The money quotes from Krugman (or, Joe Shmoe told you so):
"In fact, theres a growing consensus among financial observers that the Paulson plan isnt mainly intended to achieve real results. The point is, instead, to create the appearance of action, thereby undercutting political support for actual attempts to help families in trouble."
"In particular, the Paulson plan is probably an attempt to take the wind out of Barney Franks sails." (or, as Tanta put it, to stop Mr Frank from regulating lenders' asses into infinity")
"As Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard bankruptcy expert, puts it, The administrations subprime mortgage plan is the bank lobbys dream. Given the Bush record, that should come as no surprise." (That one is my personal favorite)
"Paulsons plan or, to use its official name, the Hope Now Alliance plan is entirely focused on reducing investor losses. Any minor relief it might provide to troubled borrowers is clearly incidental. And it is does nothing for the victims of predatory lending."
"But wont the borrowers gain, too? Not if the planners can help it. Relief is restricted to borrowers whose mortgage debt is at least 97 percent of the houses value which means that in many, perhaps most, cases those who get debt relief will be borrowers who owe more than their house is worth. These people would be nearly as well off in financial terms if they simply walked away."
"only a small fraction of subprime borrowers will qualify for relief, and many of these borrowers will eventually face foreclosure anyway. So the plan is unlikely to reduce overall mortgage-related losses by more than a few percent, at most not enough to make any real difference to financial stability."
Thank you Mr Krugman, and Tanta and CR.
Now where did we put those mobile biological weapons trailers that we found Saddam sharing with Al Qaeda in Iraq?????? Oh, they got confused with the trailers full of toxic formaldahyde that we gave to the evacuees in New Orleans? So, you see, trailers can be used for chemical warfare.
What is your take? Is the whole country upside down? Look how the Maturity (months) and Amount financed (dollars) for new car loans keeps rising, now at 63.7 months and $30,738. And these are averages???
"I don't know that I've ever really seen this much homework eaten by this many dogs before. I guess the good news is that the dogs aren't going to starve."
We all know the results when dogs eat things that are bad.
Jazz improv requires incredible skill and knowledge, plus teamwork within a band. FYI, when Beethoven played his own music he received the most notice for his improvisations.
The GWB Admn is the opposite of improvisation. GWB succeeded politically (to the extent that he did) by carrying rigidity to an extreme. He avoided press conferences, fixed those he did have wioth friendly fake reporters, and intimidated the press with post 9/11 threats that they woudl be seen as enemies of freedom. Bush stayed "on message," as the Karl Rove-ites put it, never deviating. And he approached the world with simplistic dichotomies of good vs evil. He has no capacity for improvisation at all.
It is okay if you don't like jazz . . . but the politics of this is too urgent to be left to matters of taste.
reg. homesales, is below quote from jsmineset.com fact or fiction?:
"Foreclosures change the name of which the deeds are held, which then is counted as the sale of existing house. This is also true for new home sales when a builder fails on his builders loans like the majority do in these conditions."
Typical... promise to keep profit margins up. Do it by shorting the work... and give credit to "increased productivity" or "new paradigms."
Until the roof falls in.
Tell me, is the best we can hope for that we repeat the cycle of 1) economic collapse 2) regulation 3)regulation abolished by resurgent business 4) economic collapse? Onward and onward until the melting ice caps inundate Wall Street?
O-Joe,
Loan files are guaranteed no rights. You can do whatever you think is necessary to extract information from them.
What the problem is here is that we really don't wan to know what information they have. So I think the loan files are safe.
C: Well, when you know as much as I do, it doesn't take as long. Mine took about 15 minutes.
S: 15 minutes? Let's see.
C: I guess you won't be setting the grade curve THIS time, Susie! Read it and weep. "Bats: the big bug scourge of the skies." Note the professional clear plastic binder.
"Foreclosures change the name of which the deeds are held, which then is counted as the sale of existing house. This is also true for new home sales when a builder fails on his builders loans like the majority do in these conditions."
I have no idea what this writer thinks he means.
If we are talking about the pending sales report that was just released, that is based on signed contracts. That means it could include REO, where a buyer signed a contract to buy the REO.
It would not include any foreclosure sale because those are auctions.
There may be other kinds of statistical reports on home sales that rely simply on deed filings. In that case, FCs could be included because there is a deed recorded from the borrower or trustee to the lender or anyone who outbid the lender at the FC auction.
How would you know? You would read the footnote on the press release.
