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Ethics Institute Calls for Mortgage Reform
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As the mortgage crisis worsens, The American Institute of Ethics looks at ethics in the mortgage lending industry during a conference on USF's campus Aug. 6. |
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With millions of Americans currently facing home foreclosure, including more than 400,000 Californians, The American Institute of Ethics has invited experts and the public to the University of San Francisco for a symposium on the need for more ethical business practices in the mortgage lending industry.
The symposium, Ethics and the Mortgage Crisis: A Social Justice Issue, is sponsored by The American Institute of Ethics (AIE) to raise awareness of unethical behavior. AIE, which offers ethics training, held a similar symposium for the construction industry in February. Future programs include ethics and religion, ethics and the law, and ethics in medical care.
Real estate and mortgage experts will be on hand for the Wednesday Aug. 6 symposium in Fromm Hall on the USF campus beginning at 6:30 p.m. to answer questions and discuss the cause of the crisis and what can be done to correct it. Admission is $25 per person, or $1,000 for a corporate sponsorship.
“We have a fantastic panel formed and all of us come from the same social justice position to find out: How did we get here? Where are we now? What can be done to solve the problem?” said John Sequeira ’61, AIE president and founder.
Sequeira, an insurance executive for more than 40 years, is one of five USF alumni serving on AIE’s board of directors, including John Griffin ’61, former San Francisco Mayor Frank Jordan ’75, USF Chancellor John Lo Schiavo, S.J. ’46, and James Molinelli ’60, JD ’63. Founded in 2005, AIE is a Bay Area nonprofit dedicated to raising awareness about contemporary ethical problems and working to find solutions.
Compounding the scope of the mortgage crisis is the ugly reality that the fallout has disproportionately affected lower-income families, often revealing unethical business practices and elevating this to a major social justice issue, Sequeira said.
No doubt, there is plenty of blame to go around - much of it rooted in greed - but the goal of the symposium is to move beyond finger-pointing at mortgage brokers, banks, investors, and, yes, even borrowers, to suggest practical solutions, Sequeira said.
He supports a growing chorus of voices calling for greater transparency in the loan process, Sequeira said. “We need to inject ethics into the mortgage industry, that means complete and full disclosure,” he said. “The way to avoid similar crises in the future is to explain things carefully and make sure that people understand the loans they are being sold, which will require both government and private industry involvement.”
Symposium speaker Dick Charnock, mortgage broker for Real Estate Funding Service Inc., suggests that, in particular, more scrutiny is needed where mortgage brokers receive incentives for loan approvals and when “high-risk” loans are rushed through to meet monthly quotas, among other steps.
At the same time, overregulation could complicate and confuse homebuyers, so a careful balance needs to be struck with the overall goal being to explain loans in a straightforward way that everyone can understand, Charnock said.
Charnock will be joined at the symposium by Patricia Lindo, president and founding board member of the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals of Silicon Valley and a realtor with Cashin Company Realtors, and Grace Mejia, assistant regional vice president of diverse segments manager Wells Fargo Home Mortgage and San Francisco commissioner on the Fair Lending Working Group.
For more information visit www.aieweb.org/index.cfm?views=events.
- Originally posted July 29,2008 - 
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