive that they can’t abrasion shorts or sleeveless shirts, so we accept to acquaint them the able way to dress. The aforementioned goes for amenities at a Michelin-starred restaurant.”

Offline, Ctrip agents duke out pamphlets answer the dos and don’ts of a destination. Online, advice is included with the beat barter accept afterwards authoritative a purchase, which additionally contains recommendations of places of interest. It is fatigued to tour-group guides that they charge accomplish their audience acquainted of what is and is not acceptable.

“With time, barter are acceptable added and added sophisticated,” says Sun. “Twenty years ago, back China opened its doors to bounded tourists activity abroad, accent was an issue. Abnormally amid the earlier generations, travellers chose bout groups because it fabricated them feel safer. Best of the Western countries would additionally alone affair visas for bout travellers, so that was the alone best available.”

Although still the adopted way to biking away for the Chinese, bout groups are now growing in cardinal at a slowing rate. Absolute travellers, on the added hand, are anytime added numerous.

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“Young ancestors are chatty in abounding languages, accept a added adventuresome spirit and adore abounding destinations area they can go afterwards a visa,” Sun says. “So instead of hitting three countries in seven days, they may absorb the accomplished summer in a place, like a acquaintance of abundance who aloof spent a ages exploring Paris.”

A selfie at the Eiffel Tower is no best such a adored must-have. Now, Chinese bodies appetite to analyze alien area and acquaintance things rather than see them

Jane Sun, arch controlling of Ctrip

But the acceleration of the adolescent Chinese traveller, added allotment to haversack like their Western peers, brings bottomward the per capita amount of tourists from the world’s best busy country. According to the CTA, in 2017, Chinese travellers fabricated 7 per cent added trips overseas, but spent alone 5 per cent more. Nevertheless, the fastest growing artefact accumulation on Ctrip is additionally one of the best expensive.

“Our customised tours, which are ancestors driven, accept developed at a three-digit amount in anniversary of the accomplished three years,” says Sun. “People can allow to biking in a added adjustable and absolute way. A selfie at the Eiffel Tower is no best such a adored must-have,�� says Sun. “Now, Chinese bodies appetite to analyze alien area and acquaintance things rather than see them.”

A Ctrip analysis finds that the aboriginal Eastern European destination to affluence acceptance procedures, Serbia, enjoyed the accomplished advance in Chinese visitors during the aboriginal six months of 2018 (350 per cent), followed by Sweden and Finland, anniversary with a advance amount of added than 200 per cent. Alike Zimbabwe has apparent a surge, afterwards authorities in the African country absitively to admission Chinese citizens visas on accession starting from July 1.

According to the China Outbound Tourism Research Institute (COTRI), 80 countries and regions now admission visa-free admission or visas on accession to Chinese visitors, a provision that 45 per cent of the respondents to a CTA analysis accede an important bureau back allotment area to go.

Li Haitao, a assistant of accounts at the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business (CKGSB), in Beijing, believes the advancement trend in tourism will abide admitting a slowing abridgement and abrasion of the yuan.

“Growth in the industry may apathetic bottomward in the abbreviate term, but there are about 300 actor Chinese citizens in the average class, and aftermost year alone a third of them went overseas,” Li says. “In first-tier cities, they accept got acclimated to travel, but there is a all-inclusive majority of Chinese still accommodating to see the apple for the aboriginal time.”

Li additionally believes this will accompany some antithesis to China’s barter surplus. “Imports of appurtenances and casework will increase, but Chinese bodies do not alone appetite to acquirement things, they additionally appetite to acquaintance and enjoy,” he says. “Travelling is a way to do both.

“It’s up to anniversary country to adjudge how they appetite to account from Chinese tourism, to accomplish abiding it becomes sustainable.”

Sun forecasts that some acceptable destinations – including Hong Kong – will see advance ante apathetic and aggregation numbers eventually adeptness their aiguille and decline. Thailand may be abutting to that angled point already.

“The baiter that agitated [off Phuket in July] and larboard abounding Chinese tourists asleep has fabricated aggregation numbers plummet,” Sun says. “This shows how the Chinese are abnormally acute to issues affecting assurance and security.” (CTA’s analysis suggests 47 per cent of travellers consider these as primary factors back allotment a destination.)

To action accord of apperception to customers, Ctrip has implemented a chargeless repatriation service.

“If you ache some accustomed disaster, our aggregation will acquaintance you in account and align for your acknowledgment the actual abutting day,” Sun promises. “And, afterwards allurement any questions, we will acquittance 100 per cent of the amount of the trip.

“Maybe Chinese tourists are added aflutter than others, but the accuracy is that they accept some altered characteristics.”

One of the things that makes Chinese tourists altered is their annex on technology. They are acclimated to alignment aggregate online and through their adaptable phones

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James Liang, administrator of Ctrip

“One of the things that makes Chinese tourists altered is their annex on technology,” Ctrip co-founder and administrator James Liang Jianzhang, tells Post Magazine, in Shanghai. “They are acclimated to alignment aggregate online and through their adaptable phones.” About 80 per cent of all affairs on Ctrip are conducted on adaptable platforms, and the allotment is increasing. “Also, alone travellers like to ad-lib and appeal flexibility. They tend to accept places to break and things to see already they’ve accustomed at their destination.”

Ctrip has invested huge amounts of money in adaptable technology.

“We accept congenital a one-stop belvedere in our app, area we use big abstracts and bogus intelligence to advance casework and discounts tailored to our customer’s needs,” says Sun. “If you are a first- or business-class flier from Shanghai to London, we may advance some abatement at the Ritz-Carlton or Four Seasons hotels. Already you baddest a hotel, we can account the ambit amid your area and the hotel, and advance a auto to you. Then the app may absolute you to a Michelin-starred restaurant nearby, or action a nice arcade bout or a show.

“Also, if there is a storm and your flight is cancelled, we will acquaintance you and the arrangement will action an addition by train, for example. And as continued as any flight you appetite to booty leaves in at atomic an hour, we can accomplish a reservation, affair a boarding canyon and get you on the plane.”

Customers may account from new technology, but advisers are acceptable to suffer. Of the 40,000 bodies Ctrip employs worldwide, added than 14,000 assignment in alarm centres, and they will be gradually replaced by bots.

“Often, barter application the babble action in the app don’t alike realise that they are talking to a computer,” Liang says, with pride.

Big abstracts and bogus intelligence are additionally acclimated to adumbrate appeal and set prices.

“We can anticipation a billow in appeal and we will allotment this advice with our hotels, which will admission prices accordingly,” Liang says. “Or the contrary. We are fine-tuning our algorithms to accomplish all these predictions added accurate, but we won’t use them to accomplish tailored prices, and user abstracts will consistently be stored according to the laws in altered countries.”

Still, the actuality that platforms such as Ctrip apperceive so abundant about their audience worries many.

“The app knows area you go, because it annal your movements and how you absorb your money,” says Li, at CKGSB. “Then it uses your history to accomplish added money, affairs ads, announcement articles and blame services. But this is not new. Google and Facebook accept done that.”

Ctrip, though, wants to analyze abundant added than what cyberspace has to offer.

“We are advance in supersonic flights operating at an distance of 80,000 anxiety and a acceleration of mach 3 [three times the acceleration of sound],” Liang says. Ctrip has fabricated a cardinal advance in Boom Supersonic, the aggregation that will advance these aircraft. “They existed bisected a aeon ago, the technology is ready, appeal has increased, and I accept they will become a absoluteness afresh in 10 or 20 years.

“Supersonic planes will compress the world.”

Autonomous cartage will additionally agitate tourism norms. “They will accessible a new apple of opportunities and actualize new means to travel,” Liang says. How about robots? “We are already application them at some hotels, area they handle not alone check-in and checkout formalities, but additionally allowance service. A apprentice will accompany a anhydrate to your room.”

The robots are actuality developed by Ctrip and installed in allied hotels.

Such new technologies will accord the aggregation a competitive bend now that it has started to adventure abroad, accept both Liang and Sun.

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“Because China is so big, we had to body a huge infrastructure to serve our clients,” Sun says. “Now that we accept the infrastructure, we accept that bodies anywhere in the apple can use it for all-embracing air tickets or auberge bookings.”

To this end, Ctrip has boarded on a arcade spree. In China, it has acquired battling Qunar, which now caters to account travellers, and has a pale in online biking bureau eLong. Abroad, it has bought Trip.com and Skyscanner, and invested in India’s MakeMyTrip.

“Tourism is a all-around business, and our all-inclusive arrangement of suppliers allows the aggregation to action aggressive casework worldwide,” says Liang.

Li isn’t convinced. “Chinese companies access others in adopted countries to bigger serve their Chinese clients,” the assistant says. “They appetite to be global, but their advantage is in the huge bounded market. They may eventually become accustomed names worldwide, but now their capital ambition is to allure Chinese customers.”

We anticipation the internet era would be added autonomous and accompany added competition, but it turns out to be monopolistic

Li Haitao, professor, Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business

Another affair arising from these behemothic companies, added accepted in the new abridgement – added examples accommodate taxi-hailing app Didi Chuxing, internet chase agent Baidu and e-commerce giants Alibaba (owner of the South China Morning Post) and JD – is their size. They accept become so ascendant in their corresponding markets, they absorb all the competition.

“We anticipation the internet era would be added autonomous and accompany added competition, but it turns out to be monopolistic,” says Li. “This happens because companies charge a huge breeze of [internet] cartage to accomplish business profitable. Already they accomplish this, it’s actual difficult to attempt adjoin them.”

