Obama campaign co-chair tied to subprime mortgage crisis

[Geee]

Daily Caller:

Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, the Democrat who was named a national co-chair of President Obama’s re-election campaign on Wednesday, served on the board of a company that is widely blamed for helping start the subprime mortgage crisis in 2007.

Beginning in 2004, Patrick served two years on the five-member board of ACC Capital Holdings, the parent company of Ameriquest Mortgage. He was paid a $360,000 annual salary for his efforts, according to “All The Devils Are Here,” a history of the financial crisis by Bethany McClean and Joe Nocera.

Ameriquest had already been the subject of numerous criminal complaints when Patrick joined the board of ACC. But despite its troubles, the mortgage company was the country’s “dominant subprime lender” in the years preceding the housing crisis, according to McClean and Nocera.

The company’s short-term success had much to do with the fact that it would loan money to just about anyone, regardless of income. In an effort to compete, other mortgage companies began issuing loans that were unlikely to be repaid, a practice that would eventually cripple the industry and later the American economy itself.

“Ameriquest was a problem for us because they were a large company and everybody was trying to compete with them,” one executive at another big lending company told McClean and Nocera. “If we denied a loan, we’d track who ultimately did the loan and a lot of times it was Ameriquest. Every time we rejected a loan, the sales force would call up and say ‘Well, Ameriquest is doing this.’ I would say, ‘Just because Johnny jumped off a bridge doesn’t mean you have to follow.’”