Chairman of Mortgage Bankers Association Recommends Sub-Prime Mortgage Victims Eat "Beans and Weenies"

May 22 (LPAC)--At 1:30pm on Tuesday, May 22, Chairman of the Mortgage Bankers Association, John Robbins, delivered a speech at the National Press Club in Washington DC, in which he said, "I am very proud of what I do for a living." "Yet I stand before you mad as hell. I have to be angry. It would be too depressing to accept that a very few unethical people can give my profession, and me, a black eye. But it's worse than that. It's not just our reputations that have been damaged. People have been hurt. The very people we take pride in helping. All because of a very few unethical actors."

Robbins went on, defensively, to deny the clear systemic financial risk inherent in the sub-prime mortgage blowout, "As we can clearly see, this is not a macro-economic event. No seismic financial occurrence is about to overwhelm the U.S. economy. And we're the only ones who think so." He then defended the "market economy" saying that the mortgage "industry" doesn't need any federal regulation, that "the market is an efficient tool", and that "the pendulum has swung conservatively back". He then said that any attempt for the federal government to set up barriers preventing people from being ripped off by sub-prime mortgages would only "hurt the poor".

Robbins then attacked the individual borrowers, "One of the freedoms we enjoy is the freedom to take risk, the freedom to make individual choices. Sub prime or not, people are often banking on themselves when they take a mortgage."

In response to a final question from the NPC moderator, Robbins then said that when he bought his first house in the 1970's, "we lived on beans and weenies to make sure we could make that payment."

At the end of the event, when asked by a LaRouche Youth Movement member what he thought about Lyndon LaRouche's assertion that there was an immediate systemic threat involved in the mortgage blowout, Robbins grew nervous, and with voice trembling, said, "You should tell your editor that 43 out of 50 million mortgages are in our statistical data base. We have the statistics on them." Robbins was then quickly rushed off by a staffer, still shaken.

Robbins was unavailable to comment on how having mortgage statistics in a computer would somehow prevent a systemic collapse of the US-global financial system, now teetering on the brink of blowout. He neither confirmed nor denied that the millions of at risk borrowers in the United States today could all survive the days ahead by living off "beans and weenies" to make their payments.