What Can Business Owners, Including Copywriting Services, Learn From the Current Mortgage Debacle?
It’s all over the news. Every day we hear about more scams, frauds, lies and law suits. Like the class action law suit, the second one this year, against Wachovia.
MortgageDaily.com had this to say about Wachovia today:
“The Charlotte, N.C.-based company and two subsidiaries are being sued under the Truth in Lending Act for failure to clearly and conspicuously disclose in loan documents and disclosure statements that payments on ARMs, with payment options at the teaser payment or teaser interest rate, will result in negative amortization, and that the principal balance will increase.”
Ooops. Minor detail.
And another one reported today from MortgageDaily.com:
“Morgan Stanley Mortgage Capital Holdings has filed a lawsuit against Fremont Investment & Loan, charging the former sub-prime lender with failure to cure or repurchase 231 loans because of misrepresentations that drove down the value of the mortgages.
Another …
“Lehman Brothers Bank FSB has been sued by a Tennessee storage company, charging that the bank failed to honor rate lock agreements for a commercial mortgage of more than $3 million and failed to return a total of $186,500 in rate lock payments and other deposits.”
And it goes on and on, with other stories involving scams, fraud, misrepresentations, yada, yada, yada!
So, why am I talking about this? Because I think there’s a BIG lesson here for everyone in business …
Do the Right Thing!
The right thing is very simple, really. If I wouldn’t want it done to me, I shouldn’t do it to others.
There are a lot more conclusions to be drawn from the mortgage melt-down, but I’ll confine my observations today to just this one.
No matter how BIG a company gets, I believe the guiding principle should always be to ‘Do the Right Thing’ by our employees, stakeholders and customers.
Didn’t most of us learn this from our parents? In school, didn’t everyone learn that cheating is not tolerated? And, you get punished, when you get caught!
So, if doing the right thing doesn’t guide a business owner, doesn’t it make sense not to lie, cheat and steal out of the probability that you’ll eventually get caught?
It takes a lot more effort to ‘undo’ a BAD story, and try to repair your reputation, than it does to keep your word, do the right thing and never have to worry about ruining your reputation in the first place.
But more than anything … it’s just the right thing to do, don’t you think?
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