Mejappz
Elite Member
- Joined
- Dec 16, 2005
- Professional Status
- Certified Residential Appraiser
- State
- Florida
*** FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE ***
U.S.-SPONSORED MORTGAGE GIANT BLACKLISTS PRIVATE ANALYST,
CREATES DISSIDENTS
VENTURA, Calif. (May 31, 2024) – He may be America’s newest Tso-Hsin
Cheng. Who is Tso-Hsin Cheng?
During Mao Zedong’s Four Pests Campaign, many of China’s top scientists
were branded as criminals. The campaign, among other things, called for the
eradication of the Eurasian tree sparrow. The misguided effort disregarded the
warnings of entomologists and ornithologists. These scientists predicted the
eradication of sparrows would result in locust swarms that would ravage rice
and grain fields, resulting in famine. One early Cassandra was ornithologist
Tso-Hsin Cheng, who questioned the wisdom of the eradication effort and
predicted the locust plague. For his opinions, he was stripped of his academic
career, branded a criminal and forced to sweep hallways for the rest of his life.
He also had to wear a badge that identified him as a reactionary.
A man named Jon DiPietra has become America’s newest Tso-Hsin Cheng.
Government-sponsored mortgage hegemon Freddie Mac has announced it will
reject future value opinions by DiPietra, a real property appraiser based in New
York. It’s how Freddie Mac blacklists appraisers. DiPietra has never had a
business relationship with Freddie Mac, yet the latter, due to its government-
sanctioned franchise, can intimidate mortgage lenders nationwide into exiling a
specific appraiser.
Leaning on the concept of guilt by association, the mortgage giant reportedly
blacklisted everyone associated with DiPietra at his firm, Dallas-based BBG.
Since no lender will write a mortgage that could not potentially be resold to
Freddie Mac on the secondary market, DiPietra and his colleagues were
effectively stripped of all work by an entity that exists outside government and
outside the private sector. DiPietra and his associates are now prisoners of
conscience.
What did the banished DiPietra and his colleagues do exactly? Who knows.
Was a pattern of bad appraisals detected? Who knows. Is Pietra’s firm the
modern incarnation of Arthur Andersen, Enron and Bernard L. Madoff
Investment Securities rolled into one? It’s anyone’s guess. Is Freddie making
an example of DiPietra and BBG to send a message to all appraisers to accept
its politics- and race-drenched edicts, including a recent campaign to harass
independent appraisers into self-censorship? There are many open questions.
As Soviet secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria famously said, “Show me the man,
and I’ll show you the crime.”
What can be said with any certainty is that the blacklisted DiPietra and his
colleagues will receive nothing resembling due process or equal protection
under the law. What is also certain is that Freddie and his promiscuous big
sister, Fannie Mae, operate as rogue government agencies. Both have been in
government conservatorship since 2008, the year they received a combined
$200 billion federal bailout after it was discovered they had been dabbling in
predatory subprime Alt-A, negatively amortizing, stated-income and other toxic
loan products.
We know White House officials have pressured the twins to promote an illusory
concept known as “housing equity” by eliminating key checks and balances on
mortgage lending. We know the White House has identified the nation’s 80,000
state-licensed appraisers as an impediment in this effort. We know White
House officials are attempting to micro-manage appraisers through a task force
known as PAVE. The latter includes employees of 13 federal agencies and
offices, including the politically appointed head of the Federal Housing Finance
Agency, Freddie and Fannie’s regulator and conservator.
Finally, we know Freddie and Fannie have contracted with private vendors to
throttle what can be spoken and written about the condition of collateral by
individual appraisers engaged specifically for their independence. The latter
serve as bulwarks protecting taxpayers in federally backed mortgage
transactions.
The censorship of appraisers is occurring under the pretext of a make-believe
concept the partisan task force calls “appraisal bias.” It’s similar to the way
public health was invoked as the pretext for the White House censorship of
social media platforms. It then quickly led to political censorship, which is the
case here.
In November of last year, Freddie Mac began directing a handful of exclusive
vendors to screen appraisal reports for a lengthy list of forbidden words and
phrases and then force compliance on state-licensed appraisers. A glib Freddie
Mac employee named Scott Reuter is the mortgage giant’s point man for the
coercive program.
