By Kevin Chiu
Private equity funds, hedge funds and giant banks like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, AIG and investment firm Blackstone may soon be buying up foreclosures for pennies on the dollar if a proposal is approved by the government. It 
would be a major case of legal housing thievery for all Americans to witness.
The same people who nearly drove the U.S. economy into bankruptcy, who are currently driving millions of American homeowners into foreclosure and were bailed out by the U.S. government may soon be buying up the surplus homes that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae have in their inventory.
The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Treasury Department issued a request for information over the disposition of an estimated 250,000 homes the government sponsored enterprises have in their inventories.
The RFI (Request For Information) the government issued is a away for the federal government to clear the inventory before the growing surplus of homes grows even larger with more foreclosures expected in coming months, and would sell to the funds with a minimum of $1 billion in cash to invest if tax payers don’t protest.
Similar bulk sales on properties have been made before by the government during the Savings & Loan Crisis in the late 1980s. The Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) was later formed to auction the homes off to the highest bidders.
The RFI request is actually a lazy way for Congress to easily approve bulk sales of residential homes and other properties after the government takes the next step in the process, a Request for Proposals. The RFP would set up a process for bids to be placed for the homes to be purchased by big dollar investors to quickly get rid of the inventory at deep discounts.
The process is also setting up the mass media to sell the bidding process to the public as a way of cleaning up neighborhoods that have been damaged by the foreclosure crisis. The government will predictably issue a news release stating that the homes will be rented as part of the program to improve damaged neighborhoods, and the mass media will regurgitate the news release verbatim.
As the new owners, the investment funds would rent the homes out to tenants and when the housing market recovers the same banks and hedge funds that got us into this financial disaster will clean-up by selling the properties for high profits.
If Americans don’t protest in mass, it is likely to be the biggest case of legal thievery in U.S. history as millions of homes that were foreclosed by some of the very same bankers are sold off in mass to these funds over the coming years.