Sermon Illustrations

TEMPLE OF GREED

Stanford Kurland ran Countrywide Mortgage through 2006. Then after the mortgage crisis began (for which Kurland may be partially responsible) he opened up PennyMac, a company that says they will help bail out the mortgage industry by buying the troubled mortgages at a reduced rate to help the homeowners. Such a philanthropist!

So, let’s get this straight: Kurland over a 27-year career helps Countrywide (with irresponsible lending practices), become the big bubble that will cripple the mortgage industry and become possibly the biggest factor in the American/worldwide economic crises. He bails-out just before the bubble bursts, showing up a year later to ride in on his white horse named PennyMac, buying up the putrid mortgages he created, at pennies on the dollar to save us. Wow...what a guy!

On CNN this week a professor of economics at the business school of Southern California University said of Kurland and the whole affair, "It’s completely legal...it just doesn’t pass the smell test."

Some have said Maddoff, et al, are just the tip of the iceberg in corporate America. Is the picture in focus? Can you hear me yet?

It’s not hard to figure out, in the wake of these accounts, why Americans do not go to church any more. They have switched religions; they now attend the Temple of Greed!

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