Today Occupy Wall Street (OWS) is having its National Day of Action to Stop and Reverse Foreclosures. The idea is that they can hurt the banks by forcing them to stop foreclosing. Only problem with this plan is that foreclosure delays help the banks as we introduced with our Foreclosure Roulette blog post, and demonstrated with our further analysis of foreclosure delays. In reality, attacking foreclosures will result in little more than leaving homeowners stuck in their prisons of debt - unable to sell and unable to move on with their lives.
ZeroHedge, a popular finance blog, misinterpreted a Bank of America email, which is clearly just simply trying to keep their agents and employees safe, property secure, and press relations intact (is that possible at this point), as indicating that Occupy Wall Street is getting Bank of America (BofA) where it hurts them most.
Not a chance - I'd actually venture that it is more likely a bank operative infiltrated OWS to come up with this boneheaded plan - after all the banks are running out of excuses to delay foreclosure at this point with the robo-signing crisis now a year old. Perfect timing, yet another reason for the banks to extend and pretend while continuing to leave non-performing assets marked-to-model allowing them to remain solvent and pay bonuses. If Occupy Wall Street really wanted to hurt banks they'd have a national don't make a payment month. More realistically they should lobby Congress to end mark-to-model accounting and foreclosure delays... if banks were forced to take losses now, I guarantee they'd suddenly become a lot more interested in principal balance reductions. Certainly there is no reason for banks to lower principal balances when they can leave them on their books at inflated valuations.
Who is OWS really helping today? We'd love to hear what you think.
