A Day In The Life Of The Bouncy Banker-A visit from Mr. V!

Letter to the Bank Manager #83 (Occupy Your Home!)

Crappy photo collage thrown together in haste! But you get the idea.

My dear Bank Manager,

I write to you on a fine sunny morning after days enduring nature’s rage. We have tree limbs in our back yard that narrowly missed scarring our home. Halloween was a blast this year as we negotiated downed power lines and piles of tree waste to get to those baskets of candy sitting on the stoops of homes that were without electricity. You must be relieved to hear we still have our power! This home on which I still owe a massive mortgage to, well, you, still stands. If the massive tree but yards away had chosen to give up the ghost the house could’ve been crushed. You almost lost your leverage over us.

This all set me to thinking about how it is that despite years of living in this fine shell, filling it with the warm sounds of children playing, laughing and singing—in essence breathing life into it—you, with a swipe of your pen could, if we were to skip a payment, lose one more paycheck, suffer one more medical bill, could end it all. I resent that. Truly it does come down to many missteps that, over the years, built up to a loss of equity, a tragic yet common situation. Indeed the situation is so common that people are discovering, of necessity, an inner creativity that shows the way to an alternative perspective, another way of looking at this mess. Instead of quivering with a constant gnawing anxiety over the fragility of our situation we shall instead take the bull by the horns (yes! That bull!). We have decided to go out into that yard, MY yard, no longer YOUR yard—mine I say! Mine!—I shall put my sweat and effort into sawing up those tree limbs to make fire wood (don’t see you out here with your chainsaw!) to heat my, MY family’s home. We, my family and I, not you, shall occupy our home! Inspired by the visionaries at Occupy Wall Street we shall Occupy Our Home!

Well? What do you think? Surely you are happy to see your client excited, and inspired, with fire in the belly? We are circling the wagons and hunkering down to a long, tough winter—in the comfort of OUR not YOUR home.

As these fresh creative juices flow I wanted you to be the first to know, you my bank manager, the one to whom I naturally turn in difficult times, for advice, for therapy and for friendship, a deep abiding friendship that can endure such difficult bumps in our relationship.

Yours sincerely,


Art O’Connor

Op-Ed Columnist

Another Inside Job

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: March 13, 2011

Count me among those who were glad to see the documentary “Inside Job” win an Oscar. The film reminded us that the financial crisis of 2008, whose aftereffects are still blighting the lives of millions of Americans, didn’t just happen — it was made possible by bad behavior on the part of bankers, regulators and, yes, economists. for the rest of Another Inside Job

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Paul Krugman

Go to Columnist Page »

Blog: The Conscience of a Liberal

for the rest of Another Inside Job

Why Struggling Homeowners are not being Heard

In my naivety I still imagine it reasonable to ask the banks to restructure the debt they helped create when they encouraged and made loans based on home values they knew were unsubstainable.

Letter to the Bank #36

Dear Bank Manager,

Walking past the crossing guard this morning he hailed me with: “Ah! The man with the money!” Naturally I responded (as any good citizen would) with: “Ha! Yeh, right! When I have some extra cash I’ll give you some!” We are always exchanging quips but this one, I must admit, left me somewhat stunned. As I walked away it occurred to me that both of us knew this to be a joke. Money? Who has money these days? The idea of it is almost quaint! Which brings me to a pertinent question: Why don’t I have any money? You could as well apply it to yourself I’m sure…well maybe not you but perhaps someone you know…unless you are in the top one per cent of earners in which case this just doesn’t apply. For them what I write here is written in some kind of Alien language that simply does not compute.
We can breath again. They’ve gone.
Seriously though—I work, my wife works, our children make mud bricks in the back yard for board and lodging, we are even frugal in a middle-class-sort-of-frugal-way. One major reason for this would be the confirmed fact that real wages have pretty much been locked in since the seventies whilst the cost of living has skyrocketed, expanded much like a party balloon—oh my gosh! What an analogy! Like…like…like a balloon that is about to pop! Then, as soon as one has built up any savings a vulture comes down and eats them all up. This has happened to us a lot lately—flooding in the basement, two cars on the fritz and needing major repairs two weeks in a row to the point of do we keep them going or roll them in to another less old clunker. Is it better to stay with the devil you know or exchange him for one your car mechanic claims to know, if distantly. Then anxiety sends us to the doctor with back complaints and nasty scalp conditions that our health insurance (we are SO LUCKY to have health insurance) all of a sudden deems a pre-existing condition, or not covered in the small print, or covered but yet to be met by our various deductibles. By this point the hair is so easy to tear out.
I’d feel no pity whatsoever for said plight if I was homeless or jobless, or without health insurance. I’d probably feel the same way if I was a wealthy—how can I put this delicately—Republican. I’d probably scoff. I’d say: Well what do you expect you lazy, liberal, socialist, bohemian, HOBOhemian whiner—a hand out? I’d say it with gusto too! Funny that—you can imagine the very same words coming out of the mouths of the most disenfranchised in this our—society. Now there’s a party of possibilities, an alliance. If I were you I’d have stopped reading by now. They are right! Why should the banks undermine their profit motives to prop up individuals like my ignoble self who wish to be freed up from financial anxieties so they can daub with paint on canvas all day, or write their silly letters—or cut sharks in half (down to size so to speak). And why should the government get involved? They are already way over extended. Like the banks they have financial anxieties of their own. However I do feel compelled to point out that I remain in my ignobility, a good citizen. I pay my taxes toward the dubious common good. I keep paying the interest on my mortgage and credit cards and ever so occasionally pay something toward principal. Now if only you’d stop asking for all that exorbitant interest and let me pay down my principal we could all get back on track. Better that than me, and millions of others in the same boat, from defaulting. I do sometimes feel that if I take one step too many backwards I’ll fall into the biggest hole and the only option will be to walk away from it all. That isn’t an option anybody would choose lightly. Strangely though it is almost comforting to imagine the silver lining around the black, black cloud that has been hanging over one’s head—the loss of all that Sisyphean debt.

Yours sincerely,

K. Witherkay

PS—As a good-for-nothing laz-a-bout I’m thinking of making these letters into big paintings and then persuading corporate art collections to buy them. I really should do that. I will.

PPS—I asked my seven year old to draw a lazy monster AKA a lazy middle class bohemian monster like me, not that I tried to explain. The somewhat phallic nature of the drawing is, I assure you, unintentional.

Hands Bitterman Lashes Out

Letter to the Bank #14

Dear Bank,

I’m just staring right now, staring as the value of my only asset drops! I can literally see the foundations of my home sinking into the soft clayey soil, the home where I have raised—not only two fine young whippersnappers—but also some very fine pumpkins! What shall I do when the cost of my mortgage is more than the value of my home? Should I walk away? You tell me-you are, after all, a banker! You know what the responsible thing to do is…don’t you?

Aggrieved as usual,

K

PS Sorry if I am repeating myself.
PPS How are your Stocks doing? Mine are almost finished!

Letter to the Bank #10

Dear Bank,

In the interests of full disclosure and utter transparency I think I should tell you I recently signed a petition. The petition says: "Congress must place enforceable, common-sense limits on salaries at all the banks that have taken taxpayer dollars."

I also cracked a joke. My question to the banks was this: Where did all the bail out money go? What hole did they pour it down? I wanted to know so I could go spelunking.

More seriously I also asked them this:
What would they do if the value of their home were less than the money they owed on it? Would they walk away?

Yours (whether I like it or not),

K