Attorney General Martha Coakley addresses the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce on Tuesday.
The chance to hear Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley discuss her first year in office drew a crowd of more than 300, including a handful of local bankers, to a Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce breakfast in Boston on Tuesday morning.
The Big Dig, the subprime mortgage crisis and global warming are examples of what happens when the natural, human tendency “to be unwilling and/or unable to identify small problems or patterns before they blossom into larger – and more expensive and intractable – problems” plays out, she said.
“And so, we face the avalanche.”
Massachusetts’ foreclosure problems can be traced to “lots of players, lots of greed and no one [being held] accountable,” Coakley said. She has tried to address the problem by amending consumer protection regulations to apply to most types of loans.
Coakley said she worked closely with the mortgage industry to create new regulations that target only the most risky lending practices.
Since the regulations went into effect Jan. 2, Massachusetts lenders and brokers are required to ascertain whether a borrower can repay a loan before it’s offered, certain means of broker compensation are restricted, and lenders and brokers now must obtain the borrower’s signed statement of income even if it won’t be considered in making the loan.
Guests at Tuesday’s forum seemed less concerned with mortgage lending than with Coakley’s other initiatives. They asked questions about casinos, auto insurance managed competition and the rising cost of health care, which Coakley said her office also is working to address.
“My table had three health care lobbyists,” noted Lynne Sullivan, program officer at the Catholic Schools Foundation, which provides funding for local Catholic schools.
Sullivan said she, herself, is most interested in Coakley’s plan to expand work opportunities for Massachusetts teens, which was born out of a desire to prevent street violence in urban areas.
But the mortgage crisis has affected many Catholic schools in and around Lawrence, she said. Many schools have lost students this year, either because they lost their homes due to foreclosure or their parents had to make a choice between tuition and mortgage payments.
Linda Brantley, executive director of the Massachusetts Commission on the Status of Women, said she thinks Coakley is “doing a phenomenal job for the state she’s inherited – with all its challenges, including subprime lending.”
Representatives from Citizens Bank, Bank of America and Medford-based Century Bank attended Tuesday’s forum.
Asked about Coakley’s remarks later in the day, Citizens Bank spokesman Michael Jones would not comment other than to say, “We are not a subprime lender.”