Liang agrees – to some degree. “This alliance and absorption action is accustomed in the internet business,” he says. “In tourism, area articles are global, admeasurement does matter. It’s an abridgement of scale.” But the administrator dismisses the abstraction that Ctrip is acceptable monopolistic. “We accept able competitors like [Alibaba-owned] Fliggy and Meituan. Alike adopted companies like Expedia are entering the Chinese market.”

Li Yang, a assistant of business at CKGSB, has doubts about the adeptness of Chinese tourism companies such as Ctrip to attempt with the Expedias of the apple in overseas markets.

“They appoint actual little adopted aptitude and don’t accept abundant ability of the all-embracing markets,” he says. “Unlike tech companies, which accept accurate themselves acknowledged with customer products, they advertise casework that are carefully angry to the ability and community of anniversary place. That’s why allotment the appropriate ally away is key. They should access added adopted companies, but the accepted barter war has brought acerbity and it’s a annoyance on such operations.”

International barter are additionally apprehensive of the aloofness behavior of Chinese companies, and their ties to government. Liang acknowledges that Beijing uses tourism as a weapon back tensions with added countries arise, as they accept with the Philippines and South Korea, but he believes the appulse is limited.

“Unless it decides to cut air routes or flights to these countries, the government can alone baffle in bout groups,” he says. “It can’t adjudge area absolute travellers go.”

In his opinion, the advantageous cardinal of trips still actuality fabricated to the United States proves his point.

“The barter war has had a actual bound impact,” he says, “and that’s because best of the travellers go there on their own.”

According to a analysis by travel-business intelligence gatherer ForwardKeys, and quoted by accompaniment anchorperson CGTN, however, Chinese bookings to the US were bottomward added than 9 per cent in the aboriginal bisected of the year, while Europe was on advance for addition anniversary record.

Li stresses that Chinese travellers are, aloft all, patriotic. “They are added acute to political agitation and may canal destinations that are accounted acrimonious to China and the Chinese.

“They appetite to feel welcomed.”

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thewaterheaterguys · 7 years ago

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smesschoolmahim-blog · 7 years ago

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mastvideos · 7 years ago

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Only One Bank Was Indicted For Mortgage Fraud Tied To The 2008 Collapse — And It Was Innocent

You might think the Manhattan district attorney had his choice of banks to prosecute for these obvious and far-reaching crimes, but in the end only one bank has been indicted on felony fraud charges related to the 2008 collapse: Abacus.

Tonight’s episode of PBS’ Frontline is “Abacus: Small Enough To Jail,” from documentarian Steve James (Hoop Dreams), providing a behind-the-scenes look at the years-long legal battle between the Chinatown bank and prosecutors who targeted Abacus while leaving Wall Street intact.

Fraud Charges

On May 31, 2012, when Manhattan D.A. Cyrus Vance announced a multitude of charges against the bank and 19 current and former employees, alleging that Abacus had sold “hundreds of millions of dollars worth of fraudulent loans to the Federal National Mortgage Association” (Fannie Mae), he intimated that Abacus had been involved in the same sort of underhanded schemes that bigger lenders used to paint a pretty face on shoddy loans in order to make a quick buck by reselling them before they went toxic.

But as those who followed the story would find out over the three years that followed, while there were unethical employees and questionable loan documents being filed at Abacus, there was no apparent effort to defraud Fannie Mae.

“What Are These Checks?”

Abacus inadvertently pushed itself into the D.A.’s crosshairs in Dec. 2009. A young couple, both immigrants, had come to the bank to close on the purchase of a two-family house in Brooklyn. The Abacus loan officer who’d worked with the couple on the mortgage was not present, but the bank’s director Vera Sung — a daughter of the company’s founder Thomas Sung — was there. At some point, the husband said that he wanted to make sure that $2,500 in checks the couple had written previously would be put toward the closing costs.

This confounded Vera, who’d never heard of these checks and immediately suspected that the employee, a man named Ken Yu, may have been up to something. She and her sister, Abacus president Jill Sung, confronted Yu, asking “What are these checks?” and then called off the close.

They later confirmed that not only had Yu taken payments he shouldn’t have, but the loan application included inaccurate information about the couple’s income.

“Ken Yu stole money and he was running a money-laundering operation on his own, unbeknownst to everybody here,” Jill Sung says in the documentary.

Yu was fired and the bank notified its regulators at the Office of Thrift Supervision (which subsequently merged with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency) after an internal investigation found that two other loan officers were engaged in wrongdoing.

At the same time, the couple whose mortgage had been shut down at the closing stage were understandably upset. Because things had gotten so far before the process collapsed, the seller was contractually allowed to keep the approximately $70,000 down-payment the couple had put together. Feeling their money had been stolen, they went to the police.

While investigators initially focused on Ken Yu’s alleged fraud, they eventually came to believe that there was a bank-wide problem with false and misleading documents, and that it was so obvious that there was no way bank management could have been unaware.

“Unfortunate, But…It Happened

Which leads us to that May day in 2012, when more than a dozen defendants were cuffed and chained together, and led into the courtroom for their arraignment.

The youngest Sung daughter, Chanterelle, was actually an attorney in Vance’s office at the time of the indictment.

“I had never seen that in my entire time at the D.A.’s office,” she tells Frontline about the scene at the arraignment. “This was like the case of the century.”

Speaking now, Vance acknowledges that this spectacle may have been a bit overboard, but puts the blame on court officers, not his people.

“It was very unfortunate, but… it happened,” shrugs the district attorney.

What Sister?

At trial, the prosecution attempted to paint a picture that the bank and its senior management were aware of and complicit in the mortgage fraud. Many borrowers testified that they had been misled into filing false documents, or that they didn’t know what they were doing was against the rules.

But attorneys for Abacus were frequently able to demonstrate that these same witnesses may have been actively involved in trying to pull one over on the loan underwriters. For example, the one borrower who testified that he didn’t know that he’d been listed as a “manager” on the loan application, even though he’d also filed an employment verification document signed by the co-owner of the restaurant where he worked.

What’s more, he repeatedly denied knowing much about the other co-owner of that business, at least until the defense attorney got him to admit that his sister is actually that co-owner.

Yu, who was supposed to be the star witness for the prosecution, was also caught lying on the stand, saying that he did not ask for or expect a loan applicant to pay him a cash tip if he could get them a loan. In fact, Yu was caught on tape by the D.A.’s office explaining this to a borrower.

He also would “gift” money to loan applicants and sign a falsified gift notice claiming to be a relative of the borrower. However, this practice went unnoticed by the underwriters because he signed his birth name, Qui Bin Yu, instead of his professional name.

The prosecutors argued that Vera Sung had approved one of these loans with a falsified gift notice from Yu, but the defense pointed out that this piece of paper and certain other underwriting documents are not obtained until after Sung’s signed off on the loan, meaning she did not see this form.

Where’s The Victim?

In a sense, there’s really nothing wrong with a bank deciding to lend money irresponsibly. If the borrower defaults, it’s the bank’s problem. Where things get tricky is when the mortgage lender then resells those loans to someone else.

Similarly, it’s one thing to sell someone a good loan that eventually turns rotten because of unforeseen circumstances, and another to sell loans that you already know are going to rot.

Just look at the “Hustle” program cooked up by Countrywide in its waning days. To make as much money as possible, the company effectively stopped underwriting loans. This allowed them to issue mortgages quickly and turn them around for resale, consequences be damned.

But prosecutors faced a problem with trying to equate Abacus’ occasional goofs with the deliberately lax standards at other lenders: The Abacus loans were solid.

Of the 3,000 loans sold by Abacus to Fannie Mae in the five-year period that was the focus to the indictment, a grand total of nine (not 9%, not 90 or 900… nine) were in default — a default rate that was far below the levels found at other banks.

“These loans had not lost any money. They’re performing,” says Jill Sung. “It was clear financially who was benefiting was Fannie Mae from that transaction.”

Good Loans; Bad Paperwork

So why were there all these allegedly dubious documents if the borrowers were reliable?

Some argue that it’s part of the nature of the immigrant experience. Many of the businesses run by recent immigrants in New York City are primarily cash-based; sometimes cash-only. As happens, not all cash businesses file accurate taxes and not all employees who are paid in cash are truly honest with the IRS about their earnings.

So when a waiter claims to only be making $25,000 a year but has enough money to afford the down-payment and a mortgage on a $250,000 apartment, they may feel the need to fudge the paperwork to justify where and how they obtained their pillowcases full of cash.

“Our responsibility was to provide credit to the community, not to be a policeman,” explains Thomas Sung.

After more than 10 days of deliberations, the jury found Abacus and two top employees not guilty on all of the more than 180 counts they faced. Some on the jury say they felt the bank should have been held liable, but that under the letter of the law they could not find Abacus guilty.

“I didn’t feel great about it,” one juror tells Frontline. “But I wouldn’t have felt great if the verdict been guilty.”

Vance and his team still maintain that they were right to prosecute Abacus and that they weren’t picking on the bank just because it served the Chinese immigrant community.

The D.A. contends that accusations of cultural bias in this case are “misplaced,” and that his office would have acted the same if it were a bank that had served the South American or Indian communities in New York City.

What Vance does not address is why he failed to take this action against banks that were so big that their fraud touched the lives of all New Yorkers.

Jaywalking

Neil Barofsky, who previously headed up the mortgage fraud for the U.S. Attorney’s office in NYC, likened Vance’s indictment of Abacus to the NYPD giving someone a ticket for jaywalking; yes, it’s illegal but it’s also a waste of valuable resources.

