The Great Tracker Mortgages Robbery

[Rossfan]

What law have the bastards broken though?

[Hardy]

What law have the b**tards broken though?

Theft is a crime, at least for ordinary people. Pilfering a person's assets to the tune of tens of thousands by deception, lying, fraud and breach of contract is a particularly odious form of theft.

Woodie Guthrie put it better:
As through this world I've wandered
I've seen all kinds of men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.

[Billys Boots]

Is the 'crime' not that the banks were 'advising' customers that foregoing their tracker mortgages was a better financial option for them (their customers)?  Which it wasn't.

I don't think so. At the time the ECB rate was relatively high and so switching from the tracker for a fixed period made obvious sense. The unwillingness to allow lenders to revert to the tracker is the issue I'm aware of.

Surely this is the point though - they were told they would be able to revert and when they wanted to they were told different, is that not correct?

Yes, as far as I understand it.

For the purposes of completeness here (and just for information, I'm not arguing with anyone), I've been (for commercial reasons) following the ECB rate since 2002 and at no point did commercial mortgage rates fall below the ECB plus margin rates being offered for commercial mortgages.  As I recall, the last time I changed my (domestic) mortage (2006), the rates I was offered were indistinguishable from the commercial rates being offered at the time. 

[Esmarelda]

Billy, I'm not sure what you're saying but I'd have thought, leaving compensation aside, that a calculation will be carried out that compares the interest charged on the affected loans with what would have been charged had the loan reverted to a tracker when the fixed period finished. The difference will be the amount due back to the borrower. There probably will have to be other adjustments too but I'd have thought that's the crux of it.

[rosnarun]

Is the 'crime' not that the banks were 'advising' customers that foregoing their tracker mortgages was a better financial option for them (their customers)?  Which it wasn't.

I don't think so. At the time the ECB rate was relatively high and so switching from the tracker for a fixed period made obvious sense. The unwillingness to allow lenders to revert to the tracker is the issue I'm aware of.

Surely this is the point though - they were told they would be able to revert and when they wanted to they were told different, is that not correct?

either way the borrower made a choice maybe a bad one but their choice.
as for bad advice what the difference between that and a car sales man telling you that a Toyota is better than a Volkswagen or a Skoda, it still buyer beware .
my reading is that everyone knows they banks are a soft target  and any kind of pressure can be put on them and with all the stage booing and hissing and they're own vurnerable state cpuld very well make them five in .

f some one has written evidence that they would be allowed back on a tracker then they have a very good chance in a courtroom of getting compensation and should do that otherwise its just hearsay even then it would be a breach of contract rather than a Crime?

The Capitalist  recovery system was a bail of of the institution of the bank to the benefit of   Account holders Big and small   and the Bond holders. all the top guys got sacked (except for boucher who brought BOI back to profitability and repaid all GOV Monies) the shareholders got slaughtered, and cheques were honered and the bondholders kept issuing loans and the world went on after a few bumpy months/years

[Esmarelda]

Is the 'crime' not that the banks were 'advising' customers that foregoing their tracker mortgages was a better financial option for them (their customers)?  Which it wasn't.

I don't think so. At the time the ECB rate was relatively high and so switching from the tracker for a fixed period made obvious sense. The unwillingness to allow lenders to revert to the tracker is the issue I'm aware of.

Surely this is the point though - they were told they would be able to revert and when they wanted to they were told different, is that not correct?

either way the borrower made a choice maybe a bad one but their choice.
as for bad advice what the difference between that and a car sales man telling you that a Toyota is better than a Volkswagen or a Skoda, it still buyer beware .
my reading is that everyone knows they banks are a soft target  and any kind of pressure can be put on them and with all the stage booing and hissing and they're own vurnerable state cpuld very well make them five in .

f some one has written evidence that they would be allowed back on a tracker then they have a very good chance in a courtroom of getting compensation and should do that otherwise its just hearsay even then it would be a breach of contract rather than a Crime?

The Capitalist  recovery system was a bail of of the institution of the bank to the benefit of   Account holders Big and small   and the Bond holders. all the top guys got sacked (except for boucher who brought BOI back to profitability and repaid all GOV Monies) the shareholders got slaughtered, and cheques were honered and the bondholders kept issuing loans and the world went on after a few bumpy months/years

It wasn't necessarily a bad move. If, for example, a borrower moved to a fixed rate that saved them money compared to the tracker rate for the period of the fixed term then surely that's a good move? Whether it was a good move or not is irrelevant though isn't it? Either they were entitled to go back to the tracker or they weren't.

