Editor, Manteca Bulletin,

Your Feb. 16, 2013 article, ‘Gifted loan down payments come back to haunt FHA’ lends credibility to my prediction of a major bank collapse in the next few years. As you indicated in your article, the loans aren’t being paid back. A day ago, the big story in your great paper was that new housing tracts are now being built. And my question now is who’s going to be able to afford them? I don’t mean get the loans, I mean pay the loans. You no doubt remember Mountain House. Here was this big new city being built west of Tracy in 1992. Homes were being built and selling like mad, under the same scenario you talked about in your article. Then, one day the banks cried “Uncle!” and folks lost their homes to foreclosure, and now Mountain House is like the ghost towns you hear stories about in TV westerns.

If my ‘doom and gloom’ prediction comes to be, it could get awfully messy all across the country. But this next time, you won’t have B of A and Wells Fargo buying the failed banks, because even these will fail. It all boils down to the fact that you can’t get something for nothing. Maybe in a future article, you can verify or even dispute my prediction. Thanks for reading.

Neal A. Haight

Tracy

Feb. 20, 2013