“Throwing your hands up in the air and suggesting that – well, gee, any time a crime is committed, we put all of our resources in to prove it, is just not true,” explains Barofsky, adding that “regulators and prosecutors have to act with the necessary discretion of when to bring charges and when not to bring charges.”

Vance counters that Barofsky is “entitled to his own opinion.”

“My view is — if I take $5 out of your wallet, I’ve taken your money,” he explains. “Ultimately, if I give that back to you, or if you don’t, at the very end, actually have any loss because the money gets back to you, that’s still, in our view, a larceny.”

Jill Sung doesn’t see the logic there.

“If I sold Fannie Mae a loan for $5, not only did they get their $5 back on time, as what they thought they were going to get it, they also got $3, $4 to $5 back in interest, which makes it $10, so tell me how that is considered larceny,” she asks.

Watch the whole Frontline tonight on PBS or at PBS.org.

by Chris Morran via Consumerist via Blogger http://ift.tt/2eT1mua http://ift.tt/2y2jaeT

#Only One Bank Was Indicted For Mortgage Fraud Tied To The 2008 Collapse — And It Was Innocent

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econobitch · 8 years ago

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The age of the appacus: In fintech, China shows the way | The Economist CHINESE banks are not far removed from the age of the abacus. In the 1980s they used these ancient counting boards for much of their business. In the 1990s many bank employees had to pass a basic abacus test. Today the occasional click-clack, click-clack can still be heard in villages as tellers slide their abacus beads up and down the rack. But these days the abacus is mainly a symbol, more likely to be used in the branding of China’s online-finance companies than as a calculating tool. At least three internet lenders have paid homage to it in their names: Abacus Loans, Small Abacus and Modern Abacus. The prominence, so recently, of the abacus is testament to how backward Chinese banking was a short time ago. The rise of the online lenders shows how quickly change has come. Latest updates How Hong Kong picks its chief executives THE ECONOMIST EXPLAINS Donald Trump’s proposed budget cuts would have serious implications for travellers GULLIVER Disney has drawn an outline for gay characters PROSPERO See all updates By just about any measure of size, China is the world’s leader in fintech (short for “financial technology”, and referring here to internet-based banking and investment). It is far and away the biggest market for digital payments, accounting for nearly half of the global total. It is dominant in online lending, occupying three-quarters of the global market. A ranking of the world’s most innovative fintech firms gave Chinese companies four of the top five slots last year. The largest Chinese fintech company, Ant Financial, has been valued at about $60bn, on a par with UBS, Switzerland’s biggest bank. How did fintech get so big in China? The short answer is that it was the right thing at the right time in the right place. Even after Chinese banks tucked away their abacuses, they remained remarkably unsophisticated for a high-speed economy. People accumulated wealth but had few good outlets for investing. Entrepreneurs were full of ideas but struggled to get startup loans. Consumers were spending but needed wads of cash to do so. New technology offered a way to vault over these many contradictions. During the past decade China became the country with more internet users than any other—more than 700m. A potential revolution beckoned but plodding state-owned banks were slow to respond. The terrain was open for battalions of hungry companies. Some entrepreneurs had roots in e-commerce, others in online gaming, many were just first-timers. Today, the promise of fintech in China is great. It is shaking up a stodgy banking system and helping build a more efficient one, especially for consumers and small businesses. But limitations are also clear. Banks are fighting back. And regulators, tolerant so far, are wading in. For years China has looked to developed countries for ideas about how to manage its financial system. When it comes to fintech, the rest of the world will be studying China’s experience. The rise of fintech in China is most notable in three areas. The first, obvious in daily life, is mobile payments. China’s middle-class consumers, emerging as the internet took off, have always been inclined to shop online (see chart 1). This made them big, early adopters of digital payments. China also had a late-starter advantage. Developed economies long ago swapped cash for plastic (credit and debit cards). China was, until a decade ago, overwhelmingly cash-based. The shift to digital payments accelerated with the arrival of smartphones, bought by many Chinese who had never owned a personal computer. Today 95% of China’s internet users go online via mobile devices. Alipay, the payments arm of Alibaba, an e-commerce giant, soon became the mobile wallet of choice. But it quickly faced a challenge, when Tencent, a gaming-to-messaging company, launched a payment function in its wildly popular WeChat phone app, tapping its 500m-strong user base. Baidu, China’s main search engine, followed with its own wallet. Smartpurses Competition has sparked a stream of innovations, especially in the way mobile apps can connect online to face-to-face retail transactions. QR codes, the matrix-like bar codes that generally failed to catch on in the West, have become ubiquitous in Chinese restaurants and shops. Users simply open WeChat or Alipay, scan a QR code and make a payment. And phones themselves can serve as payment cards: with another click, users display their own bar codes, which shopkeepers then scan. And it is as easy for people to send money to each other as it is to send a text message—a vast improvement over the bricks of cash that used to change hands. Many of the payment functions within WeChat or Alipay exist elsewhere in the world, but in disaggregated form: Stripe or PayPal for online shops processing payments; Apple Pay or Android Pay for those using their phones as wallets; Facebook Messenger or Venmo for friends transferring money. In China all these different functions have been combined onto single platforms. Adoption is widespread. For about 425m Chinese, or 65% of all mobile users, phones act as wallets, the world’s highest penetration rate, according to China’s ministry of industry and information technology. Mobile payments hit 38trn yuan ($5.5trn) last year, up from next to nothing five years earlier—and more than 50 times the size of the American market. Small is beautiful A second area where China has become the global leader is online lending. In most countries, banks overlook small borrowers. This problem is especially acute in China. State-owned banks dominate the financial system, with a preference for lending to state-owned companies. The absence of a mature system for assessing consumer credit-risk adds to banks’ reluctance to lend to individuals. Grey-market lenders such as pawn shops provide financing but at usurious interest rates. Fintech has started to fill this gap. E-commerce was again the launch-pad: online shopping platforms developed loan services, and are using their customers’ transactions and personal information to create credit scores. (How the government might eventually harvest data for social control is cause for concern, but for now lenders are merely trying to master the basics of credit ratings.) Shoppers on Alibaba and JD.com, China’s two biggest e-commerce portals, can conveniently borrow small amounts, typically less than 10,000 yuan. According to Ant Financial (Alibaba’s financial arm, spun out in 2014), 60% of borrowers in this category had never used a credit card. On their platforms, Ant and JD.com also lend to merchants, many of whom are the kinds of small businesses long ignored by banks. However, e-commerce lending is intrinsically cautious. Its targets are clients already well-known to the big shopping platforms. For the more radical side of China’s online lending, look instead at the explosion of peer-to-peer (P2P) credit. From just 214 P2P lenders in 2011, there were more than 3,000 by 2015 (see chart 2). Initially free from regulatory oversight, P2P soon morphed into China’s financial Wild West, brimming with frauds and dangerous funding models. More than a third of all P2P firms have already shut down. Yet P2P lenders still have a big role to play in China. Despite a string of headline-grabbing collapses, the industry has continued to grow. Outstanding P2P loans increased 28-fold from 30bn yuan at the start of 2014 to 850bn yuan today. The online lenders answer a basic need, like China’s grey-market lenders of old, but in modern garb and, thanks to all the competition, offering credit at lower interest rates. In other countries, P2P firms typically lend to clients online and obtain funding from institutional investors. The most successful lenders in China flip that approach on its head. Because of the lack of consumer credit ratings, they vet borrowers in person. Lufax, China’s biggest P2P firm, operates shops—more than 500 in 200 cities—for loan applicants. And for funding, Chinese P2P firms draw almost entirely on retail investors. More than 4m people invest on P2P platforms, up by a third over the past year. The platforms can then divide loans into small chunks, parcelling them out to investors to disperse risks. This points to the third area of China’s fintech prowess: investment. Until recently, Chinese savers faced two extreme options for managing their money: stash it in bank accounts, where interest rates were artificially low, but it was as safe as the Communist Party; or punt on the stockmarket, about as safe as playing baccarat in a casino in Macau. “In the middle there was nothing,” says Huang Hao, vice-president of Ant Financial. Fintech has opened that middle ground. In the West asset managers increasingly worry that they face a wave of disintermediation as investors migrate online. In China asset managers barely had a chance to serve as intermediaries in the first place; the market skipped into the digital stage. In large part this resulted from a generational divide that is the inverse of the global norm: the best-paid workers in China tend to be younger, the country’s first big generation of white-collar workers. They are much more likely to be willing to trust web-based platforms to manage their money. “In America people love technology, too, when they are 22. They just don’t have any money,” says Gregory Gibb, Lufax’s chief executive. The biggest breakthrough was the launch of an online fund by Alibaba in 2013. This fund, Yu’e Bao (or “leftover treasure”), was promoted as a way for people to earn interest on the cash in their e-commerce accounts. The appeal, though, turned out to be much broader. Invested through a money-market fund, Yu’e Bao offered returns in line with the interbank market, where interest rates float freely (see chart 3). This meant that savers could get rates that were more than three percentage points higher than those banks offered. And risk was minimal, because their cash was still ultimately in the hands of banks. Yu’e Bao attracted 185m customers within 18 months, giving it 600bn yuan of assets under management. As is so often the case in China, new entrants soon appeared. In 2014 Tencent launched Licaitong, an online fund platform linked to WeChat. Within a year, it had 100bn yuan under management. Lufax, meanwhile, outgrew its P2P roots to transform itself into a financial “supermarket”, offering personal loans, asset-backed securities, mutual funds, insurance and more. Robo-advisers (firms that use algorithms and surveys to let users build portfolios) also have China in their sights. Give me your pennies And it is not just about wealthy investors. In the West people generally need deep pockets before they can afford to buy into products such as money-market funds. In China all it takes is a smartphone and an initial buy-in of as little as 1 yuan. WeChat, with 800m active accounts, and Ant, with 400m, can afford to be generous. How to gauge the impact of fintech in China? Measured against the rest of the country’s colossal financial system, the various fintech pieces are puny. Apps and online lenders might have massive user bases, but they are mainly comprised of consumers and small businesses, not the hulking state-owned enterprises and government entities that form the backbone of the banking system. The outstanding balance of P2P credit is roughly 0.8% of total bank loans. Credit provided by the e-commerce firms adds up to even less. Earnings from mobile payments amount to barely 2% of bank revenues. Wei Hou, an analyst with Bernstein Research, reckons that the fintech firms will grab less than a twentieth of banks’ business by 2020. That is hardly to be sneezed at, since it comfortably equates to 1trn yuan in revenues. But it is not the kind of radical disruption that fintech’s more ardent evangelists often foretell. Nevertheless, just looking at the overall size of fintech is insufficient. In the market segments they have set their sights on, fintech firms have made a big mark. Digital payments account for nearly two-thirds of non-cash payments in China, far surpassing debit and credit cards. P2P loans make up about a fifth of all consumer credit. What’s more, fintech firms have provoked a competitive response. Take the customer experience at China’s biggest banks: it has improved markedly over the past few years. Once-cumbersome online-banking portals are much easier to use. Even more important, banks are also changing their business models. Prodded in part by the online investment funds, they have moved away from their plain-vanilla deposit-taking roots. Their focus has shifted to “wealth-management products” (WMPs), deposit-like investments which they sell to their clients, often via mobile apps. Returns are as high as anything on Alipay or Tencent. The banks’ apps are not as slick, but not far off, and they feel far safer, with their reassuringly physical thousands of branches. The outstanding value of WMPs has reached more than 26trn yuan, quadrupling in five years. WMPs have brought new risks into the financial system, in particular concerns over banks’ funding stability. But they have arguably done more to promote interest-rate liberalisation than any regulatory edict. And banks have come to appreciate their own strengths: branch networks; solid reputations; and risk controls. “You can’t say that banks or fintech firms are better positioned. Both need each other,” says Li Hongming, chairman of Huishang Bank, the main lender in Anhui, a big central province. Fintech upstarts have also learned that lesson. Look at Wheat Finance, one of the country’s earliest P2P lenders, established in 2009. Amy Huang, Wheat’s CEO, says her initial goal was to challenge banks on their home turf. But she soon realised that banks have insuperable advantages, with their stable, low-cost funding bases. Instead of battling them, Wheat is becoming their partner: 70% of its revenues come from selling digital services to banks. Regulatory attitudes are also shifting. China’s government initially gave fintech companies a free hand, a striking contrast to its heavy policing of traditional banks. The hunch was that fintech firms were small enough for any problems to be manageable, and might produce useful innovations. This wager paid off: the rise of mobile payments and online lending owe much to light regulation. But the era of benign neglect is over. In 2016, provoked in part by the P2P scandals, China introduced regulations to cover most fintech activities. Most of the rules are aimed at making fintech safer, not at curbing it. Firms can no longer pursue their most ambitious strategies. Individuals, for instance, can borrow no more than 200,000 yuan from any one P2P lender. Some of the regulations, though, also constrain what fintech firms can hope to achieve. The central bank is overseeing the creation of an online-payments clearance platform. It wants transparency: all digital payments will be visible to the central bank. But it could neutralise one of the main advantages of Ant and Tencent, forcing them to share transaction data with banks. It seemed, for a time, that China’s internet titans might go after banks’ crown jewels, when they obtained licences to run online banks. But the government has required that they act in partnership with existing banks for even the most basic functions such as deposits and withdrawals. Yet this is not the end of the road. Ant and Tencent still have hundreds of millions of users between them on apps that offer a wide range of financial services and products. They just need to persuade enough users to view them not simply as mobile wallets but as mobile brokers and lenders. As Lufax and JD.com hone their offerings, they, too, will grow more powerful. Regulations have placed speed bumps along their path. But the path is still there. The Chinese are coming China’s fintech champions are also trying to break into new territory abroad. WeChat’s mobile wallet is usable internationally, mostly in Asia for now. Ant has invested in mobile-finance companies in India, South Korea and Thailand. But replicating their successes in other markets will not be straightforward. Much of their repertoire was devised specifically to address deficiencies in China’s financial system. And anything that touches on core banking abroad will require local incorporation and adherence to local regulations—headwinds against global expansion. China’s bigger impact is likely to be indirect. Its fintech giants have shown what can be done. For emerging markets, the lesson is that with the right technology, it is possible to leapfrog to new forms of banking. For developed markets, China offers a vision of the grand consolidation—apps that combine payments, lending and investment—that the future should hold. And the biggest lesson of all: it is not upstarts versus incumbents but rather a question of how banks absorb the fintech innovations blossoming around them. China, an early adopter of the abacus, is, after a long period of dormancy, once again blazing a trail in finance.

