FROM YAHOO FINANCIAL

BEYOND FINANCIAL RECKLESSNESS- CORRUPTION OF THE COURT? and a positive surprise
(5-Oct-07)
I am not an employee of CFC or any of its subsidiaries and affiliates, and I have never been one either.

But sometimes I feel that had I been hired today by Countrywide for Phase I data entry, I could probably do a pretty good job witout much training... while in December 2006 (10-11 months ago!), I did not even know what the name Countrywides stood for, what are Regulation B, pipeline report,Internal Audit Committee,secondary and tertiary mortgage markets. sub-prime, wholesale branch, underwriting, real estate code...

Otherwise, here are some conclusions I draw from this yet unfinished affair:

1) Don't know much about the history of Countrywide's rapid growth as a corporation, but I must assume that the development of an extremely high capactiy, real time, integrated, computerized underwriting system had at least something to do with it. The way that the system was operated in recent years may also be part of the problem.

2) California was the primary victim of Enron energy manipulations, and the affair can be summed as the fraudulent transfer of substantial wealth from California to texas. But that did not happen by chance - California prepared itself to be the victim by design, through corrupt deregulation. Today, the FBI reports that california is the epicenter of a growing epidemic of real estate and mortgage fraud. That too is no coincidence. It appears that the system in LA today is such that real estate and other types of white collar crime are tolerated by law enforcement (it is just a business dispute), hardly considered a valid argument by real estate lawyers (this is a civil court, it sounds bad to talk about fraud, it's too extreme), and hardly accepted by judges in court (it's a red herring).

3) California real estate code reads like a nice piece of legistlative work. But in reality it is not workable today.

4) Some say that the japanese econony pays annually in reduced growth the price of lack of leadership to move its economy out of the use of the traditional carved seals in banking and other business transactions.
Similarly, it may be found, that the american economy is paying and will pay annually in reduced growth the price of lack of leadership and initiative to move the economy, the business community, and the public at large into the age of digital signatures, through a long term, measured, education-based plan at the national level.