Dial-a-Crowd Battles Spanish Banks Trying to Repossess Homes

[Ichingcarpenter]

Luis Dominguez got up at dawn to take a 5 a.m. bus to join a human chain around a Madrid home threatened with foreclosure. Three weeks earlier, the crowd had come to him after he telephoned for help.
“I was facing eviction and they saved me from losing my home,” said Dominguez, 74, a pensioner with a walking stick in one hand and a five-foot placard saying “Stop Evictions” in the other. “I came today to show my gratitude and support.”



The 300 protesters, organized by a group called La Plataforma de los Afectados por la Hipoteca, or PAH, managed to win a reprieve for the property’s owner, a single mother with a disabled son. Rising unemployment in Spain may lead to 300,000 foreclosures this year and next, according to Adicae, a rights group representing bank customers.




“In large parts of the U.S., you can just walk away from your home and your debt, and that contributed to the country’s banking crisis,” Jordi Fabregat, a professor of management and financial control at Barcelona’s Esade Business School, said by telephone. “That can’t be done here, so the banks are protected from defaults during a crisis.”



.
The number of foreclosed homes advertised by Idealista.com, Spain’s largest real-estate website, has risen 10-fold to 30,000 in three years. The properties are valued at about 4.6 billion euros and owned by 40 banks.


“If the banks had to assume all the losses resulting from the bad mortgages they granted during the property boom, the whole financial system would collapse,” Jesus Encinar, Idealista.com’s chief executive officer, said in an interview.



http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-07-13/dial-a-crowd-confronts-debt-laden-spanish-banks-by-thwarting-foreclosures.html

[dixiegrrrrl]

1. “If the banks had to assume all the losses resulting from the bad mortgages they granted....

exactly.

So WHO is to blame for this mess?

Somehow WE got the blame and WE got picked to fix the banks problem.

and, in truth, the mortgage mess is really a teen part of the bank's problems.
All that zombie debt ( derivatives, credit default swaps, otherwise known as counterfeit gambling chips) are the major problem.

[Ichingcarpenter]

2. I made sure I included that line because it told a truth

that I don't think they realized.... glad you caught it too.

But its pretty cool that people are organizing
and standing together.... Maybe it will catch on
in the States...