In a front page story, the New York Times reports that state attorney general Andrew Cuomo has launched an investigation of whether “exception” mortgages, meaning ones that fell outside the lender’s guidelines but were nevertheless approved, were adequately disclosed when bundled into mortgage backed securities. Connecticut’s attorney general is working on a similar, cooperative review, […]
Read more...The Fortune article by Allan Sloan, “BofA’s awesome Countrywide tax break‘ was more blunt, pointing out that we taxpayers are helping subsidize Bank of America’s purchase and Mozilo’s payout. The tax savings are reported to be worth a half a billion over the first five years after the deal close, due to Bank of America […]
Read more...There are three good and overlapping state of global finance pieces tonight; they all have worthy ideas and I’ll integrate them as best I can. The first is a post by Thomas Palley, “The Subprime – Trade Deficit Connection,” which is a companion piece to th Financial Times article by Stephen Roach yesterday. Roach depicted […]
Read more...Ooof, things have gone from bad to ugly. Bloomberg reports that the stocks of mortgage insurers MBIA and Ambac plummeted due to an earnings estimate cut by Morgan Stanley and talk of a Countrywide bankruptcy. It goes without saying that these developments imperil the fundraisings the insurers have been told by the ratings agencies they […]
Read more...The origins of the phrase “Let them eat cake” are uncertain, but it is generally attributed to Marie Antoinette, and at the time, her proposal wasn’t as loopy as it sounds now. The French peasantry was hungry due to high bread prices resulting from a flour shortage. The queen urged the poor instead to eat […]
Read more...An article in Asia Times, “Shopping ‘zombies’ offer US hope,” supplies middling analysis (the author believes the depth of the subprime mess has been dimensioned, which means the bad news has already been reflected in prices. That’s a long winded way of saying that now is a time to buy. That perspective is not shared […]
Read more...The Financial Tines and the Wall Street Journal feature two treatments of the same theme, investors looking to pick up bargains in companies damaged by the subprime implosion. The Financial Times discusses the interest of the Kuwait Investment Authority in acquiring stakes in financial services firms; the Journal article is aimed at retail investors that […]
Read more...Since I often take the Wall Street Journal to task on its reporting, I wanted to be sure to point out when they do a good job on topics of interest, per today’s page one story, “Lender Lobbying Blitz Abetted Mortgage Mess.” The article describes the lobbying efforts of subprime lender Ameriquest and three industry […]
Read more...In less than a week, we have had two lame front page stories at the Wall Street Journal that bear a strong resemblance to each other. I am wondering whether this is a function of holiday short-staffing or a new Murdoch template. “Cursory story” is far too kind a description for this paradigm. The current […]
Read more...The Case-Shiller Index showed further deterioration in the housing market in October, with a fall in all 20 metropolitan areas surveyed. Not surprisingly, the National Association of Realtors paints a sunnier picture. From Bloomberg: Home prices in 20 U.S. metropolitan areas fell in October by the most in at least six years, a private survey […]
Read more...For the record, Menzie Chinn is thoughtful and measured, and had a much less inflammatory heading to his post on the need to prevent “looting” in any regulatory reform that comes out of the subprime train wreck. Chinn uses the term looting in a very specific fashion, using George Akerlof and Paul Roemer’s analysis of […]
Read more...We are more that a bit skeptical of whether the New Hope Alliance Plan (the name alone instills doubt) to help a subset of subprime borrowers by freezing their initial interest rate is more about creating photo ops than helping meaningful numbers of overextended borrowers. Why are we so dubious? The last smoke and mirrors […]
Read more...UBS is getting heat on multiple front on the planned investment of $11.5 billion, the bulk of which comes from the Singapore Investment Corporation, and the remainder from a secretive Middle Eastern investor. Initially, this development seemed like a coup, for the Swiss bank announced further writeoffs seen as deep enough to take it through […]
Read more...The Wall Street Journal has a page one story, “Fraud Seen as a Driver In Wave of Foreclosures,” which probes the role of mortgage scams. I’m sure Tanta will wax eloquent on this article, but let me hazard a couple of observations. First, the article seeks to describe the fraud problem, citing the widely-touted Mortgage […]
Read more...Why am I cynical about the measures that the Federal Reserve proposed today to stem predatory mortgage lending? They smack of being an obligatory effort taken in the face of Congressional and media pressure. The Fed appears to have done little in the way of its own investigation of what is happening in the field […]
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