"In fact, theres a growing consensus among financial observers that the Paulson plan isnt mainly intended to achieve real results. The point is, instead, to create the appearance of action, thereby undercutting political support for actual attempts to help families in trouble."
"In particular, the Paulson plan is probably an attempt to take the wind out of Barney Franks sails."
Over the past decade, Wall Street built a market for more than $2 trillion in securities sold globally and backed by loans to U.S. homeowners on two long-accepted beliefs and one newer one. The prevailing logic: The value of the American home would never fall nationwide, and people would almost always make their mortgage payments. The more recent twist: Packaging mortgage loans and turning them into securities would make the global economy more resilient if anything went wrong.
In a matter of months, though, much of the promise of the new financial architecture -- together with its underlying assumptions -- has proven to be a mirage. As house prices fall and homeowners default on mortgages at troubling rates, the pain has spread far and wide. An examination of the resulting crisis shows that it is comparable to some of the biggest financial disasters of the past half-century.
There may be other kinds of statistical reports on home sales that rely simply on deed filings.
DataQuick does exactly that. In Feb they made a change to ignore non-arms length transactions but that's someplace i don't want to go. Is "John & Jane Doe HW/JT" transferring to "J&J Living Trust 012" counted?
Robert, this is not the first time Tanta has reminded me of Susie Derkins!
Nor I. I was just waiting for the right moment to conjure the image of 'kerpow!' and a lacrosse stick but you beat me to it.
Greenspan acknowledged that derivatives, by construction, are highly leveraged, a condition that is both a large benefit and an oversized Achilles' heel. It appeared that the benefit had been reaped in the past decade, leading to a wishful declaration of the end of the business cycle. Now we are faced with the oversized Achilles' heel, with "the possibility of a chain reaction, a cascading sequence of defaults that will culminate in financial implosion if it proceeds unchecked". According to Greenspan, "only a central bank, with its unlimited power to create money, can with a high probability thwart such a process before it becomes destructive. Hence central banks have, of necessity, been drawn into becoming lenders of last resort."
Greenspan asserted that such "catastrophic financial insurance coverage" by the central bank should be reserved for only the rarest of occasions to avoid moral hazard. He observed correctly that in competitive financial markets, the greater the leverage, the higher must be the rate of return on the invested capital before adjustment for higher risk. Yet there is no evidence that higher risk in financial manipulation leads to higher return for investment in the real economy, as recent defaults by Enron, Global Crossing, WorldCom, Tyco and Conseco have shown. Higher risks in finance engineering merely provide higher returns from speculation temporarily, until the day of reckoning, at which point the high returns can suddenly turn in equally high losses.
I keep waiting for the next bad news - hoping to know when we've hit bottom, so that we can begin the clean-up.
Strangely, bad economic news is followed by two responses: new Stock Market rallies and more disinformation, spin, and twisted accounting from our government.
Over the last 7 years (which just happen to coincide with the administration of our government by the "CEO" President) precedents have been set that will haunt us far into the future. Chief among these is the notion that the rules and laws don't have to be followed. This ideology is based on, and fatally flawed by, the underlying meme that any form of regulation of business is an unacceptable trampling of the rights of the people by an out-of-control liberal government bent on some vague but nefarious goal (little or no thought is given as to the reason our parents and grandparents adopted the laws and regulations in the first place).
Deficit spending, tax cuts for the wealthiest, falling dollar, outsourcing, cronyism, debt-based economy, bloated government bureaucracy, undocumented workers, preemptive war on false pretenses, the employment of an overpriced mercenary army, the ruin of our reputation, torture, destruction of evidence, incompetence rewarded as brilliance - all sold to us under the brand of "Conservatism".
Here's a news flash: There has never been a more liberal government in the US than the Bush administration. They have liberalized us beyond the point of criminality. What can be more liberal than no regulation? What can be more liberal than no law enforcement?
The more we loosen the system, the more we lose ("we" being the alleged government by the people). We are not only being robbed, we are being robbed forward.
Mark these words: when an audit of the BA is finally conducted (in as much as one can accurately audit the books of a criminal organization in the first place), the true extent of the damage to our economy and our nation will make the current situation look like a springtime walk in the park.
moe showers, if you do not quit pasting in long unidentified snippets of someone else's text that are or are not relevant to the current thread, I will ban you.
moe showers, if you do not quit pasting in long unidentified snippets of someone else's text that are or are not relevant to the current thread, I will ban you.
ahhhh! thank you.. I think moe is a chat bot anyhow.
