Former Countrywide and PennyMac executive Stanford L. Kurland passed away last week from COVID-19. The Wall Street Journal wrote about Kurland’s career focusing on his conflicts with Countrywide Financial founder, Angelo Mozilo. While Mozilo was a scrappy and flashy entrepreneur from the Bronx, Kurland was a polished former accountant from Los Angeles. Kurland famously left Countrywide before the company started its precipitous decline and was eventually sold to Bank of America. Kurland went on to found PennyMac Loan Services which today has a market cap of about $5 Billion. Like most stories about Countrywide, which at one time was the largest mortgage lender in America, the WSJ story portrayed Mozilo as selfish and misguided, while Kurland was portrayed as smart and calculating. I’m sure Stanford Kurland was a good man, and his success in the mortgage industry speaks for itself, but my experience with both men was different. Mozilo was supportive of NAHREP from day one. In 2000, he was the biggest name in the housing industry, yet he personally attended NAHREP’s kick-off event in March of 2000, not as a keynote speaker, but as a quiet observer. I was impressed by that. Mozilo gave me his private cell phone number after the event, and over the years he responded to every email and never turned down a proposal from me. He told me that when he started Countrywide, Latinos were his most loyal customers, and he will never forget it. Conversely, when Stanford Kurland started PennyMac, I reached out to him several times and never received a response. Granted PennyMac was largely a B2B correspondent lender at the time, yet I worked with several similar companies over the years. Kurland was never interested in anything we did at NAHREP. That doesn’t make him bad, it’s just a fact. Even though Stanford Kurland helped build Countrywide, he was never tainted by its eventual failure, and Mozilo became the image and scapegoat for the entire mortgage meltdown. Because of my personal experience, it always seemed a bit unfair to me. RIP, Stanford Kurland.
Over the last few weeks, I have had the opportunity to speak at the T3 Conference in Florida…I surprised the audience when I explained how the issue of diversity has been framed incorrectly, and has for the most part alienated the business community.
Elon Musk dropped by the Real Time with Bill Maher show recently for an interview with the host. Maher, who considers himself a liberal is an obvious fan of the CEO of Tesla and Space X. The centerpiece of their conversation was their discussion regarding what Musk called the “woke mind virus” or what I prefer to call “cancel culture”.
People sometimes get me wrong. They think that because I talk a lot about giving back and living modestly, I must not care about money. On the contrary, I care a lot about money because I understand how our system works.