Broke, USA

by Gary Rivlin

  People in Dayton reached out to their congressional delegation hoping for help in Washington. They did their homework, and Jim McCarthy made contact with Martin Eakes and Bill Brennan. They were fighting national banks and other publicly traded companies with a broad geographical reach. This was a problem best fought in Washington, D.C., not Dayton city hall.

  Those hoping to warn the rest of the country about the threat posed by the subprime lenders had their successes. Andrew Cuomo, in his final days as HUD secretary under Bill Clinton, spoke out publicly against the problem and Cuomo, along with Larry Summers, the Treasury secretary, created a short-lived task force in April 2000 to examine predatory lending in the United States. That same year Congress would again turn its attention to the subprime lending industry when Congressman Jim Leach, a Republican from Iowa and the chairman of the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services, held a hearing to look at the situation. But it was the misfortune of those advocating reform that in the 1950s, a woman named Florence Gramm managed to buy a small bungalow home in Columbus, Georgia, despite the risks inherent in extending her credit.

  There’s no doubting Florence Gramm’s grit and fortitude. Her husband, Kenneth, suffered a stroke shortly after she gave birth to their son Phil. That left him partially paralyzed and unable to work. But Florence Gramm, a nurse, convinced a finance company to loan them the money they needed to buy a home, even though that meant she would need to work double shifts. Throughout his political career, which included three terms as a U.S. senator, Phil Gramm spoke frequently about the subprime loan that enabled his mother to become the first person in her family to own a home.

  Gramm wasn’t just any senator; he was determined to serve as his party’s resident expert on the financial industry—once he settled on a political party. He held a Ph.D. in economics and had taught at Texas A&M, while running an economic consulting firm on the side, before deciding to get into politics in the 1970s. The surest route to victory in Texas back then was to run as a Democrat, and that was what Gramm did when he was first elected to Congress, but he had switched to the Republican Party by the time of his election to the Senate in 1984. He is probably best known for his co-authorship of the landmark Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act, which in the 1980s established deficit reduction targets for the federal budget. More recently, he was the primary sponsor of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, the bill that undid the post-1929 crash reform mandating that banking, brokerage, and insurance businesses remain separate. There was no denying his power through the 1990s and into the 2000s. Any federal legislation curbing the behavior of the country’s subprime lenders would need to first pass muster with the powerful chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, and Senator Phil Gramm of Texas was not about to meddle with this corner of the free enterprise system that had played so exalted a role in his family’s history.

  “Some people look at subprime lending and see evil,” he said on the Senate floor during debate over a bill to clamp down on subprime lenders in 2001. “I look at subprime lending and I see the American dream in action. My mother lived it as a result of a finance company making a mortgage loan that a bank would not make.” And if nostalgia were not enough to ensure his gung-ho support, then there was also the generosity of these lenders who helped to keep him in office year after year. Between 1989 and 2002, commercial banks were more generous with Gramm than with anyone else in the Senate and he received more from Wall Street than all but a few colleagues. In 2000, the National Association of Mortgage Brokers praised Gramm for killing an anti–predatory lending bill that was gaining momentum in Congress.

  There’s a difference, of course, between a subprime loan that costs a borrower a couple of percentage points above standard mortgage rates and those costing five or ten percentage points more. Gramm told of the 50 percent premium his parents paid in interest rates because she was a higher credit risk, but Tommy Myers, Freddie Rogers, and Dora Byrd could only dream that they had been paying interest rates only 50 percent higher than the conventional rate. There were no doubt other differences between the mortgage that Florence and Kenneth Gramm received in the 1950s and the high-fee, high-interest-rate loans that some of Gramm’s colleagues wanted to curb. The Gramms received their loan prior to the deregulation of the 1980s, when lenders were still prohibited from charging more than 1 percent of the loan amount in up-front fees. It’s also doubtful that Florence Gramm’s loan would have been saddled by lump-sum credit insurance policies, giant balloon payments they couldn’t possibly afford, or any of the other practices critics were trying to curb.

  “We wanted to go for a federal fix,” McCarthy said. “Because that was really the way to deal with predatory lending. [But] basically, Senator Gramm’s view was, ‘Over my dead body,’ and so we said fine, we’ll start from the bottom up.”

  Maybe the biggest surprise following the success of Martin Eakes and his allies in North Carolina was that their victory didn’t inspire copy-cat bills in states across the country. Their victory had inspired people in Ohio, but the activist leading the charge in favor of an anti–predatory lending bill, Bill Faith, the executive director of a group called the Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio, was telling people it wasn’t time. “The banks and mortgage brokers and these other characters have the place completely locked down,” Faith told them. “We’re trying everything—and all it’s meant is our heads are bloody from hitting them against a wall.” California passed a watered-down subprime lender bill in October 2001, more than two years after North Carolina, but mainly the fight fell to a few cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and Dayton.