#payments

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pinkarcadecandy · 8 years ago

Text

I.O.U.

APRIL 13, 2009 ISSUE

How we used to treat debtors.

By Jill Lepore

In the early republic, traders could declare bankruptcy while other debtors were jailed.

CreditIllustration by Zohar Lazar

John Pintard, a man of steady habits, made profitable use of his year in debtors’ prison. Locked up beginning in 1797 in a two-story stone jail in Newark that loomed, like a tombstone, over the town’s burial ground, he walked more than a thousand miles—113,984 lengths of the hall—and read more than a hundred books, from “The National Debt Productive of National Prosperity” to the complete works of Samuel Johnson, including Johnson’s Dictionary, which he digested at a rate of one page every nine minutes, which meant that, between the time he spent pacing like a caged animal and the hours he whiled away drafting letters to his creditors, begging them to forgive his debts, it took him a hundred and fifty-seven days to get from “abacus” to “zootomy.” Reading the Dictionary was a way to mark time, like making hash marks on the wall of a cell with a lump of coal. But it went beyond that. “I am more indebted to him than any other writer,” Pintard wrote of Johnson, aptly. Johnson himself had spent time in debtors’ prison—twice, once for a debt of ve pounds —and had pointed out the senselessness of it. “We have now imprisoned one generation of debtors after another,” Johnson observed in 1758, “but we do not nd that their numbers lessen.”

What’s to be done with people who can’t pay what they owe? Throwing them into prison seems preposterous now; it seemed preposterous then, too. What’s the point, if a man has already handed over to his creditors everything he owns? asked the author of “The Ill Policy and Inhumanity of Imprisoning Insolvent Debtors,” printed in Rhode Island in 1754. “Can his Creditors, with all their Wisdom, have more than All? Will his Imprisonment increase his Estate? Will his Connement pay or diminish his Debts? or the Punishment of his Body be any Kind of Advantage to them, or to Society?”

It isn’t hard to make the argument against debtors’ prison. But it took more than an argument to abolish the institution, mainly because it was so horrible that it worked, at least as a threat: few things motivate prompt repayment of money owed better than the prospect of a dark, dank dungeon where rats and smallpox thrive while men and women shrink and shrivel and starve and die. ( Jailers provided food, bedding, and fuel for felons; debtors were left to fend for

themselves.) Parliament didn’t ban the imprisonment of debtors until 1869. The practice ended much sooner in the United States. Imprisonment for debt was abolished in New York in 1831; the rest of the country soon followed.

What replaced it, as Harvard Law School’s Bruce Mann reported in “Republic of Debtors,” a landmark study of eighteenth-century nancial failure, was something that has become a mainstay of American life: bankruptcy. Under the terms of the rst U.S. bankruptcy law, passed in 1800, Pintard’s debts were discharged, his ledger erased, and his past, eventually, forgotten. Other countries have bankruptcy laws, too, of course, but they generally favor creditors; our laws favor debtors, and always have.

We have been bailing ourselves out, in other words, from the beginning. Lately, we’ve been bailing fast and furious, but not as fast as the water’s been rising. Eighty-six hundred Americans led for bankruptcy in 1946; 191,729 in 1967; and 314,886 in 1980. An even steeper increase in the number of bankrupts since then is usually attributed to relaxed provisions of the 1978 Bankruptcy Code; non-business bankruptcy lings rst topped a million in 1996. The 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act made it harder to declare bankruptcy by introducing means testing. In the spike just before that law’s implementation, the number of bankruptcy lings passed two million; the following year, in its aftermath, the number dropped to six hundred thousand, but it’s been creeping back up ever since. There were more than a million lings in 2008. Put another way: in 1946, one in seventeen thousand Americans declared bankruptcy; last year, one in three hundred did. This past November saw 5,075 bankruptcy lings daily, a thirty-seven-per-cent increase over the same month the year before. In 2009, about one and a half million lings are expected, although if Congress makes it easier for homeowners who le for bankruptcy to avoid foreclosure, that number could climb even higher.

We have discharged one generation of debtors after another, but we do not nd that their numbers lessen. We nd only that we forget, when times are good, that times were ever bad. The colonies were settled, the nation founded, the country built, by debtors. We’ve forgotten that, too; debtors don’t like to look back. “The present generation is bankrupt of principles and hope, as of property,” Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote. Mostly, though, we’re bankrupt of history.

