Category Archives: Credit markets

Marshall Auerback: Bankers Gone Wild in Ireland AND Germany

By Marshall Auerback, a hedge fund manager and portfolio strategist who writes for New Deal 2.0. Despite a blame-a-thon on Ireleand, Germans banks are really at the core of the eurozone catastrophe. Much ink has been spilled in the press over the Irish problem and the laxity of the country’s southern Mediterranean counterparts in contrast […]

Credit Default Swap Volumes Fall Before Pending Rule Changes

On the one hand, I’m being proven somewhat wrong in my dismissive views of the impact of Dodd-Frank. Credit default swaps, a product I’ve viewed as essential to rein in (it’s a fee machine for Wall Street that has produced clear harm and has almost no socially productive uses) have fallen markedly in volume prior […]

Richard Alford: “Quantitative Easing Explained” And Its Critics

By Richard Alford, a former economist at the New York Fed. Since then, he has worked in the financial industry as a trading floor economist and strategist on both the sell side and the buy side. The YouTube video “Quantitative Easing Explained” has surpassed 2.9 million views. The video is both entertaining and unremittingly critical […]

More on the Damaging Implications of Corporate Cash-Hoarding

John Authers of the Financial Times provides an update on corporate cash-hoarding. In brief, it’s getting worse due to probably-warranted executive nervousness about business prospects. As Authers puts it: Corporate chieftains the world over have lots of cash, and want to hold on to it. It is a critical symptom of a new Age of […]

Guest Post: Will the Irish Crisis Spread to Italy?

By Paolo Manasse, Professor of Macroeconomics and International Economic Policy at the University of Bologna and Giulio Trigilia, Master’s student at Collegio Carlo Alberto. Cross posted from VoxEU. Is Italy the next European country to go? This column argues that the jury is still out, although the grace period will not extend beyond three years. […]

Systemic coupling round-up

Time to count up the systemic implications of the Irish crisis, following up on some of today’s links and other news. First, the usual contagion to Portugal and Spain is now in full swing, propelled by another barrage of bumbling Euroannouncements: Weber announced that if necessary, the EU would increase the ceiling of the EFSF […]

50 State Attorney General Mortgage Probe Rejects Idea of Global Settlement

Bloomberg provided a useful update on the 50 state attorney generals’ investigation into mortgage abuses. One key development is that the AGs are treating investors as parties whose interests need to be considered. This appears to be at odds with the approach taken by Federal regulators, who are devising and implementing exams of various sorts […]

“Waiting for Godot”, or “Endgame”?

No formal announcement yet, but some presumably well-sourced rumours about the size of the Irish bailout (EUR 85Bn), and the rate (7%, via the redoubtable Twitterer on all matters Irish @LorcanRK). While we await the budget statement, there are reasons to suspect, or hope, that the bailout, like Godot, will never come, because it’s failing […]

Foreclosure Task Force: Worse Than Stress Tests?

Felix Salmon reports on a conversation with departing assistant Treasury Secretary Michael Barr on newly-commenced reviews of the practices of bank servicers. Barr’s patter might sound convincing to the uninformed. An “11-agency, 8-week review of servicer practices, with hundreds of investigators crawling all over the banks”! Promises to hold miscreants accountable! Banks required to fix […]

Florida Kangaroo Foreclosure Courts: More Evidence of Favoritism Towards Banks

Lisa Epstein of Foreclosure Hamlet sent an eye-opening letter from Christopher Meister, who ran for the sheriff of Lee County, Florida as an independent and lost. As much as I’ve read plenty of reports of dubious judicial behavior in Florida, I still find myself appalled when new stories crop up. The Meister letter provides specific […]

Countrywide Offers Not-Very-Convincing Explanation of Testimony on Its “Oops, We Still Have the Note” Snafu

It was predictable, as soon as the press took notice of a potentially very damaging bit of testimony by a Countrywide manager, that its parent, Bank of America, would do everything in its power to deny its validity. By way of brief background (see here, here, and here for more detail), a recent court decision […]

Guest Post: Two Cords of Wood – An Intimate Look at Unnecessary Foreclosure

By Thomas Cox, a retired bank lawyer in Portland, Maine who serves as the Volunteer Program Coordinator for the Maine Attorney’s Saving Homes (MASH) program, cross posted from New Deal 2.0 Back in September, I was asked to give some unusual advice to a client. This woman, a resident of rural Northwestern Maine, wanted to […]

Levitin on the Dire Implications of “Securitization Fail”

There is a great post by Adam Levitin at Credit Slips which discusses the implications of the fact that a recent court decision in Kemp v. Countrywide Home Loans, Inc. stated that Countrywide had not transferred the note (the borrower IOU) to the Bank of New York, trustee for the securitization trust. Perhaps more important, […]

Why MERS Needs to be Taken Out and Shot

Some readers may have been unhappy with my failure to comment on a Washington Post article late last week about a push by the mortgage registry service, MERS, to “legalize” its activities. Even though the article indicates that dollars are being thrown at lobbyists to sell the MERS version of reality in DC, their approach […]

Tom Adams: Failure to Transfer Notes a Serious Issue for Countrywide and Its Trustee

By Tom Adams, an attorney and former monoline executive On Sunday, the New York Times reported on a recent case known as Kemp vs. Countrywide. In it, the judge in his decision states that for the mortgage loan in question in the case, a Countrywide employee testified that the mortgage note had never been delivered […]