Elanso

Because I know you're still out there, a note to people who think the mortgage crisis is a personal responsibility issue:

On a recent week, the Douglas County Public Trustee received six new filings for $1 million-plus homes entering the foreclosure process.

And it's not just homes.

Senior centers, office buildings and even churches have been forced to deal with the threat of losing their million- dollar real estate to the lenders, forcing them to scramble to escape foreclosure auctions.

For example, the biggest health club in the metro area, the Lakeshore Athletic Club - Flatiron, was in foreclosure for about six months last year, before the $19 million foreclosure was withdrawn, according to public records. - Rocky Mountain News

Nationally, RealtyTrac shows 261,255 properties received foreclosure notices during May -- a 7 percent increase from the previous month and a 48 percent boost from May 2007.

The report also states one in every 483 U.S. households received a foreclosure filing during the month, the highest monthly foreclosure rate since RealtyTrac began issuing the report in January 2005. - mlive.com

To convince any reasonable person this is a personal responsibility issue, you're going to have to come up with a reason why all of a sudden, in the United States, rich people and poor people and people in between and churches and senior centers and health clubs just all spontaneously became  really irresponsible, on a historic level. Was it in the air, or the water?

Or was it in the lending practices? New rules approved by the Fed offer a few reminders of shady practices widespread enough to be worth banning:

For all mortgages, prime and subprime, the new rules will:

— Prohibit seven misleading advertising practices, including representing that a rate or payment is "fixed" if it will change over the course of the loan.

— Prohibit advertising in which different loans are compared unless all payments and rates are also disclosed.

— Prohibit foreign-language mortgage ads in which required disclosures are presented in English.

— Prohibit a lender from encouraging or coercing an appraiser to misrepresent a home's assessed value.

Misleading advertising, bullshit appraisals...all things mortgage-holders did to themselves, no doubt.