  The Chicago legislation came first, but it was a largely symbolic law, a bill that claimed jurisdiction only over those banks already doing business with the city. “We have very limited power as a city,” Mayor Richard M. Daley told the Chicago Sun-Times. “It’s basically building a groundswell.”

  Philadelphia’s law, passed in April 2001, was anything but symbolic. Tougher than even North Carolina’s, Philadelphia’s dictated that lenders operating inside the city limits could not charge more than 4 percent in up-front costs or interest rates more than 6.5 percent higher than a long-term Treasury bill. Philadelphia, a city with a population greater than that of twelve states, had its own Bill Brennan: Irv Ackelsberg, an attorney with Community Legal Services who as far back as the mid-1990s was talking about subprime lending as a “public crisis.” It’s as though society has dealt with the problem of inadequate credit among low-income people, Ackelsberg would say, by drowning them in destructive debt that only increases their chances of reaching financial ruin. Access to credit wasn’t necessarily a positive thing.

  The next locale to draw the industry’s attention, improbably, was the country’s 152nd-largest city, with slightly more people than Joliet, Illinois, but not nearly as many as Amarillo, Texas, or Newport News, Virginia.

  Dean Lovelace had never been the most popular fellow inside Dayton city hall. For starters there was the way he was elected, running against the political establishment in tandem with a white man who would be elected Dayton’s first Republican mayor in twenty-five years. And if that were not enough to earn the ire of his new colleagues, he ensured their antipathy by voting against the emergency measure they sponsored to grant themselves a raise. Lovelace would begin his crusade to champion an anti–predatory lending bill with the activist community at his side as well as the town’s main newspaper (“a striking jump in unscrupulous lending,” the Daily News wrote in a 2000 editorial, “[is] putting more low-income homeowners at increasingly higher risk of losing their homes”), but no solid allies among his fellow commissioners.

  Lovelace gave me a funny look when I asked him how his modest-sized city came to occupy so prominent a position in the fight against some of the nation’s biggest financial institutions. He had constituents complaining, he said with a shrug, and advocates asking him for help. Anyone doubting that Dayton was experiencing a widespread problem only had to
read the reports the Predatory Lending Project was submitting to the county. Its hotline was receiving so many calls that, despite having hired extra staffers to answer the phones, they simply stopped advertising the number. “It got to the point where there was such a backlog that people would have to wait six or eight weeks even to be seen,” McCarthy said. “We felt we were doing people a disservice.”

  Lovelace introduced his bill at the start of 2001, sparking an immediate backlash. In the suburbs a firm called Ohio Mortgage Funding had just set up shop. What critics don’t understand, its branch manager told the Daily News, is that the people who will be harmed by this legislation are the very people whom subprime’s critics are seemingly trying to help. “They’re going after predatory lenders,” he said, “and all they’ll do is make low-income people unable to get loans.” The title companies came to the defense of their brethren in the lending business, and even the mainstream banks lined up against Lovelace. “That was one of the big surprises,” Lovelace said. As he saw it, the mortgage products the town’s established banks were selling were a world apart from the predatory lending he was aiming to stop. To win their support, he agreed to amend his bill so it exempted any bank scoring at least a “satisfactory” on the CRA test used to measure their level of lending in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods. The banking establishment continued to oppose him nonetheless. “We have seven big banks in Dayton,” Lovelace said. “I can’t say all seven came out against us but most of them did.” Only in time did he realize that the corporate parents of most of these banks had subprime affiliates and that their affiliates were the problem.

  Lovelace made other compromises. He had originally proposed capping the fees a lender could charge at 3 percent of the loan total but he agreed to raise that to 5 percent. Similarly, he bumped the cap on the permissible interest rate from six percentage points above the going rate on a thirty-year Treasury bill to nine points. Some of its strongest provisions were left intact, though, like its prohibition against prepayment penalties and its ban on any loan with monthly payments that exceed 50 percent of a borrower’s income. The measure was unanimously passed into law in the summer of 2001.

  Elected officials and others from around the country phoned Lovelace with their congratulations but their praise was premature. Lovelace might have stopped the worst excesses of the subprime mortgage business but his ordinance only applied to Dayton proper, not the suburbs. The poverty industry may have first taken root on the city’s west side but they had crossed the river and were spreading into the first-ring suburbs and even to the more rural communities along Interstate 75 on the fringes of the metro area. As its industrial lifeblood continued to drain, Dayton, it seemed, was becoming a subprime city.

  Then the American Financial Services Association, a trade association representing the consumer finance companies and other lenders, challenged the bill’s legality in court. Instead of taking effect thirty days after its passage, as written, it would remain on hold pending a trial. That would give the industry time to turn its attention to the Ohio state legislature, which had the power to preempt Dayton’s ruling.