More from the Petruno article that meets my biases:
...The American Securitization Forum, a trade association that includes servicers, lenders and investors, worked to craft the rate-freeze plan with the White House. On Thursday, the group put out a lengthy document asserting that servicers have the legal right to pursue modifications that are "in the best interests of investors."
But this is the kind of stuff governed by detailed contracts between investors and loan servicers. And in general, Gundlach said, "if you're going to modify more than 5% of the loans [in a pool], you're in blatant breach of contract."
As for the idea that the servicers would get permission from every pool investor, good luck. Specific pools can have hundreds of investors, many of them foreign. The logistics of achieving some kind of consensus are daunting at best.
Josh Rosner, a managing director of financial consulting firm Graham Fisher & Co. in New York, figures that a rash of legal challenges to loan modifications is inevitable. "I think that's exactly where we're going to be" in 2008, he said.
When the executive and legislative branches encourage this stupidity and the 4th Estate is out at Lunchtime O'Boulez, all that's left is the judicial branch. At the very least it will slow down this crap.
btw - thanks Tanta - I'd started to dread scrolling thru the comments.
-K
Is "John & Jane Doe HW/JT" transferring to "J&J Living Trust 012" counted?
Robert Coté | Homepage | 12.10.07 - 1:09 pm | #
Robert,
Here in Charlotte County,Fl. they are included into the counties monthly sales figures on the website. I randomly checked 3 months over the last year and came up with about a 10-11% rate. I just back those out of all 200.00 and less sales and it gets me pretty close on FC's.
We have been running roughly 50% of all sales as REO...Good times ahead!!!
Rosalind, with your permission, I'm doing a little catching up from an earlier thread on this furious news day.
[Even with a modest decline in the national aggregate price this year, its important to keep in mind that nearly two-thirds of the metro areas in the U.S. are showing price increases, he said. The apparent disparity results from fewer sales in high-cost markets, so a change in the mix of sales is dragging down the national median home price.]
Does the NAR even have a shred of a sense of ethics left? "apparent disparity" - what the hell is that?
This is the most deliberate attemt to misrepresent that I can recall, even frm the NAR. Perhaps the 15% declines in the most expensive and most active markets are overwhelming the 1% increases in the least expensive and slowest markets.
I wish they would turn their raw data over to an independent auditor for analysis.
I keep waiting for the next bad news - hoping to know when we've hit bottom, so that we can begin the clean-up.
Each new wave of bad news pushes the final reckoning further off into the future -- if the financial sector can clean up the SIV and CDO oopsies with minimal fallout, we might see the bottom by Spring. This is the soft landing scenario. If the recession turns vicious, it could be years before we hit bottom.
There has never been a more liberal government in the US than the Bush administration. They have liberalized us beyond the point of criminality. What can be more liberal than no regulation? What can be more liberal than no law enforcement?
There is nothing liberal about the Bush administration -- this is government of the Autocrats, for the Kleptocrats, by the Incompetents. BushCo is the Larry Curly & Moe Gangsters-R-Us writ large -- dedicating to making the rich richer, and turning everything else they touch into shit.
Liberalism is about using the power of government for the common good -- right wing smears may have tainted the word, but the concept is still valid.
All of the talk about unfettered free markets is a load of crap -- there has never been a free market in the history of the world. Governments always act to protect their vital interests, whether they be economic or political.
The current free market mania is nothing more than Wall Street gaming the system, so that Wall Street can loot the Treasury and the world's markets -- for the benefit of Wall Street.
The current economic crisis is the collapse of the Wall Street SIV CDO Ponzi scheme -- they finally ran out of suckers to buy their crap.
I think Krugman has it wrong, but only partly wrong. He thinks the deal is designed to benefit investors. I don't think it does.
I asked before, cui bono? Unless I'm misreading, I think think it's the servicers who benefit--and the plan was designed that way. They escape costly talent ramp-ups to handle these loans the right way; they probably escape liability for mods conducted under the plan; and they escape at least some of this guano coming home to roost on their balance sheets.
Everybody else essentially gets hosed.
Why pander to the servicers? I think the clue is two little words in Krugman's piece: "bank lobby." There isn't yet a united front called the "Mortgage Sludge Bagholder Association."
Incidentally, I think Frank's proposal is best for everyone. I can't imagine why everyone thinks punch drunk lenders who threw all standards away should still be first in line at the creditors' punchbowl. And as a side benefit, a bankruptcy proceeding could force a true mark-to-market moment for housing's sinking asset values.
