Mnuchin: ‘Foreclosing on People Is a Very, Very Terrible Thing To Do’

EXCERPT:

MNUCHIN: "And I will tell you, I can’t talk about specific loans, because of privacy, but there are certain things that were in the press, and the most troubling loan we had was actually to the octomom, and we worked very, very hard. That was a terrible situation, and we worked very, very hard to move her to another home that they could afford. But I can assure you that as chairman of the bank I took these issues very seriously. It’s not to say that we didn’t have certain mistakes. There were mistakes, we regret those mistakes. As I mentioned we had hundreds of thousands of delinquent loans. And just as an aside, when you talk about loan modifications, banks are highly incented to do loan modifications. Anybody who thinks that we made more money foreclosing on a loan then modifying a loan has no understanding of this. We were highly incentive. Foreclosing on people is a very, very terrible thing to do, but it’s also very costly to the bank. So we believed in loan modifications and we were financially incented to offer them when we could."