The state has arbitrated insolvency since antiquity. Under Roman law, the body of a debtor could be cut up and disbursed to his creditors. That probably never happened, but it was common for debtors to end up as slaves. (Debt and slavery, historically—and conceptually—are always tangled up together.) In England, statutes decreeing imprisonment for debt date to the thirteenth century. The point wasn’t to lock you up—as the proverb had it, “A prison pays no debts”—but to terrify you into paying, to avoid incarceration. Nine times out of ten, that’s just what happened, which is why the practice prevailed in most parts of the early modern world and, in the seventeenth century, travelled, with English common law, to America. A 1641 Massachusetts law known as the “Body of Liberties” closely followed English practice, declaring of the insolvent that “his person may be arrested and imprisoned where he shall be kept at his owne charge, not the platife’s till satisfaction be made.” The logic behind this bring-your-own- mutton-and-peat clause was that you might be hiding your money and, if you weren’t, and were

truly broke, your friends and family would pony up to keep you in food and rewood or, better still, to pay your debts. There were no terms: you weren’t sentenced for a month, a year, a decade; you stayed in jail until your creditors were satised.

This didn’t work that well in the New World. As many as two out of every three Europeans who came to the colonies were debtors on arrival: they paid for their passage by becoming indentured servants. Early on, labor was so scarce that colonists who fell into debt once they got here paid with work; there was much to be done, and there weren’t many prisons. In 1674, a Massachusetts court ordered Joseph Armitage, who owed John Ruck twenty-two pounds, to serve as Ruck’s servant for seven years. (What relieved the colonies’ labor scarcity and spelled the end of debtor servitude was the rise of the African slave trade.) The colonies were also a good place to go to run away from your debts. Some colonies were, basically, debtors’ asylums. In 1642, Virginia, eager to lure settlers, promised ve years’ protection from any debts contracted in the Old World. North Carolina did the same in 1669. Creditors, in any case, found it all but impossible to pursue fugitive debtors across the Atlantic. (Not for nothing did Defoe’s Moll Flanders, born in London’s Newgate Prison, sail to Virginia.) Then, there was an early version of a farm subsidy: Connecticut and Maryland forbade the prosecution of debtors between May and October and released prisoners to plant and harvest on the unassailable argument that “the Porest Sort of the Inhabitants” were often “undone in that they cannot be at Liberty to make their Cropps.”

Nevertheless, before long jails were built, and American creditors proved keen to seize their debtors, as was demonstrated in pathbreaking research conducted by the archivist G. Philip Bauer in the nineteen-thirties. As early as 1678, one colonist observed, “It is every dayes way in every trading towne, for merchants upon neglect of payment, for to arrest theire debtors.” Debt became both more common and more complicated. As the colonial economy grew and, like England’s, commercialized, it increasingly depended on pieces of paper that uctuated in value. This arrangement was especially treacherous on this side of the ocean, where there was never much cash and funds had to travel for miles. At rst, only merchants relied on paper credit, not so much currency as notes of hand, bills of exchange, and I.O.U.s. (The term “I.O.U.” dates to the sixteen-teens.) Soon, though, tradesmen and artisans and even people of decidedly modest means were using paper credit. Debt might be a crime and, worse, a sin, Cotton Mather preached in a 1716 sermon titled “Fair Dealing Between Debtor and Creditor,” but if the colonists, cash poor and on the edge of the world, couldn’t live with it they certainly couldn’t live without it: “Yea, without some Debt, there could be no Trade carried on.” Some debt, yeah. The question was, and remains: how much is too much?

In London, debtors’ prisons lled. And then they teemed. In 1728, James Oglethorpe, a member of Parliament, learned that a friend of his had died in Fleet Prison. Oglethorpe urged an investigation, which led to legislative reform outlawing the imprisonment of debtors who owed very small sums. That resulted in the release of as many as ten thousand debtors. Oglethorpe had another idea: what about just shipping the miserable wretches across the ocean? In 1732, he founded Georgia, a colony intended as a refuge for debtors released from English prisons.

This only strengthened a prevailing perception: that the colonies’ relationship with England was that of a debtor to a creditor. By the seventeen-sixties, sympathy for debtors had attached itself to the patriot cause. Weren’t all Americans debtors? Whenever New York’s Sons of Liberty held a banquet, they made a show of sending the leftovers to the city’s imprisoned debtors. Virginia planters like Jefferson and Washington were monstrously in debt to merchants in London. A creditor was “lord of another man’s purse”; hadn’t the British swindled Americans out of their purses, their independence, their manhood? This, anyway, is how many colonists came to view their economic dependence on Britain. Declaring independence was a way of cancelling those debts. The American Revolution, some historians have argued, was itself a form of debt relief.

In 1776, just a few months before the Declaration of Independence, Philadelphians formed the Society for Assisting Distressed Prisoners, modelled on a London society founded in 1773 by a goldsmith who, having amassed a fortune, used it to buy twenty-ve thousand petty debtors out of prison, one by one. In 1787, just before the Constitution was drafted, New Yorkers, following the example of a British reformer who had issued a dire report on the state of prisons in England and Wales, formed the Society for the Relief of Distressed Debtors. The group launched an investigation and found that, of 1,162 debtors committed to debtors’ prison in New York City in 1787 and 1788, 716 owed less than twenty shillings.

Debtors in New York used to be locked up in the garret of City Hall, at the corner of Wall Street, in a cramped nook under the eaves. From its dormers, they would lower shoes, tied to a string, to collect alms from passersby. (Debtors’ prisons in other cities and towns had what were called “beggars’ grates,” iron bars through which prisoners in cellar dungeons could extend outstretched palms.) In 1759, New York’s debtors were moved to the New Gaol, near the Commons, or what is now City Hall Park. After 1775, when the city’s criminals were relocated, the debtors had the New Gaol, such as it was, to themselves. Three oors, fourteen rooms: merchants, artisans, and the like shared rooms on the second and third oors; laborers lodged on the rst.

In the seventeen-eighties, the painter Ralph Earl must have occupied rooms upstairs, where he had light enough to paint, because the members of the Society for the Relief of Distressed Debtors came up with an ingenious plan to save him: they hired him to paint their portraits. (Artists and writers, like brokers, were in the business of producing paper whose value tended to uctuate; this made them especially prone to debt. Hogarth, another jailbird, made debtors’ prison a stop on the “Rake’s Progress,” and so many writers—including Defoe, Fielding, and Smollett—landed in debtors’ prison that scholars have argued that debt fuels the plot of nearly every eighteenth-century novel.) But, while Earl worked in a sun-bathed upper-oor apartment, the city’s poorest debtors sat in darkness, day and night. They had no rooms; they slept on the oor in the ground-oor hall or were shut up in the cellar.

New York’s debtors’ prison was a ship of misery in a sea of anarchy. In 1794, as Bruce Mann relates, debtors on the top two oors of the New Gaol, known as the Upper Hall and the Middle Hall, printed their own newspapers, drafted their own constitution, established their own courts, and elected their own sheriffs to enforce the laws. One debtor’s wife was ned for

“not cleaning herself and becoming lousey.” (Wives, and children, too, often lived in prison, but almost all jailed debtors were men; in most states, married women could neither own property nor contract debts.) Debtors who couldn’t pay their nes were sentenced to “close connement.”

John Pintard ended up in debtors’ prison in Newark only because he was trying so desperately to stay out of debtors’ prison in New York. Pintard knew a fair bit about the deprivation of incarceration in Gotham. During the Revolution, he had served on a commission to relieve the distress of Americans being held in the city as prisoners of war, many of whom were starving to death. After the war, he opened offices at 12 Wall Street and became one of the city’s most prosperous importers, specializing in the China and Indies trades. In 1790, Pintard was elected to the New York State Legislature. In his spare time, he helped found the American Museum, “to perpetuate the Memorial of national events and history,” and he contributed a column called “American Chronology” to New York Magazine. He opened a stockbroker’s office and, in 1791, became a partner of Leonard Bleecker (who happened to be the secretary of the Society for the Relief of Distressed Debtors); they were America’s rst securities brokers. They got very rich very fast. One New Yorker, in a poem titled “Speculation,” asked, “What magic this among the people, / That swells a may-pole to a steeple?” Then Pintard, who supported Alexander Hamilton’s plan to fund the national debt, partnered with former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury William Duer, who was attempting, unethically but not, at that point, illegally, to corner the market on stock in the Bank of the United States.

Duer was a Madoffian swindler; Pintard fell for him. To fund Duer’s scheme, Pintard borrowed the money of “shopkeepers, widows, orphans, Butchers, Carmen, Gardners” and signed his name to nearly a million dollars’ worth of bank notes, on Duer’s behalf. In 1792, when Duer’s scheme collapsed—all those bank notes were worthless—Duer was all but chased to New Gaol; stone- throwing mobs rioted outside. (One irate investor broke into the jail and challenged Duer to a duel.) Pintard hid out in his Manhattan town house. The practice was known as “keeping house”: if you never left your house, you couldn’t be served with a writ, and you could avoid debtors’ prison. (Fielding wrote “Joseph Andrews,” yet another novel plotted by debt, while keeping house in Charing Cross.) Keeping house was easier if you were also out of town. One friend thought that Pintard ought “to remove to a State where there is a Bankrupt Act.” Pintard turned over everything he owned—his ships, their cargoes; his houses, their libraries—and ed to New Jersey.

The insolvency of Duer and Pintard triggered the Panic of 1792, the nation’s rst stock-market crash. Jefferson estimated the losses at about ve million dollars, roughly the value of New York; it was as bad, he thought, as if the city had been levelled. Recovery came quickly (Hamilton believed that Duer’s incarceration had stabilized the situation), but the panic left a legacy: it spurred Wall Street brokers to sign an agreement banning private bidding on stocks, so that no one, ever again, could do what Duer had done. That agreement marks the founding of what became the New York Stock Exchange.

