ECONOMIC DEVASTATION: 3.4 Million Can’t Pay Their Mortgage Due to Massive Lockdown Supported by Trump
Shane Trejo
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Right now, at least 3.4 million homeowners are not paying their mortgages due to the extreme recession caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
While that may get them by momentarily, they will be expected to pay that money back at some point. The CARES Act bailout package is a stopgap, allowing homeowners to delay payments for up to a year, but that may only temporarily hold back economic doom.
“They told me, yes, you can skip three months’ payments,” said New York resident Frank Gullo, who has had his hours slashed by Long Island Rail Road, to NPR about his mortgage lender. “But then they told me there was a balloon payment at the end of it.”
“You know, it stresses us out,” said Gullo’s wife, Jasmine, who has lost her job as a concert tour promoter because of the shutdown. “It’s like a black cloud hanging over my head.”
Frank and Jasmine are unable to fathom how they and millions of other beleaguered Americans will be able to make ends meet under these conditions.
“If everyone’s lost their job at this point,” Frank said, “how is that helping? That’s doing the exact opposite. That’s putting people in further debt once we get out of this.”
“It’s impossible,” Jasmine said. “This pile of money is just going to magically appear from somewhere?” The Gullo family has been forced to dip into their 401(k) retirement fund just to stay afloat. This is an early indicator that the CARES Act, which was promoted aggressively and signed into law by President Donald Trump, is doing little to give relief to the Americans who need it the most.
“In the vast majority of cases, what should happen at the end of the CARES Act forbearance period is that homeowners should be given the opportunity to have those missed payments put on the back end of their mortgage,” said Diane Thompson, a former attorney with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Thompson believes the missed payments ought to be put at the back end of an individual’s mortgage so they will not have exorbitant fees to pay back once the pandemic comes to close. This is how the system should work if the letter of the law is followed, Thompson believes.
“When servicers are telling homeowners that they have to make a lump sum payment, that’s contrary to the law and contrary to all of the guidance I’ve seen coming out from the various regulators,” Thompson said.
However, with the CARES Act being written by lobbyists and muscled through without any deliberation at Trump’s behest, this has not been the case. The CARES Act has turned out to be another cruel Wall Street power grab that crushes the little guy, emblematic of the federal swamp that Trump has refused to drain as Commander-in-Chief.
Thompson is calling for Congress to spring into action once more and write rules to clarify these protections and help the consumer from being preyed upon by rapacious mortgage lenders.
“We absolutely need Congress to step in here, so that there’s a simple clear path,” she said. “The simplest, the easiest thing to do for people who’ve missed mortgage payments is simply to put those payments on the back end.”
Although President Donald Trump became the leader of the working man, he is listening to the deep state experts by keeping the coronavirus lockdown in place. He is ignoring his constituents, who are getting crushed by the economic calamity, as they plead for their country to be returned to normalcy.
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