The word, home, has powerful meanings for Americans. Who can forget, Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, saying over and over, “There’s no place like home.” How many of us “want to go home?” How many of us when overseas, look back at the U.S. and think about going “home.”

Home is a human concept life love, caring, kindness,.. those kinds of things.

It’s hard to quantify.

For most of American history, homes were very simple, often one room, generally little more than shacks. But as time went by and with urbanization, homes became larger and more complex … and more expensive.

For most Americans, purchasing a home all at once became impossible. A market for mortgages developed and people bought their homes over time.

Banks were small and deeply embedded into the fabric of the community. Social fabric is a fancy word for multiple relationships. A local bank with small resources depended heavily on the success of its loans, even the smallest, for its continued success. So, the bank exploited its connections, it knew a great deal about a creditor, may have known him personally, probably his family as well. They knew what he did for a living, not in the sense of the job title on the application, they knew what he did.

The bank was also well known. It’s officials were church goers, customers, friends, etc. The locals knew the bank by its continuously developing reputation.

Thus, there was social pressure both ways. For the homeowner, it was a disgrace to fall behind on payments. For the bank, it was dangerous to its moral authority to foreclose without consideration of many factors. Generally, speaking there was a great deal of pressure, rightfully so, to work out the problem rather than seize the home.

That’s gone. Beginning roughly in 1999, banks began selling their loans as assignments to investment banks to be bundled into “securities” to be sold to the foolish and the more foolish.

There is no knowledge of the community or the borrower beyond the thinnest veneer of computer data. The bank might as well be orbiting Pluto for all the effect of public opinion.

Human and business are both relegated to key strokes.

This limited knowledge is probably entirely adequate for “World for Warcraft.”

Taking a process developed from a community developed series of relationships has been disastrous. Banks were given the benefit of the doubt because as community citizens they could be trusted. This made the process of mortgage foreclosure easier for the banks, streamlining a difficult problem in the community to be as painless as possible.

Maintaining that level of trust in bank integrity has been disastrous in an age where banking has become more a world of bonus obsessed, financial buccaneers than respectable community bankers.

The human recipients of the mortgages have suffered terribly. They have very often expected that their loans could be modified as since they were making what in the past were reasonable offers only to be tossed from “the gates of the temple.” What was reasonable no longer mattered. What was the best decision no longer mattered.

The only thing that mattered was the process. Humans need not apply.

We can no longer pretend that banks are reasonable, that they will act intelligently, or that they have the interest of the community or their nation in mind, when they make decisions.

James Pilant