The Vultures are Back

Cookie Jill pointed this out in the comments and it really wasn’t the best way to start the day:

Whether they deserve to be or not, Countrywide Financial and its top executives would be on most lists of those who share blame for the nation’s economic crisis. After all, the banking behemoth made risky loans to tens of thousands of Americans, helping set off a chain of events that has the economy staggering.

So it may come as a surprise that a dozen top Countrywide executives now stand to make millions from the home mortgage mess.

Stanford L. Kurland, Countrywide’s former president, and his team of former company executives have been buying up delinquent home mortgages that the government took over from other failed banks, sometimes for pennies on the dollar. They get a piece of what they can collect.

“It has been very successful — very strong,” John Lawrence, the company’s head of loan servicing, told Mr. Kurland one morning last week in a glass-walled boardroom here at PennyMac’s spacious headquarters, opened last year in the same Los Angeles suburb where Countrywide once flourished.

The next thing we are likely to hear is that George Bush and Darth Cheney have teamed up and formed a company to sell cheap Bibles for big bucks to the families of those killed in Iraq with the name of the lost loved one inscribed in gold. Oh! and if you buy two you get a genuine picture of Shrub in his flight suit with the "Mission Accomplished" banner. with a simulated signature, of course.

Unbelievable.