It would appear that the banks, collectively, are admitting that thousands or their customers have been wronged. I'm not clear on detail but there seems to be little doubt from either side that refunds and compensation are due and will be paid.

[Hardy]

Is the 'crime' not that the banks were 'advising' customers that foregoing their tracker mortgages was a better financial option for them (their customers)?  Which it wasn't.

I don't think so. At the time the ECB rate was relatively high and so switching from the tracker for a fixed period made obvious sense. The unwillingness to allow lenders to revert to the tracker is the issue I'm aware of.

Surely this is the point though - they were told they would be able to revert and when they wanted to they were told different, is that not correct?

either way the borrower made a choice maybe a bad one but their choice.
as for bad advice what the difference between that and a car sales man telling you that a Toyota is better than a Volkswagen or a Skoda, it still buyer beware .
my reading is that everyone knows they banks are a soft target  and any kind of pressure can be put on them and with all the stage booing and hissing and they're own vurnerable state cpuld very well make them five in .

f some one has written evidence that they would be allowed back on a tracker then they have a very good chance in a courtroom of getting compensation and should do that otherwise its just hearsay even then it would be a breach of contract rather than a Crime?

The Capitalist  recovery system was a bail of of the institution of the bank to the benefit of   Account holders Big and small   and the Bond holders. all the top guys got sacked (except for boucher who brought BOI back to profitability and repaid all GOV Monies) the shareholders got slaughtered, and cheques were honered and the bondholders kept issuing loans and the world went on after a few bumpy months/years

Even the banks themselves are not as enthusiastic in defence of their actions as yourself. In fact, they've stopped defending them, admitted that they were wrongful, agreed to refund the money embezzled and are considering the level of compensation that will be  offered. You don't compensate somebody for doing them good or for an action that is not wrongful.

"Wrongful" is simply a weasel word for "criminal" in this case, since, as I said in a previous post, obtaining money bywrongful means is theft.

[Eamonnca1]

It's amazing how blinded people are by theories that have utterly as and completely failed. Just as communism drastically failed in Eastern Europe and many other places, capitalism has spectacularly failed throughout the developed world. Globalisation has been a disaster and many people who were cheerleaders for it initially accept it has been a mess. The trouble with economic theories are they are just that - theories - and any stringent application of them is pretty much guaranteed to fail. They are not scientific despite some claims that they are, they are just opinions and need to be treated as that. The hilarious Irish groupthink (even after bailing out the banks and covering 43% of Europe's banking debt) of capitalism good, socialism bad is so nonsensical it drives me crazy. Elements of both theories have merit and should be factored into decision making but rigid adherence is just plain stupid.

Once we were forced to nationalise the banks we should have maintained control until we were 100% sure everything was cleaned up and we could never, ever be caught like that again. I think we've been too quick to re-privatise.

Where in the developed world has it failed? Has it failed in the developing world?

[Eamonnca1]

What law have the b**tards broken though?

The problem with scams like this is it's usually civil law rather than criminal law that they've broken. So somebody has to sue the blackguards at their own expense as opposed to calling the cops and letting them prosecute at the public expense.

Cormac O'hEadhra was talking about this the other day, he asked what'd be the point of imposing fines on the banks when the executives at the top wouldn't suffer any personal penalty and the added cost would just be passed on to the customers. The only solution I can see is for tougher laws on white collar crime to make this sort of thing a criminal offense so we can start doling out jail time to thieving bankers.

[Declan]

Fintan O'Toole: The corruption of Irish banking goes back 30 years

The betrayal of basic ethics goes so deep only the criminal law can root it out

We really should have a parade. It may not be quite up there with the centenaries of the Easter Rising or the Battle of the Somme, but surely the 30th anniversary of the corruption of the Irish banking system is worth marking. It is, after all, living history, a part of what we are. The word of the moment regarding Irish banking is "culture", but it is a euphemism for the systematic abandonment of basic ethics, of right and wrong. That started in 1987. In the previous year, the State had introduced deposit interest retention tax (Dirt) – as it went into force, the banks discovered that they could attract more deposits by allowing the local farmer and shopkeeper and doctor to sign a form claiming to be resident outside the country and therefore exempt from Dirt.