The saccharine Mr. Reuter speaks of the positives of the censorship, assuring
appraisers that by expurgating many of the most common words in the English
language from their appraisal reports, words like “good,” “bad,” “high,” “low,”
“strong,” “weak,” “slow,” “rapid,” appraisers will be freed to be more descriptive.
At the same time, says Reuter, the appraisers can be safe – hint, hint! – from
career-destroying accusations of bias. Since Fred and Fan can blacklist
appraisers and punish the lenders who hire them, the censorship has real
teeth.
Banned are many other words and terms. They include “crime,” “school district”
“student,” “preferred,” “well-kept” and “desirable,” and many puzzlingly
innocuous phrases like “convenient to.”
“Some of this language is subjective in nature, while some is potentially
biased,” writes Reuter without explaining the methods by which Freddie has
determined words and terms like “place of worship” or “well-kept” or “student” to
be potentially biased when used by appraisers.
Freddie’s new sanitized language means an appraiser can no longer make
basic observations like, “The appraised property has a high-gabled roof with
two dormers” or “The property is located in the Houston Independent School
District” or “The property is adjacent to a church parking lot.”
Freddie’s censorship program is an example of nongovernment actors –
Freddie Mac employees are not civil servants – working with individuals in
government, like Sandra L. Thompson of Freddie’s federal regulator, to chill the
protected speech of a class of citizens uniquely engaged for their
independence.
The new policy is contained in Freddie’s Soviet-like directive “5603.4
Unacceptable Appraisal Practices.”
With Freddie’s censorship in place, each appraisal has become a Mao-era
struggle session, which seems to be the point. Ornithologist Tso-Hsin Cheng
would recognize it.
# # #
Jeremy Bagott is a real estate appraiser and former newspaperman. His most
recent book, “The Ichthyologist’s Guide to the Subprime Meltdown,” is a
concise almanac that distills the cataclysmic financial crisis of 2007-2008 to its
essence. This pithy guide to the upheaval includes essays, chronologies,
roundups and key lists, weaving together the stories of the politics-infused
Freddie and Fannie; the doomed Wall Street investment banks Lehman and
Bear Stearns; the dereliction of duty by the Big Three credit-rating services; the
mayhem caused by the shadowy nonbank lenders; and the massive
government bailouts. It provides a rapid-fire succession of “ah-hah” moments
as it lays out the meltdown, convulsion by convulsion.
U.S.-SPONSORED MORTGAGE GIANT BLACKLISTS PRIVATE ANALYST,
CREATES DISSIDENTS
VENTURA, Calif. (May 31, 2024) – He may be America’s newest Tso-Hsin
Cheng. Who is Tso-Hsin Cheng?
During Mao Zedong’s Four Pests Campaign, many of China’s top scientists
were branded as criminals. The campaign, among other things, called for the
eradication of the Eurasian tree sparrow. The misguided effort disregarded the
warnings of entomologists and ornithologists. These scientists predicted the
eradication of sparrows would result in locust swarms that would ravage rice
and grain fields, resulting in famine. One early Cassandra was ornithologist
Tso-Hsin Cheng, who questioned the wisdom of the eradication effort and
predicted the locust plague. For his opinions, he was stripped of his academic
career, branded a criminal and forced to sweep hallways for the rest of his life.
He also had to wear a badge that identified him as a reactionary.
A man named Jon DiPietra has become America’s newest Tso-Hsin Cheng.
Government-sponsored mortgage hegemon Freddie Mac has announced it will
reject future value opinions by DiPietra, a real property appraiser based in New
York. It’s how Freddie Mac blacklists appraisers. DiPietra has never had a
business relationship with Freddie Mac, yet the latter, due to its government-
sanctioned franchise, can intimidate mortgage lenders nationwide into exiling a
specific appraiser.
Leaning on the concept of guilt by association, the mortgage giant reportedly
blacklisted everyone associated with DiPietra at his firm, Dallas-based BBG.
Since no lender will write a mortgage that could not potentially be resold to
Freddie Mac on the secondary market, DiPietra and his colleagues were
effectively stripped of all work by an entity that exists outside government and
outside the private sector. DiPietra and his associates are now prisoners of
conscience.
What did the banished DiPietra and his colleagues do exactly? Who knows.
Was a pattern of bad appraisals detected? Who knows. Is Pietra’s firm the
modern incarnation of Arthur Andersen, Enron and Bernard L. Madoff
Investment Securities rolled into one? It’s anyone’s guess. Is Freddie making
an example of DiPietra and BBG to send a message to all appraisers to accept
its politics- and race-drenched edicts, including a recent campaign to harass
independent appraisers into self-censorship? There are many open questions.
