Clearly Distorted News, in Black and White

Finance: Pentagon Denies Mortgage Due to Credit Rating: Lending Industry Applauds Stricter Lending Rules

“I applied for a mortgage today, my wife and I finally decided to settle outside of Cincinnati now that Ive retired… but the Pentagon denied my mortgage application,” James Swank, of Cincinnati, Ohio told the NevYork Times today, in a story about the recent merger of the Pentagon with two of the nations top three credit rating agencies. The Lending industry has applauded the move, popularized as part of President Bush and Vice President Cheneys economic rehabilitation program. “While we love to lend money, we really dont want it to go out of the country, and if the Pentagon can verify someone is not a foreign terrorist before we initiate a loan, thats even more assurance on our bottom line,” Jane Wimple, of The Association of Private Mortgage Lenders Savings and Loan, said in response. But there has been some disgruntlement on the part of mortgage consumers, which some analysts say may hurt consumer confidence. “We have several stories already of individuals being denied loans because their names were mistakenly added to the federal no-fly list,” Tom Walpole, of the libertarian think-tank Advocates of Free Consumption, counteracted. “We dont even care that much about the privacy concerns, we just dont want free citizens right to borrow themselves and their country into massive debt to be compromised,” he said. But James Swank, who lists his job title as an “Average Guy trying to Get By”, says he just wants a little house. “Me and my wife, weve been living in this shoebox here for the last fourty years, paying rent. We just thought it would be nice to have a couple years out in the Cincinnati countryside before we kick the bucket.”