It was the most blatant of frauds – bank staff in rural towns had to pretend people they saw every day were not there at all, that they were really in Boston or Berlin or Birmingham. The lies had to be lived out as intimate, ordinary, mundane things. And they spread from the top: the great and the good of Irish life, the Jesuit boys who filled the boardrooms and the executive suites of the banks decided that these frauds were just business. They eyed each other and thought: "If we don't do this, the other crowd will." A rot set in and it has never been stopped.

Mark Hely-Hutchinson was chief executive of Bank of Ireland from 1983 to 1990. He was perhaps the last gentleman in Irish banking. He treated everyone who worked for him with dignity and respect. He could give a sincere Christian answer to the question of what he thought corporate government to be: "I think that very simply, that corporate governance includes behaving to your customers and to your staff and to the public the way you would like other people to deal with you." And if we want to understand the abysmal ethics of Irish banking, we might recall the fate of one of the great lost documents of modern Ireland: Mark Hely-Hutchinson's abortive code of conduct for bankers.

Hely-Hutchinson drew up the code shortly after he took over Bank of Ireland. It was an attempt at an ethical charter for the industry, an effort to ensure that if one bank behaved properly (by not opening bogus non-resident accounts, for example), its competitors would not undercut it. But crucially it also required the support of the Revenue Commissioners, the Department of Finance and the Central Bank. If a code of ethical conduct was going to work, these powerful State agencies had to give it serious backing.

Hely-Hutchinson had his first discussions about the code with the Revenue in 1983. As he later recalled before the Public Accounts Committee: "We produced a draft code of conduct for our own staff, discussed that further with the Revenue and with the Department of Finance and eventually we stated that we were going to do it, we were going to implement it unilaterally anyway, and we hoped that the Revenue would do something about making sure that other organisations followed suit."

"The Dirt scandal was the great alarm bell. But the State went back to sleep. It woke up in 2008 with an existential crisis generated by a banking system with no moral compass

But as far as pretty much everyone else was concerned, Hely-Hutchinson was a naive do-gooder. He got nowhere with the Revenue. When the Dirt fraud was being implemented through most of the banking system, he pressed the Revenue again about the code of ethical conduct. They told him "everybody had written them a nice cosy letter saying 'of course' but they hadn't got any means of policing the situation and they weren't very optimistic that it would actually happen; in other words, that other people would adopt the code of conduct." And the Central Bank? When Hely-Hutchinson pressed it about the code of conduct, "Oh, it would have been a very, sort of, warm polite response, 'What a pity these other people don't have the same ethics as you do.'"

This is not ancient history. We're still living with it. The Dirt scandal was the great alarm bell. In its report the PAC pointed to be the collective betrayal of the public interest and of basic ethical values by the boards of the banks: "Given the eminence of many of the members of the boards... it is surprising that they did not bring a greater weight to bear on the enforcing of ethical standards either within their organisations or the banking sector generally." But when this alarm went off, the State threw the clock at the wall, turned over and went back to sleep. It woke up in 2008 with an existential crisis generated by a banking system that had no moral compass, that knew no boundaries.

And we'll do this again and again – frauds followed by vague wailing about "culture", followed by more frauds. The only culture that really matters is the culture of impunity. When a system has no ethics, when it does not know right from wrong, it has to be educated. There might have been a time when a code of ethics would have imparted the necessary lessons. Now, the only code that will make a difference is the criminal code

[johnneycool]

Is the 'crime' not that the banks were 'advising' customers that foregoing their tracker mortgages was a better financial option for them (their customers)?  Which it wasn't.

I don't think so. At the time the ECB rate was relatively high and so switching from the tracker for a fixed period made obvious sense. The unwillingness to allow lenders to revert to the tracker is the issue I'm aware of.

Surely this is the point though - they were told they would be able to revert and when they wanted to they were told different, is that not correct?

either way the borrower made a choice maybe a bad one but their choice.
as for bad advice what the difference between that and a car sales man telling you that a Toyota is better than a Volkswagen or a Skoda, it still buyer beware .
my reading is that everyone knows they banks are a soft target  and any kind of pressure can be put on them and with all the stage booing and hissing and they're own vurnerable state cpuld very well make them five in .

f some one has written evidence that they would be allowed back on a tracker then they have a very good chance in a courtroom of getting compensation and should do that otherwise its just hearsay even then it would be a breach of contract rather than a Crime?

