TC the Terrible

I nearly forgot to mention that today is the day that The King died. Thirty years ago Elvis fell from his throne (literally) and went to be with his momma.

Being from Memphis I’ll admit to having a bit of a passing fascination with the big E. And like everyone else from there I’ve known my share of people that knew him first hand. I was friends with one of the ER nurses that pulled his fat ass out of the ambulance when it brought him to Baptist Memorial Hospital for the last time. She swears it really was him on the gurney, and that he wasn’t as fresh as his entourage claimed that he was. If you know what I mean. I once worked with a woman that had gone to high school with him, and claimed to be the first girl to crawl over in the back seat of a car with him. A car he had borrowed from another classmate by the way. She said he was sweet, but had really quick hands. Of course she also claims to have kept him North of the Border all night. Which might explain why they only had one date. At my last job before I left Memphis for DC one of the guys in our part of the cube farm had some property that backed up to Graceland and he always bitched about the white trash that trekked across his place to try to scale the back fence of the Presley compound.

I never crossed the gates of Graceland personally, though I took several out of town buddies there so they could. Coming back later to pick them up when the tour was over, hoping none of them died from the excitement of it all. I did always manage to make it down EP Blvd for the Dead Night festivities. Loads of freaks and geeks to make fun of, like the girl on the right that came all the way from Holland to see his grave and get her Elvis tat in Memphis. Nice.

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P.S.  I found this a couple of minutes after the original post and couldn’t not pass it along.  Proof that Memphis still thinks Elvis is the shits is that they even run fake news in the free liberal paper acting like he lived to see his 72nd birthday.

The older I get the more George Will makes sense to me.  In today’s column he gives us this nugget.

To get a mortgage is usually to commit capitalism. . .

Right on George.   People buy homes to get a slice of the American dream, but they also buy them with the hopes of turning a profit a few years down the line when they sell.

The problem with the market today is simple greed.  Twenty years ago it took good credit and a chunk of cash to put down to get a home loan.  Six months ago a person with a bankruptcy in the last five years could get a home loan with no cash down and a cursory credit check.  The sub-prime market got a lot of people into houses that quite frankly didn’t belong in them.

A friend of mine in Memphis saw this coming back in 2002.  He showed me a memo from the loan department of the bank where he works that described a new mortgage product.  One that required the borrower to pay only the interest for the first five years of the loan.  He knew then that type of product would lead to people buying homes they couldn’t afford, hoping that their lives would drastically change in five years and they would be able to refinance the loan into something more stable.  How right Matt was.

What is going on now with CountryWide (which holds the mortgages on both of my homes) and other lenders is a normal correction of a wayward market.  The market strayed too far from sound practices and now must come back within its reasonable boundaries.   An action that will lead to a more stable market and economy in a few months.

The people harmed are those that were on the margins for the market.  People with blemished or bad credit will find it harder to get the money for housing, and those with “trick mortgages” will be hard pressed to flip them when the real payments come due.  Is this a bad thing overall?  Not really, it just means that a nation used to spending more than it can afford has to learn some restraint.  At least until the next time a bank finds a dubious way to finance the market.