Homewreckers

September 1, 2019
A tale of greed and corruption involving "corporate landlords" who "drove a generational transfer of wealth from hundreds of thousands of individual homeowners to a handful of well-heeled bankers and titans of private equity." Many previous books have painted searing portraits of massive financial fraud in the mortgage and investment banking world, including David Dayen's Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street's Great Foreclosure Fraud (2016). While Dayen told his tale mostly from the ground up, Glantz (The War Comes Home: Washington's Battle Against America's Veterans, 2009, etc.), a Peabody Award-winning investigative reporter, relates the saga mostly from the top down. The author spotlights a variety of contemporary robber barons, including Donald Trump before he was president; Trump's father, Fred; Wilbur L. Ross Jr. before he was the Secretary of Commerce; and Steven T. Mnuchin before he became Secretary of the Treasury. Glantz's impressive research leads him to portray each of the tycoons as morally bankrupt and utterly without compassion for homeowners who lost their property. Occasionally, the author shifts the narrative to Sandy Jolley, a cheated homeowner who gathered copious amounts of information, found a lawyer willing to present her damning case to the federal government, and stood to gain substantial damages from the bankers under a law meant to reward whistleblowers. As Glantz relentlessly builds the indictment against the bankers, he wonders why law enforcement agencies failed to take any meaningful action. "It's hard to imagine [deals] so perfectly designed to lazily allow the government to undercut working-class Americans on behalf of a small group of billionaires," he writes, "but that is exactly what happened again and again." In addition to the Trumps, Ross, and Mnuchin, Glantz also levels warranted attacks against John Paulson, Jamie Dimon, Jared Kushner, and Sean Hannity. The similarities of the moguls' many predations may tire some readers, but the insertion of Jolley into the narrative bolsters the storyline. A solid, useful exploration of a system that "needs substantial, systemic change."

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September 23, 2019
Members of President Trump’s inner circle have exploited the 2008 housing market collapse to amass wealth and power while sending U.S. homeownership rates to their lowest levels in more than 50 years, according to this cogent, infuriating exposé. Investigative journalist Glantz (The War Comes Home) targets such wealthy businessmen as U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, real estate investor Thomas Barrack Jr., and private equity fund founder Stephen Schwarzman, all of whom placed big bets on the housing market in the years after the crash. Between 2012 and 2014, for example, Schwarzman’s Blackstone Group spent $7.8 billion to buy 41,000 foreclosed homes across the U.S. and flip them into rental properties. Meanwhile, Mnunchin’s OneWest Bank was being rewarded under the terms of its loss-share agreement with the FDIC for foreclosing on thousands of reverse mortgages across Southern California. As a result of the “rigged” system that made such maneuvering possible, Glantz writes, millions of middle-class households have lost their best opportunity to build wealth. His lucid prose and impressive research make this an essential account of an under-the-radar housing crisis. Agent: Anthony Arnove, Roam Agency.