The Capitalist  recovery system was a bail of of the institution of the bank to the benefit of   Account holders Big and small   and the Bond holders. all the top guys got sacked (except for boucher who brought BOI back to profitability and repaid all GOV Monies) the shareholders got slaughtered, and cheques were honered and the bondholders kept issuing loans and the world went on after a few bumpy months/years

Nationalisation by a different name you mean with the working man picking up the tab for the excesses of the elite.

True capitalist workings means the weak fail and that's what should have happened here, but it didn't and the same people are skulking around the same institutions and not a finger was laid on any of them.

Laws are written by the rich for the rich.

[magpie seanie]

It's amazing how blinded people are by theories that have utterly as and completely failed. Just as communism drastically failed in Eastern Europe and many other places, capitalism has spectacularly failed throughout the developed world. Globalisation has been a disaster and many people who were cheerleaders for it initially accept it has been a mess. The trouble with economic theories are they are just that - theories - and any stringent application of them is pretty much guaranteed to fail. They are not scientific despite some claims that they are, they are just opinions and need to be treated as that. The hilarious Irish groupthink (even after bailing out the banks and covering 43% of Europe's banking debt) of capitalism good, socialism bad is so nonsensical it drives me crazy. Elements of both theories have merit and should be factored into decision making but rigid adherence is just plain stupid.

Once we were forced to nationalise the banks we should have maintained control until we were 100% sure everything was cleaned up and we could never, ever be caught like that again. I think we've been too quick to re-privatise.

Where in the developed world has it failed? Has it failed in the developing world?

Anywhere financial institutions were bailed out by governments. You couldn't have a clearer definition of failure than that.

[Franko]

It's amazing how blinded people are by theories that have utterly as and completely failed. Just as communism drastically failed in Eastern Europe and many other places, capitalism has spectacularly failed throughout the developed world. Globalisation has been a disaster and many people who were cheerleaders for it initially accept it has been a mess. The trouble with economic theories are they are just that - theories - and any stringent application of them is pretty much guaranteed to fail. They are not scientific despite some claims that they are, they are just opinions and need to be treated as that. The hilarious Irish groupthink (even after bailing out the banks and covering 43% of Europe's banking debt) of capitalism good, socialism bad is so nonsensical it drives me crazy. Elements of both theories have merit and should be factored into decision making but rigid adherence is just plain stupid.

Once we were forced to nationalise the banks we should have maintained control until we were 100% sure everything was cleaned up and we could never, ever be caught like that again. I think we've been too quick to re-privatise.

Where in the developed world has it failed? Has it failed in the developing world?

You can't be serious?

[Eamonnca1]

It's amazing how blinded people are by theories that have utterly as and completely failed. Just as communism drastically failed in Eastern Europe and many other places, capitalism has spectacularly failed throughout the developed world. Globalisation has been a disaster and many people who were cheerleaders for it initially accept it has been a mess. The trouble with economic theories are they are just that - theories - and any stringent application of them is pretty much guaranteed to fail. They are not scientific despite some claims that they are, they are just opinions and need to be treated as that. The hilarious Irish groupthink (even after bailing out the banks and covering 43% of Europe's banking debt) of capitalism good, socialism bad is so nonsensical it drives me crazy. Elements of both theories have merit and should be factored into decision making but rigid adherence is just plain stupid.

Once we were forced to nationalise the banks we should have maintained control until we were 100% sure everything was cleaned up and we could never, ever be caught like that again. I think we've been too quick to re-privatise.

Where in the developed world has it failed? Has it failed in the developing world?

You can't be serious?

I'm deadly serious. Sure capitalism can be corrupt in places, but it's better able to recover from corruption than any alternative that's been tried. Trust me, I've been to the Soviet Union and their system did not work. Capitalism works best when corporations are small enough that they can go to the wall without having to be bailed out. The recent bailouts we saw were not capitalism in action, that was private profits and socialized losses.

As for the developing world, billions of people in China and India have been lifted out of poverty by globalization. Not many western politicians want to say that out loud because it's not a popular view, but it's an indisputable fact.

[tiempo]

Dunphy's The Stand podcast is worth a listen on this topic.

Ep 96: David Hall, CEO of Irish Mortgage Holders, on Ireland's Delinquent Bankers

thestandwitheamondunphy.com