I keep hearing that the big banks/investment houses/servicers don't have enough bodies to do the work properly.
thus, my question would be: how long does it take to properly train in a person?
it would seem that you could train people rather quickly with the right incentives...
this would also increase employment and GDP, right?
Let's say it takes 1 year to train, then my response would be, "let's freeze mortgages for 1 year" and then go back and do a step by step review of all mortgages by newly trained personnel.
Man, I was about to commit a faux pas but I checked the urban dictionary and I tell ya I have to get with the program - although the recommended spelling is fopar
This is the most deliberate attemt to misrepresent that I can recall, even frm the NAR.
C: Why does the sky turn red as the sun sets?
Dad: That's all the oxygen in the atmosphere catching fire.
C:Where does the sun go when it sets?
Dad:The sun sets in the west. In Arizona actually, near Flagstaff.
C: Oh
Dad: That's why the rocks are so red.
C: Don't the people there get burned up?
Dad: No the sun goes out when it sets. That's why it's dark at night.
C: Doesn't the sun crush the wyhole state when it lands?
Dad: Ha Ha Of course not. Hold a quarter up. See, the sun's about the same size.
C: I thought I read the sun was really big.
Dad: You can't believe everything you read I'm afraid.
C: So how does the sun rise in the east if it lands in Arizona each night?
Dad: Well, it's time for bed.
C: I hope someday I'm as smart as Dad.
Mom: Why, what did he tell you now?
Banker's Morgan Stanley link- "One risk is that both our outlook and the Feds are too optimistic, because they pay too much attention to the economic resilience of the past, and not enough to the future effects of financial and economic headwinds and the dynamics of the downturn. Dramatically slower growth in domestic demand leaves it vulnerable to shocks."
These guys still do not get it. If HELOC money dries up, consumption will IMMEDIATELY fall by 2.5%. No soft landing, no "mild recession." Mr. and Mrs. Jones will turn out the lights, and lowering the fed funds rate won't prevent it.
The issue you raise about HELOC is interesting - in MBIA's statement on the $1B raised, they said:
MBIA also announced that as a result of continued deterioration in the performance of residential mortgage-backed securities, in particular, prime home equity lines of credit and closed-end second mortgage-backed securities the Company currently estimates that it will establish case basis loss reserves of between $500 million and $800 million in the fourth quarter related to those exposures.
It is hard to "train" a first-rate workout specialist.
That's a job that people get to after many years in the biz. They know credit underwriting; they know BK and FC (processes, laws, uses and abuses); they know something about pricing and how securities work; they understand the collections process; they can read a payment history, a broker price opinion, a mortgage insurance policy cert and an adjustable rate mortgage rider at 20 paces while guzzling Diet Coke and sitting in on a conference call.
You don't "train" people to do that job. You promote experienced people into that job, and you pay them what they're worth (or as close to that as you can get, since they're worth their weight in gold).
I can train just about anyone to follow the checklist. But what you need, if you want good workouts done fast, is someone who doesn't need the checklist, knows when to stray from the checklist, and crucially: can make the decision, execute the document, and go on to the next problem.
Every servicer already has a bunch of disempowered paper pushers. We haven't let specialists make decisions in ages. Oh no; the bid bad Wall Street people might sue you if Marlene in Default Servicing decided to make the call and offer the workout today, before the borrower gets any more past due and while the borrower is on the phone and ready to sign. No, no, we can't have that; Marlene's decision might get Monday-morning quarterbacked by ten lawyers. So make Marlene keep handing it up the food chain until it lands on the desk with someone whose authority and skills are both the inverse of Marlene's. By then, of course, you may just have been overtaken by events . . .
That's all water under the bridge anyway, because we no longer have a pool of junior collections/special loan servicing people to promote up into specialist positions. We outsourced all that to a bunch of really nice Indians who work in call centers and read from scripts and don't get paid very much. You cannot ask them to make workout decisions. They've never even seen a deed of trust. They read scripts and log entries.
Ditto with the senior credit underwriters: we got rid of them when AUS took over. They'd be good candidates for the workout department, but they're gone.
End of story: there are hundreds (if not thousands) of people in this country who could do this job. If you put a first-class headhunter on the task, and paid (including relo, if necessary) to get them, you could have them in a few months.
Just typing that made me laugh so hard I almost fell off my chair.
