The March of The Plutocrats . . .

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Jeebus.  The march toward transforming America in to the world's largest third world oligarchy continues briskly apace:

Anyone who has ever struggled to get her landlord to fix a broken appliance can imagine how much worse it could have been if she were paying rent to a faceless hedge fund based thousands of miles away. That tenant’s nightmare may be on its way to reality for hundreds of thousands of Americans, as Wall Street firms have snapped up 200,000 family houses with the intention of renting them out.

Banks, hedge funds, and private equity firms have been amassing those real estate holdings for a few years now, but their plan for wringing profit out of the rental market is just starting to draw real scrutiny. The New York-based hedge fund Blackstone Group is now the nation’s largest landlord after purchasing over 40,000 foreclosed family homes for the purpose of renting them out.

While firms like Blackstone often farm out the day-to-day management of the rental properties to third-party companies, those intermediaries are often also based in faraway states. Some have a track record of being unresponsive to basic things like broken sewer pipes, as the Huffington Post has reported. The banks and their intermediaries may neglect basic upkeep of these properties. In that worst-case scenario for renters, local and attentive property managers and building supers will get replaced with “Wall Street-based absentee slumlords,” in David Dayen’s phrase.

On-the-ground concerns for communities and renters go beyond neglect, however. The rising influence of financial titans turned local landlords could threaten all sorts of public services. In the case of Huber Heights, OH, the hedge fund Magnetar Capital has become the largest landlord in the whole town and is using that influence to try to extract lower property tax charges from the town — a change that would undermine funding for schools and other public services for locals, but boost the bottom line of the Illinois-based financial giant.

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/01/24/3203471/wall-street-landlord/


Hmmm . . . let us analyze this for a moment:

Artificially inflate the housing bubble, make a killing on mortgages and mortgage-backed securities, then tank the housing market and the world economy along with it, get a $750 billion dollar taxpayer funded bailout, foreclose (illegally quite often) on many of those properties because the economy you helped crash resulted in people losing jobs and subsequently their homes, then buy those foreclosed homes back for pennies on the dollar, and finally to bring it all full circle and rent out those homes at premium rates.

It is The Gadfly's not-so humble view that this is nothing less than diabolically genius.  And The Gadfly would be absolutely shocked if it wasn't a significant chapter of the bankster's and the Wall Street wolves' business plan all along.

Telling ya' --- hangman's nooses.  It is looking more and more like that is the only thing that will fix it.


----TFG