That place is a magnet for crime.

Chase exec: we tricked naive borrowers into taking out subprime loans

By Cory Doctorow at 1:15 pm Thursday, Dec 1

An award-winning Chase vice-president has gone public with accusations that his bank deliberately tricked naive borrowers into taking out high-commission loans they could never pay back (his team wrote $2B in loans during the subprime bubble), putting the lie to the narrative that subprime was about greedy borrowers taking money they knew they shouldn’t:

One memory particularly troubles Theckston. He says that some account executives earned a commission seven times higher from subprime loans, rather than prime mortgages. So they looked for less savvy borrowers — those with less education, without previous mortgage experience, or without fluent English — and nudged them toward subprime loans.

These less savvy borrowers were disproportionately blacks and Latinos, he said, and they ended up paying a higher rate so that they were more likely to lose their homes. Senior executives seemed aware of this racial mismatch, he recalled, and frantically tried to cover it up.

Theckston, who has a shelf full of awards that he won from Chase, such as “sales manager of the year,” showed me his 2006 performance review. It indicates that 60 percent of his evaluation depended on him increasing high-risk loans.

In late 2008, when the mortgage market collapsed, Theckston and most of his colleagues were laid off. He says he bears no animus toward Chase, but he does think it is profoundly unfair that troubled banks have been rescued while troubled homeowners have been evicted.

A Banker Speaks, With Regret

(via Naked Capitalism)

I can’t feel too sorry for what happens to the Chase on Broadway after they decided to butcher the building in their glee to obliterate any vestiges of WaMu. They removed the sculpted brick that had the WaMu logo and replaced the brick with totally different colored brick the only reason being they wanted to get rid of any vestiges of the bank they got at a fire sale.

It’s called branding.

When they don’t care about the community, why should the community care about them? I’m looking forward to the day when people finally get the sense to move their accounts to banks that care about them, and these big banks pack up and leave. In the meantime, throwing stuff through their windows isn’t going to hurt them… They’ll just up their fees and put the screws on their employees to pay for it. If you really want to hurt Chase and BoA, convince your favorite local business and all of your friends to stop banking there. Get your church to stop banking there. Get your local candidates to stop banking there. (almost all of them in the last election cycle held their campaign accounts at BoA). Don’t use a card for that 4 dollar purchase at your favorite local business, forcing them to pay a transaction fee to a major bank company. Use cash for little local stuff, switch who you bank with. That is the only way to hurt them.

Vandalism is a crime and we all pay for it. the comment by “better aim” suggests that there is a legitimate reason to target Chase, and there is NOT. ever. the so called “better” choice than a small business or church is a bit like saying to a murderer: well, at least you chose someone who “deserved” it, not an old person or a young child.
talk about poor morality!