John Pintard was no ordinary debtor. Ordinary debtors were indigent, not just insolvent. Then, as now, it was better to be rich and owe a fortune than to be poor and owe a pittance. Pintard kept house in New Jersey for ve years before his creditors caught up with him. When he got to debtors’ prison, in July of 1797, he decorated: “The necessary repairs of the

apartment allotted to me in this abode of human wretchedness has so engrossed my attention that I have not looked into a book scarcely the last week,” he complained in his diary. He painted, wallpapered, and returned to his books. In April, ve days after Pintard nished reading Johnson’s Dictionary, forty debtors imprisoned in New Gaol staged a jailbreak. The week that all but seven of those fugitives were caught, Pintard moved on to reading “Thoughts in Prison,” poems written from Newgate in 1777 by an English clergyman named William Dodd, who was awaiting execution for having forged a bill of exchange in order to bail himself out of debt: “What man, / How high soe’er he builds his earthly nest, / Can claim security from fortune’s change?”

Pintard liked those lines, but he had his own ideas about misfortune: unrelieved debt was un- American. That summer, when Pintard and his fellow-inmates celebrated the Fourth of July, they toasted the United States: “May its next revolution no longer nd imprisonment for debt & personal slavery, solecisms, in the chapter of American rights & privileges.” And then Pintard, who, after Johnson, had been reading Shakespeare, offered a debtors’“Henry V”:

We few, we wretched few, we band of brothers, For he to day that is conned with us Shall be our brother, be he ne’er so vile.

The Constitution grants to Congress the power “to establish . . . uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies.” What the framers did not make clear, and what led to decades of debate, was whom those laws were for. Bankruptcy for some, or bankruptcy for all? There seemed to be two kinds of debt: debts incurred by “traders” (stockbrokers, bankers, merchants) and debts incurred by everyone else. The rst kind could be forgiven, for the sake of commerce; the second kind had to be enforced, for the sake of creditors, contracts, and public morality. Traders take on nancial risks, and society benets; for commerce to thrive, a trader’s liability has to have a bottom.

The idea that debt is necessary for trade, and has to be forgiven, is consequent to the rise of a market economy. The idea that debt is wrong and should be punished is a feature of a moral economy. Historians generally argue that the market economy replaced the moral economy sometime between 1700 and 1900. Of course, it’s a lot messier than that, or talk-show hosts wouldn’t be calling for A.I.G. executives to be air-dropped onto Alcatraz. Bankruptcy protection and debtors’ prison do fall, roughly, on either side of a chronological divide, between a market economy and a moral one. But there remains an American exception. The bankruptcy laws we inherited from England granted relief only to traders. Americans, though, came to prefer forgiving everyone’s debts, on the ground that sorting debtors into two systems (bankruptcy for wheelers and dealers, debtors’ prison for chumps) is, nally, undemocratic.

Americans fought to provide the same debt relief for everyone because we believe in equality, and because bankruptcy protection makes taking risks less risky. Americans, Tocqueville wrote, “make a virtue of commercial temerity.” We like risk. “Hence arises the strange indulgence which is shown to bankrupts.” Our willingness to forgive—and forget—debt lies behind a good part of our prosperity. But in this topsy-turvy year we’ve so wholly forgotten where we began

that we’ve turned our history upside down. Just now, lots of Americans would like nothing better than to put the wheelers and dealers in jail and to wipe away the debts of the rest of us. ( Jail for criminals is one thing, but the populist fury has mostly been directed at people who haven’t broken any laws. That raises the question of whether we needed better laws. We did.) Some Americans want traders to pay for the risks we all took, as if traders sinned but we were merely investing. The argument, in short, is for sorting: Wall Street becomes a debtors’ prison; Main Street declares bankruptcy. It might even come to that. But it might also be worth remembering why we stopped sorting, and when.

In 1788, delegates to the New York ratifying convention proposed an amendment to the Constitution: bankruptcy laws passed by Congress “shall only extend to merchants and other traders,” but states should have the power to “pass laws for the relief of other insolvent debtors.” The amendment didn’t pass. States, nevertheless, did adopt those laws. An insolvency law passed in New Jersey in 1798 was meant to save poor debtors from starvation by requiring a creditor to pay four shillings a week for his debtor’s keep. When John Pintard’s creditor missed a payment, Pintard—whose prison syllabus included law books—seized upon this technicality. That helped get him out of jail, in August of 1798. There remained, however, the matter of discharging his debts. When Congress passed the rst federal bankruptcy act, in 1800, it followed English precedent, and applied only to traders. Pintard moved to New York and took out an ad in the newspaper, announcing that he was doing business as a broker. He then traded a single stock, at a prot of fty-eight cents (which he donated to charity), and promptly led for bankruptcy. On September 10, 1800, seven days before his bankruptcy was nally declared, he wrote in his diary, “Should prosperity smile, let me never forget the suffering I have endured to serve as a check against presumptuous hopes.”

Pintard didn’t forget, but everyone else did. In 1935, Charles Warren, the rst historian to make a careful study of bankruptcy, found that every major American bankruptcy law had been the product of a nancial crisis or a depression—and was subsequently repealed or watered down when the economy revived. As one nineteenth-century congressman explained, creditors, who outnumber debtors, tend to get the upper hand: “There are 500,000 bankrupts, but how many creditors? Five at least to each debtor—hence there will be 2,500,000 for repeal.” Bankruptcy law also goes in cycles (The Dow is down: We need relief !), because the economy goes in cycles (No, wait! The Dow is up!). The faster our news, the shallower our history, the more frantic our panic.

The 1800 law that discharged Pintard’s debts was passed to help the country recover from the Panic of 1792; it was repealed in 1803. The House committee on repeal concluded that it promoted “fraud, speculation, and extravagance.” And that it helped those who least needed it: “We saw rich men today, bankrupt tomorrow, and next day in full business and great style, while the poor farmer or manufacturer who had been ruined by their extravagance must suffer the penalties of the law in a jail.”

Pintard was never again a rich man, but in 1804 he was appointed New York City’s rst Inspector—in effect, the city’s statistician. He counted things, especially things having to do with public health: taverns, streets, people, cellars, births, deaths, remen, dog licenses. And then he did something he’d been wanting to do for a long time: in 1804, he founded the New-York

Historical Society. His books formed the core of the Society’s library; Pintard became its librarian. Dedicated to “the humble task of collecting and preserving,” he begged New Yorkers for donations of papers—letters, books, tracts, magazines, anything. He wanted to save the nation’s past.

Two years after Pintard became Inspector, the Society for the Relief of Distressed Debtors, which had changed its name to the Humane Society, ladled out to debtors nine thousand quarts of soup. The number of debtors in New York, like just about everything else, was growing wildly. (Between 1790 and 1830, the city’s population increased by more than ve hundred per cent.) In 1811, a New York lawyer named Joseph Dewey Fay, using a pseudonym that recalled an English reformer, published “Essays of Howard; or, Tales of the Prison.” Fay, who claimed to have spent sixteen years in debtors’ prison, estimated that in 1810 ten per cent of New York’s free men had been arrested for debt. “Americans boast they have done away with torture,” Fay wrote, “but the debtors’ prison is torture.” He went to Albany and lobbied the legislature to pass an expanded insolvency law for imprisoned debtors. He prevailed. The day the bill became law, Fay advertised his legal services in the newspaper—who better to help you clear your debts than Joseph Fay, Esq.? Six hundred and twenty-ve debtors availed themselves of discharge in the law’s rst ten months. People had themselves arrested for debt merely to take advantage of it.

A response to the Panic of 1809, that law was repealed within a year, and was later ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, which took it to encroach on Congress’s authority. Opposition to extending bankruptcy protection was overcome only in the wake of the Panic of 1837. In 1841, Congress passed a sweeping federal bankruptcy law that offered protection to everyone. Within two years, forty-one thousand Americans had sought relief. Henry Anstice, who kept a shop on Nassau Street, printed a directory of every New York bankrupt: carpet dealers, grocers, stove-makers, merchants, clerks, dentists, tinworkers, even a towboat captain. By 1843, when Anstice printed his list, the economy had improved and, predictably, the law had been repealed. But bankruptcy protection would never again be restricted to brokers. It would be for everyone.

Americans like to get rich fast. That this means we go broke fast, too, is something that we have become very good at forgetting. Our ignorance of history is matched only by our unfailing optimism; it’s actually part of our optimism. Pintard’s optimism was different: he was hopeful that we wouldn’t forget to be pessimistic. Should prosperity smile, let me never forget the suffering I have endured to serve as a check against presumptuous hopes.

John Pintard took away from prison a sense of civic obligation. “We all owe a debt to Society as well as to God,” he wrote in 1816, “and I wish to discharge my share.” That year, he found a home for the New-York Historical Society: the abandoned almshouse next door to the debtors’ prison. He had become involved in a dozen causes, including the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism, a platform from which he hoped to launch a plan that he had rst devised during the Panic of 1809: he wanted to start a savings bank, the rst in the nation. “Monday 4 P.M. Committee of the pauperism Society on the subject of a Savings Bank,” Pintard wrote, accounting for a typical week in his life. “Tuesday 4 P.M. Committee of the Historical Society on the Library, on the propriety of establishing a reading room.” A savings bank was, to Pintard, merely another kind of depository.