As Soviet secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria famously said, “Show me the man,
and I’ll show you the crime.”
What can be said with any certainty is that the blacklisted DiPietra and his
colleagues will receive nothing resembling due process or equal protection
under the law. What is also certain is that Freddie and his promiscuous big
sister, Fannie Mae, operate as rogue government agencies. Both have been in
government conservatorship since 2008, the year they received a combined
$200 billion federal bailout after it was discovered they had been dabbling in
predatory subprime Alt-A, negatively amortizing, stated-income and other toxic
loan products.
We know White House officials have pressured the twins to promote an illusory
concept known as “housing equity” by eliminating key checks and balances on
mortgage lending. We know the White House has identified the nation’s 80,000
state-licensed appraisers as an impediment in this effort. We know White
House officials are attempting to micro-manage appraisers through a task force
known as PAVE. The latter includes employees of 13 federal agencies and
offices, including the politically appointed head of the Federal Housing Finance
Agency, Freddie and Fannie’s regulator and conservator.
Finally, we know Freddie and Fannie have contracted with private vendors to
throttle what can be spoken and written about the condition of collateral by
individual appraisers engaged specifically for their independence. The latter
serve as bulwarks protecting taxpayers in federally backed mortgage
transactions.
The censorship of appraisers is occurring under the pretext of a make-believe
concept the partisan task force calls “appraisal bias.” It’s similar to the way
public health was invoked as the pretext for the White House censorship of
social media platforms. It then quickly led to political censorship, which is the
case here.
In November of last year, Freddie Mac began directing a handful of exclusive
vendors to screen appraisal reports for a lengthy list of forbidden words and
phrases and then force compliance on state-licensed appraisers. A glib Freddie
Mac employee named Scott Reuter is the mortgage giant’s point man for the
coercive program.
The saccharine Mr. Reuter speaks of the positives of the censorship, assuring
appraisers that by expurgating many of the most common words in the English
language from their appraisal reports, words like “good,” “bad,” “high,” “low,”
“strong,” “weak,” “slow,” “rapid,” appraisers will be freed to be more descriptive.
At the same time, says Reuter, the appraisers can be safe – hint, hint! – from
career-destroying accusations of bias. Since Fred and Fan can blacklist
appraisers and punish the lenders who hire them, the censorship has real
teeth.
Banned are many other words and terms. They include “crime,” “school district”
“student,” “preferred,” “well-kept” and “desirable,” and many puzzlingly
innocuous phrases like “convenient to.”
“Some of this language is subjective in nature, while some is potentially
biased,” writes Reuter without explaining the methods by which Freddie has
determined words and terms like “place of worship” or “well-kept” or “student” to
be potentially biased when used by appraisers.
Freddie’s new sanitized language means an appraiser can no longer make
basic observations like, “The appraised property has a high-gabled roof with
two dormers” or “The property is located in the Houston Independent School
District” or “The property is adjacent to a church parking lot.”
Freddie’s censorship program is an example of nongovernment actors –
Freddie Mac employees are not civil servants – working with individuals in
government, like Sandra L. Thompson of Freddie’s federal regulator, to chill the
protected speech of a class of citizens uniquely engaged for their
independence.
The new policy is contained in Freddie’s Soviet-like directive “5603.4
Unacceptable Appraisal Practices.”
With Freddie’s censorship in place, each appraisal has become a Mao-era
struggle session, which seems to be the point. Ornithologist Tso-Hsin Cheng
would recognize it.
# # #
Jeremy Bagott is a real estate appraiser and former newspaperman. His most
recent book, “The Ichthyologist’s Guide to the Subprime Meltdown,” is a
concise almanac that distills the cataclysmic financial crisis of 2007-2008 to its
essence. This pithy guide to the upheaval includes essays, chronologies,
roundups and key lists, weaving together the stories of the politics-infused
Freddie and Fannie; the doomed Wall Street investment banks Lehman and
Bear Stearns; the dereliction of duty by the Big Three credit-rating services; the
mayhem caused by the shadowy nonbank lenders; and the massive
government bailouts. It provides a rapid-fire succession of “ah-hah” moments
as it lays out the meltdown, convulsion by convulsion.
