Wall Street investment firms are eager to become your new landlord. New York Times Dealbook reports:
Large investment firms have spent billions of dollars over the last year buying homes in some of the nation’s most depressed markets. The influx has been so great, and the resulting price gains so big, that ordinary buyers are feeling squeezed out. Nationwide, 68 percent of the damaged homes sold in April went to investors, and only 19 percent to first-time home buyers.
Wall Street played a central role in the last housing boom by supplying easy — and, in retrospect, risky — mortgage financing. Now, investment companies like the Blackstone Group have swooped in, buying thousands of houses in the same areas where the financial crisis hit hardest.
Blackstone, which helped define a period of Wall Street hyperwealth, has bought some 26,000 homes in nine states. Colony Capital, a Los Angeles-based investment firm, is spending $250 million each month and already owns 10,000 properties.
[We tend to view History as a linear line of events, one leading inexorably to the next but History like the present, is composed of a myriad of interlocking discreet moments. These first few entries of the Invisible Histories will examine those historical forces which have currently manifested in the form of a Catholic Pope crusading through the America’s against the Animist and Pentecostal religious faiths which have emerged here. Also cocaine, there will be lots of cocaine. No names have been changed to protect the innocent because from a historical perspective no one is innocent.]
April was national financial literacy month, promoted heavily by major banks and other debt-producing institutions who want you to believe that poverty, the financial crisis, and mounting student debt are the result of ordinary people’s ignorant refusal to discipline themselves and budget properly. Via the 
Here’s fair warning that if Bank of America, Citibank, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, or Wells Fargo illegally foreclose on your home, the piddling compensation check sent to you a few years later may bounce when you attempt to cash it. Via 