Pintard helped open that bank, the New York Bank for Savings, during the Panic of 1819. “Americans are an active restless people impatient of slow prots,” he wrote. “Their habits . . . must undergo, not a reformation, but a complete revolution. A new race must arise on the broken fortunes of the present.” That new race had to learn “to plod and earn an honest living, to accumulate by slow degrees.” Americans, Pintard believed, “are like the Indians, who think when Spring comes that there will be no more winter.”

Pintard wasn’t averse to speculation, though. During those same years, he played an important role in bolstering support for the Erie Canal, an extraordinarily risky and enormously capital- intensive public-works project (known, fondly, as the Big Ditch), which spurred manufacturing, created thousands of jobs, and made New York the wealthiest city in the world. The canal, Pintard thought, was “an enterprize second only in importance to this State, to the declaration & achievement of Am. Independence.” When the canal was opened, in 1825, it was Pintard who was charged with carrying a bottle of water from the Erie to pour into the Atlantic.

Meanwhile, debtors’ prison was dying. In 1818, the state of New York required the release of just about anyone who owed less than twenty-ve dollars; in 1825, that amount was doubled. Calls for the outright abolition of the institution grew more urgent: debtors’ prison was both un-American and anachronistic. “Debtor imprisonment law is the product of the dark ages of feudalism,” petitioners to the Albany legislature argued. “Why Americans have allowed it to exist here is a wonder.” The wonder, really, is that Americans managed to get rid of it; at the time, debtors were imprisoned in every country in Europe except Portugal.

In 1831, the New York State Legislature abolished imprisonment for debt. Maine and Tennessee followed that same year, as did, slowly but surely, the rest of the Union. The last debtors in the New Gaol left on March 1, 1832. The building, whose twenty-two-inch-thick stone walls made it reproof, was put to another use: housing the city government’s archives.

William Duer died, a debtors’ prisoner, in 1799. John Pintard went bankrupt and got off nearly scot-free. Given the very many things he did with his fresh start—he served as treasurer of the New York Bank for Savings until 1841, when he was eighty-two, and blind—it’s good that he didn’t die in Newark’s jail, a stone’s throw from the town’s burial ground, a potter’s eld.

In the strange indulgence we show to bankrupts, Tocqueville wrote in the eighteen-thirties, “Americans differ, not only from the nations of Europe, but from all the commercial nations of our time.”That’s still true.We left something behind,early on.Nineteenth-century British writers kept on writing gloomy novels with scenes set in debtors’ prisons because they still had those prisons; Dickens’s father lived in debtors’ prison; Thackeray was arrested for debt; and Trollope’s father ed the country to avoid it. American writers coined shiny, bright new plots: rags-to-riches, the hazards of new fortunes. Debtors’ prison was abolished, and bankruptcy law was liberalized, because Americans came to see that most people who fall into debt are victims of the business cycle, and not of fate or divine retribution. Because our bankruptcy laws make taking risks less risky, for everyone, everyone takes more risks. We have lost and we have gained, yet, in the main, we have prospered mightily.

But not endlessly. Spring comes, and summer, and then fall. Winter, too, will come again. It will get chilly, and we won’t remember where we put our coats. Consumer debt, which stands at two and a half trillion dollars, has been the engine of the American economy since the nineteen- seventies and, arguably, longer. Buying on credit has been, for at least the past half century, pitched to the American people as a civic responsibility. We keep buying and spending and overextending and forgiving debts; we keep forgetting how we came to accumulate them; we can’t seem to remember that bad times follow good; we lack the fortitude supplied by a bracing history. There are a thousand bankruptcy lawyers working in Manhattan today. There will be more tomorrow; they peddle pastlessness. But sometimes there’s prot in looking back, and reckoning our accounts.

No one wants to hear that. It’s difficult; it can be depressing. Here’s what everyone wants to hear: the motto that Pintard, before he died, in 1844, decided to put on his family’s coat of arms: Never Despair. ♦

Jill Lepore is a staff writer and a professor of history at Harvard. “The Secret History of Wonder Woman” is her latest book.

#bankruptcy #newyorker #jilllepore #iou #debtor #history

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nitindhage48 · 5 years ago

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Property Management Service Global Market Demand, Growth, Opportunities, Analysis of Top Key Player and Forecast to 2025

This report studies the global Property Management Service market, analyzes and researches the Property Management Service development status and forecast in United States, EU, Japan, China, India and Southeast Asia. This report focuses on the top players in global market, like

Quintessentiallyhome Mapletree JLL Savills Singapore Abacus Property CBRE Singapore Colliers International Rhodo Property & Estate Management Services Pte Ltd ELDA Management Services, Inc Florida Property Management Services LLC Advantage Property Management Services Alpha Property Management Services, LLC Rosen Management Services Premier Property Management Services Orchard Block Management Services Southern Property Management Services Summit Management Property Management Services Preferred Property Management Services Accent Property Management Services Lee & Associates Blue Sky Luxury Hinch Property Management Tower-International Marsh & Parsons Monte Davis Property Management Service

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If you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want.

Table of Contents

Global Property Management Service Market Size, Status and Forecast 2025 1 Industry Overview of Property Management Service 1.1 Property Management Service Market Overview 1.1.1 Property Management Service Product Scope 1.1.2 Market Status and Outlook 1.2 Global Property Management Service Market Size and Analysis by Regions (2013-2018) 1.2.1 United States 1.2.2 EU 1.2.3 Japan 1.2.4 China 1.2.5 India 1.2.6 Southeast Asia 1.3 Property Management Service Market by Type 1.3.1 Percentage of rent 1.3.2 Fixed fee 1.3.3 Guaranteed rent 1.3.4 Revenue share 1.3.5 Others 1.4 Property Management Service Market by End Users/Application 1.4.1 Housing Agencies 1.4.2 Home Owners 1.4.3 Enterprises 1.4.4 Institutions 1.4.5 Others

2 Global Property Management Service Competition Analysis by Players 2.1 Property Management Service Market Size (Value) by Players (2013-2018) 2.2 Competitive Status and Trend 2.2.1 Market Concentration Rate 2.2.2 Product/Service Differences 2.2.3 New Entrants 2.2.4 The Technology Trends in Future

3 Company (Top Players) Profiles 3.1 Quintessentiallyhome 3.1.1 Company Profile 3.1.2 Main Business/Business Overview 3.1.3 Products, Services and Solutions 3.1.4 Property Management Service Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018) 3.1.5 Recent Developments 3.2 Mapletree 3.2.1 Company Profile 3.2.2 Main Business/Business Overview 3.2.3 Products, Services and Solutions 3.2.4 Property Management Service Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018) 3.2.5 Recent Developments 3.3 JLL 3.3.1 Company Profile 3.3.2 Main Business/Business Overview 3.3.3 Products, Services and Solutions 3.3.4 Property Management Service Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018) 3.3.5 Recent Developments 3.4 Savills Singapore 3.4.1 Company Profile 3.4.2 Main Business/Business Overview 3.4.3 Products, Services and Solutions 3.4.4 Property Management Service Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018) 3.4.5 Recent Developments 3.5 Abacus Property 3.5.1 Company Profile 3.5.2 Main Business/Business Overview 3.5.3 Products, Services and Solutions 3.5.4 Property Management Service Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018) 3.5.5 Recent Developments 3.6 CBRE Singapore 3.6.1 Company Profile 3.6.2 Main Business/Business Overview 3.6.3 Products, Services and Solutions 3.6.4 Property Management Service Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018) 3.6.5 Recent Developments 3.7 Colliers International 3.7.1 Company Profile 3.7.2 Main Business/Business Overview 3.7.3 Products, Services and Solutions 3.7.4 Property Management Service Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018) 3.7.5 Recent Developments 3.8 Rhodo Property & Estate Management Services Pte Ltd 3.8.1 Company Profile 3.8.2 Main Business/Business Overview 3.8.3 Products, Services and Solutions 3.8.4 Property Management Service Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018) 3.8.5 Recent Developments 3.9 ELDA Management Services, Inc 3.9.1 Company Profile 3.9.2 Main Business/Business Overview 3.9.3 Products, Services and Solutions 3.9.4 Property Management Service Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018) 3.9.5 Recent Developments 3.10 Florida Property Management Services LLC 3.10.1 Company Profile 3.10.2 Main Business/Business Overview 3.10.3 Products, Services and Solutions 3.10.4 Property Management Service Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018) 3.10.5 Recent Developments 3.11 Advantage Property Management Services 3.12 Alpha Property Management Services, LLC 3.13 Rosen Management Services 3.14 Premier Property Management Services 3.15 Orchard Block Management Services 3.16 Southern Property Management Services 3.17 Summit Management Property Management Services 3.18 Preferred Property Management Services 3.19 Accent Property Management Services 3.20 Lee & Associates 3.21 Blue Sky Luxury 3.22 Hinch Property Management 3.23 Tower-International 3.24 Marsh & Parsons 3.25 Monte Davis Property Management Service

4 Global Property Management Service Market Size by Type and Application (2013-2018) 4.1 Global Property Management Service Market Size by Type (2013-2018) 4.2 Global Property Management Service Market Size by Application (2013-2018) 4.3 Potential Application of Property Management Service in Future 4.4 Top Consumer/End Users of Property Management Service

5 United States Property Management Service Development Status and Outlook 5.1 United States Property Management Service Market Size (2013-2018) 5.2 United States Property Management Service Market Size and Market Share by Players (2013-2018) 5.3 United States Property Management Service Market Size by Application (2013-2018)

……Continued

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nitindhage48 · 6 years ago

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Property Management Service Market 2018 Industry Growth, Share, Trends, Demand, Analysis and Forecast to 2025

Request a Sample Report @ https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/3054775-global-property-management-service-market-size-status-and-forecast-2025

Market segment by Regions/Countries, this report covers United States EU Japan China India Southeast Asia

Market segment by Type, the product can be split into Percentage of rent Fixed fee Guaranteed rent Revenue share Others

Market segment by Application, Property Management Service can be split into Housing Agencies Home Owners Enterprises Institutions Others

If you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want.