  Eight

  An Appetite for Subprime

  WASHINGTON, D.C., AND NEW YORK, 2000–2005

  Martin Eakes confesses he didn’t really know Sandy Weill’s name when a congressional staffer called his office asking if he could be in Washington the next day. Weill was a man editors put on the covers of their magazines, but apparently those weren’t magazines that Eakes read. Now Citigroup, the company Weill bought and transformed into the world’s largest financial titan, had announced it wanted to buy Associates—officially Associates First Capital—for $31 billion. They were holding a press conference the next day. Eakes was livid that a financial giant would lend its brand and its reputation to a company like Associates. Of course he would come.

  His hosts the next day were Congressman John LaFalce of Buffalo, then the ranking Democrat on the House Banking Committee, and Senator Paul Sarbanes of Maryland, then the ranking Democrat on the corresponding Senate committee. LaFalce and Sarbanes spoke and then, at least the way Eakes likes to tell the story, the two exchanged alarmed glances as he took his turn at the podium. Eakes casts himself in high dudgeon that day, telling the story of Freddie Rogers, declaring Associates a moral cancer eating away at the body of American communities. “I was up there saying, ‘We can’t allow this to continue any longer, we must stop it and we must stop it now,’” Eakes remembers. “I went up there with my normal, all-guns-blazing style.”

  A few weeks later, LaFalce, a fourteen-term member of Congress, sent a letter to Weill and also to Robert Rubin, the chairman of Citigroup’s executive committee and Bill Clinton’s former Treasury secretary, expressing his dismay that Citigroup intended to purchase a lender “that community advocates have for some time placed among the worst predatory lenders in the country.” Congress didn’t have the power to prevent the acquisition but a couple of committee chairs could make life miserable for a company; toward that end LaFalce named Eakes as his and Sarbanes’s emissary. To drive home the point, LaFalce and others sent a separate letter urging banking regulators to “closely scrutinize” the deal because of some “disturbing allegations.” Sanford I. Weill, tireless and driven, a man of relentless ambitions who had transformed Citigroup into what the New York Times Magazine dubbed “the world’s biggest money machine,” would have to deal with the likes of Martin Eakes.

  “Sarbanes and LaFalce basically deputized me,” Eakes said. “They told Weill and Rubin that they had no choice but to deal with this young punk. They couldn’t ignore me even if they wanted to.” With characteristic bravado, Eakes announced at his first meeting with Citigroup’s representatives, “You will change these practices. Or we will bring you to your knees.”

  Sandy Weill had attained great heights, but that only made his fall in the spring of 1985 seem that much more spectacular. He had arrived on Wall Street fresh out of Cornell, his finance degree in hand and ready to conquer the world, but instead he felt snubbed. A Jew from Brooklyn, born to Polish immigrants, he felt like an outsider in a world that favored the blue-bloods and WASPs. He started as a runner on Wall Street and was quickly promoted to broker, but after a few years he quit his job to help start a brokerage firm that eventually Weill and his partners sold to American Express for nearly $1 billion in stock. “The Jews are going to take over American Express and they’ll never know what hit them,” Weill boasted to a friend, according to one of his biographers. But American Express was run by men of lineage. Weill, by contrast, was brilliant and cunning but also plump and ill-mannered. He chewed his nails and wore rumpled suits and propped his scuffed shoes up on the furniture while smoking fat, pungent cigars. He ultimately attained the president’s post at American Express, but finding himself on non-native soil, he was out within four years of his arrival. At fifty-two and with a net worth north of $50 million, Weill leased a pricey set of offices in the Seagram Building on Park Avenue, hired a personal assistant, and waited for the phone to ring.

  All the well-wishers offering their sympathies kept Weill busy during those first weeks. His wife thought the two of them would travel the world together, but Weill was impatient and hyperactive; he was not a man to ease into the comfortable life of the rich gentleman farmer. The most she got from him was a fortnight in Europe. “The prospects of being away for more than a few weeks from whatever action might arise,” wrote Monica Langley, author of the Weill biography Tearing Down the Walls, “was more than Sandy could bear.” Back in town, he sifted through newspapers and business magazines in search of inspiration. He put out feelers about any number of companies. He played golf and gave generously to Carnegie Hall and other charitable causes if for no other reason, Langley wrote, than to remind the world that he was still here. He made a clumsy public play to take over Bank of America, then a financial giant going through a rough patch, but his bid was rebuffed and then exposed. The “definition of chutzpah,” sniffed Fortune
in an article that appeared under the headline SANFORD WEILL, 53, EXP’D MGR, GD REFS.

  Who knows what Weill might have said to the two junior executives traveling to New York to pitch him on a business called the Commercial Credit Corporation, had they visited him shortly after he resigned from American Express rather than one year into his exile. Commercial Credit was a consumer finance company whose owner, Control Data, the computer maker, had been trying to sell it for at least a couple of years. Weill, in fact, Langley reports, was among those who had passed on a deal while he was still at American Express. But back then he was serving as president of a credit card giant with dreams of one day taking over as chief executive. Now he was a man trying to keep sane in search of a platform that would let him rebuild his empire. And if his vehicle had to be this ailing, grubby competitor to Household Finance, so be it.