Table of Contents

……Continued

Access Complete Report @ https://www.wiseguyreports.com/reports/3054775-global-property-management-service-market-size-status-and-forecast-2025

Norah Trent

Partner Relations & Marketing Manager

[email protected]

Ph: +1-646-845-9349 (US)

Ph: +44 208 133 9349 (UK)

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mastvideos · 7 years ago

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If you’ve walked Canal St. in lower Manhattan’s Chinatown, you’ve probably passed by the modest headquarters of Abacus Federal Savings, a family run community bank that has served New York City’s Chinese immigrant population for more than three decades. It’s more than a mile away — and a world apart — from the more famous banks on Wall Street whose reckless behaviors during the housing bubble led to trillions of dollars in economic loss, the failure of financial institutions nationwide, an unprecedented federal bailout of the banking and auto industries, and continued fraud by big banks in a rush to foreclose on large numbers of homes as quickly as possible. You might think the Manhattan district attorney had his choice of banks to prosecute for these obvious and far-reaching crimes, but in the end only one bank has been indicted on felony fraud charges related to the 2008 collapse: Abacus. Tonight’s episode of PBS’ Frontline is “Abacus: Small Enough To Jail,” from documentarian Steve James (Hoop Dreams), providing a behind-the-scenes look at the years-long legal battle between the Chinatown bank and prosecutors who targeted Abacus while leaving Wall Street intact. Fraud Charges On May 31, 2012, when Manhattan D.A. Cyrus Vance announced a multitude of charges against the bank and 19 current and former employees, alleging that Abacus had sold “hundreds of millions of dollars worth of fraudulent loans to the Federal National Mortgage Association” (Fannie Mae), he intimated that Abacus had been involved in the same sort of underhanded schemes that bigger lenders used to paint a pretty face on shoddy loans in order to make a quick buck by reselling them before they went toxic. But as those who followed the story would find out over the three years that followed, while there were unethical employees and questionable loan documents being filed at Abacus, there was no apparent effort to defraud Fannie Mae. “What Are These Checks?” Abacus inadvertently pushed itself into the D.A.’s crosshairs in Dec. 2009. A young couple, both immigrants, had come to the bank to close on the purchase of a two-family house in Brooklyn. The Abacus loan officer who’d worked with the couple on the mortgage was not present, but the bank’s director Vera Sung — a daughter of the company’s founder Thomas Sung — was there. At some point, the husband said that he wanted to make sure that $2,500 in checks the couple had written previously would be put toward the closing costs. This confounded Vera, who’d never heard of these checks and immediately suspected that the employee, a man named Ken Yu, may have been up to something. She and her sister, Abacus president Jill Sung, confronted Yu, asking “What are these checks?” and then called off the close. They later confirmed that not only had Yu taken payments he shouldn’t have, but the loan application included inaccurate information about the couple’s income. “Ken Yu stole money and he was running a money-laundering operation on his own, unbeknownst to everybody here,” Jill Sung says in the documentary. Yu was fired and the bank notified its regulators at the Office of Thrift Supervision (which subsequently merged with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency) after an internal investigation found that two other loan officers were engaged in wrongdoing. At the same time, the couple whose mortgage had been shut down at the closing stage were understandably upset. Because things had gotten so far before the process collapsed, the seller was contractually allowed to keep the approximately $70,000 down-payment the couple had put together. Feeling their money had been stolen, they went to the police. While investigators initially focused on Ken Yu’s alleged fraud, they eventually came to believe that there was a bank-wide problem with false and misleading documents, and that it was so obvious that there was no way bank management could have been unaware. “Unfortunate, But…It Happened Which leads us to that May day in 2012, when more than a dozen defendants were cuffed and chained together, and led into the courtroom for their arraignment. The youngest Sung daughter, Chanterelle, was actually an attorney in Vance’s office at the time of the indictment. “I had never seen that in my entire time at the D.A.’s office,” she tells Frontline about the scene at the arraignment. “This was like the case of the century.” Speaking now, Vance acknowledges that this spectacle may have been a bit overboard, but puts the blame on court officers, not his people. “It was very unfortunate, but… it happened,” shrugs the district attorney. What Sister? At trial, the prosecution attempted to paint a picture that the bank and its senior management were aware of and complicit in the mortgage fraud. Many borrowers testified that they had been misled into filing false documents, or that they didn’t know what they were doing was against the rules. But attorneys for Abacus were frequently able to demonstrate that these same witnesses may have been actively involved in trying to pull one over on the loan underwriters. For example, the one borrower who testified that he didn’t know that he’d been listed as a “manager” on the loan application, even though he’d also filed an employment verification document signed by the co-owner of the restaurant where he worked. What’s more, he repeatedly denied knowing much about the other co-owner of that business, at least until the defense attorney got him to admit that his sister is actually that co-owner. Yu, who was supposed to be the star witness for the prosecution, was also caught lying on the stand, saying that he did not ask for or expect a loan applicant to pay him a cash tip if he could get them a loan. In fact, Yu was caught on tape by the D.A.’s office explaining this to a borrower. He also would “gift” money to loan applicants and sign a falsified gift notice claiming to be a relative of the borrower. However, this practice went unnoticed by the underwriters because he signed his birth name, Qui Bin Yu, instead of his professional name. The prosecutors argued that Vera Sung had approved one of these loans with a falsified gift notice from Yu, but the defense pointed out that this piece of paper and certain other underwriting documents are not obtained until after Sung’s signed off on the loan, meaning she did not see this form. Where’s The Victim? In a sense, there’s really nothing wrong with a bank deciding to lend money irresponsibly. If the borrower defaults, it’s the bank’s problem. Where things get tricky is when the mortgage lender then resells those loans to someone else. Similarly, it’s one thing to sell someone a good loan that eventually turns rotten because of unforeseen circumstances, and another to sell loans that you already know are going to rot. Just look at the “Hustle” program cooked up by Countrywide in its waning days. To make as much money as possible, the company effectively stopped underwriting loans. This allowed them to issue mortgages quickly and turn them around for resale, consequences be damned. But prosecutors faced a problem with trying to equate Abacus’ occasional goofs with the deliberately lax standards at other lenders: The Abacus loans were solid. Of the 3,000 loans sold by Abacus to Fannie Mae in the five-year period that was the focus to the indictment, a grand total of nine (not 9%, not 90 or 900… nine) were in default — a default rate that was far below the levels found at other banks. “These loans had not lost any money. They’re performing,” says Jill Sung. “It was clear financially who was benefiting was Fannie Mae from that transaction.” Good Loans; Bad Paperwork So why were there all these allegedly dubious documents if the borrowers were reliable? Some argue that it’s part of the nature of the immigrant experience. Many of the businesses run by recent immigrants in New York City are primarily cash-based; sometimes cash-only. As happens, not all cash businesses file accurate taxes and not all employees who are paid in cash are truly honest with the IRS about their earnings. So when a waiter claims to only be making $25,000 a year but has enough money to afford the down-payment and a mortgage on a $250,000 apartment, they may feel the need to fudge the paperwork to justify where and how they obtained their pillowcases full of cash. “Our responsibility was to provide credit to the community, not to be a policeman,” explains Thomas Sung. After more than 10 days of deliberations, the jury found Abacus and two top employees not guilty on all of the more than 180 counts they faced. Some on the jury say they felt the bank should have been held liable, but that under the letter of the law they could not find Abacus guilty. “I didn’t feel great about it,” one juror tells Frontline. “But I wouldn’t have felt great if the verdict been guilty.” Vance and his team still maintain that they were right to prosecute Abacus and that they weren’t picking on the bank just because it served the Chinese immigrant community. The D.A. contends that accusations of cultural bias in this case are “misplaced,” and that his office would have acted the same if it were a bank that had served the South American or Indian communities in New York City. What Vance does not address is why he failed to take this action against banks that were so big that their fraud touched the lives of all New Yorkers. Jaywalking Neil Barofsky, who previously headed up the mortgage fraud for the U.S. Attorney’s office in NYC, likened Vance’s indictment of Abacus to the NYPD giving someone a ticket for jaywalking; yes, it’s illegal but it’s also a waste of valuable resources. “Throwing your hands up in the air and suggesting that – well, gee, any time a crime is committed, we put all of our resources in to prove it, is just not true,” explains Barofsky, adding that “regulators and prosecutors have to act with the necessary discretion of when to bring charges and when not to bring charges.” Vance counters that Barofsky is “entitled to his own opinion.” “My view is — if I take $5 out of your wallet, I’ve taken your money,” he explains. “Ultimately, if I give that back to you, or if you don’t, at the very end, actually have any loss because the money gets back to you, that’s still, in our view, a larceny.” Jill Sung doesn’t see the logic there. “If I sold Fannie Mae a loan for $5, not only did they get their $5 back on time, as what they thought they were going to get it, they also got $3, $4 to $5 back in interest, which makes it $10, so tell me how that is considered larceny,” she asks. Watch the whole Frontline tonight on PBS or at PBS.org. by Chris Morran via Consumerist

http://www.bollywoodnews4free.tk/2017/09/only-one-bank-was-indicted-for-mortgage.html

#Only One Bank Was Indicted For Mortgage Fraud Tied To The 2008 Collapse — And It Was Innocent <p>If

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