That's all water under the bridge anyway, because we no longer have a pool of junior collections/special loan servicing people to promote up into specialist positions. We outsourced all that to a bunch of really nice Indians who work in call centers and read from scripts and don't get paid very much. You cannot ask them to make workout decisions. They've never even seen a deed of trust. They read scripts and log entries.
Repeat: We no longer have a pool of junior collections/special loan servicing people to promote up into specialist positions.
Tanta, welcome to the world of former engineers. When I was wet behind the ears engineering was a profession. Nowadays it is a cost center. Want a US hybrid automobile? How about a Ford Escape? Ford licenses Toyota 1st generation technology to make the Escape Hybrid. Toyota is offering generation 2.5 right now.
I am totally indebted to you for reawaking my sanity, for I have been too long without Calvin & Hobbes. I truly enjoyed the remembrance of "snow art" as it should be and will now look forward to the rest of winter and hopefully, snow!!! Let Paulsen and his ilk prepare for a lot hotter clime after life. Cheers all!
Robert, I think there is one important difference from the engineering situation.
Nobody goes to college and gets a "loan workout specialist" degree. It isn't even close to the content of standard or specialized business majors. There are no recognized training institutes. Because RE finance is so local, there are zero international standards.
It was always a job that you got by working your way up. And furthermore, it was not exclusively but very largely one of the few decent-paying jobs women got. A lot of the canny old grizzled veteran women I know who did that work didn't have college educations. They had started thiry years ago on the teller line. They weren't "expensive" employees because they were in a high-status job; they were expensive because they'd been around so long they had eleventy jillion hours of unpaid vacation and weeks of severance eligibility and some of them even had old pension plans you couldn't force them off because they were too old. As far as base salary, they didn't make that much, but they had racked up some bennies.
The other issue is simply the cyclical nature of servicing. Who wanted to keep a bunch of these folks around during the boom, when .02% of loans were defaulting, and of those, you just worked out a refi or sale (not even a short one)?
I mean, automakers always need engineers. Servicers only really need workout people in bad economic cycles. So they always go through this thing of wanting to pare down the default-servicing people during booms, when they aren't busy enough.
That's a lot of what led to these subservicing arrangements with "special servicers." The problem with that is that it, in turn, became a lowest-bid-gets-the-contract thing, too.
I don't minimize the difficulties that engineers and programmers and other folks have and continue to go through. But these jobs were hard-won by people who started in entry-level jobs decades ago and earned their stripes. And they got turned out by "rightsizers" who make fat bonuses. It's part of the terrible shame of the corporate world in the last few decades and this is just an example of it. But it's why I'm so caustic about this whining by the industry that it lacks resources: it lacks resources because it cannibalized itself years ago to show Wall Street cool numbers.
There is this pervasive notion about the plan that it will somehow re-write existing contracts even though we know this isn't true. Even more disturbing is the concept that existing borrowers will immediately stop making payments on the mortgage because they think there is an automatic refi to better terms in the works. At some point it has nothing to do with reality but is more about what the plan is perceived to do.
I can easily imagine that someone who is underwater and desperate for a solution to their crises will view this plan as a white knight, or at least they'll stop making payments and error on the side of their own solvency. They can always claim ignorance after the fact! "I thought I was going to get a re-fi under the gubbermint plan" or "the president said that he would help people like me" etc.
Even Fleck doesn't seem to understand the details, why would the average subprime borrower, or anybody other than a mortgage banker for that matter? This is the REAL problem with the plan, imho.
Revenue Procedure 2007-72 describes conditions under which modifications of certain subprime mortgage loans will not be cause the IRS to challenge the tax status of certain securitization vehicles in which the mortgages are pooled. It will be published in IRB 2007-52 dated Dec. 24, 2007.
SECTION 6. APPLICATION
In the case of one or more transactions to which this revenue procedure
applies
.01 The Internal Revenue Service will not challenge a securitization vehicles
qualification as a REMIC on the grounds that the transactions are not among the
exceptions listed in § 1.860G-2(b)(3);
.02 The Internal Revenue Service will not contend that the transactions are
prohibited transactions under section 860F(a)(2) on the grounds that the transactions
are not among the exceptions listed in section 860F(a)(2)(A)(i)(iv);
.03 The Internal Revenue Service will not challenge a securitization vehicles
classification as a trust on the grounds that the transactions manifest a power to vary
the investment of the certificate holders; and
.04 The Internal Revenue Service will not challenge a securitization vehicles
qualification as a REMIC on the grounds that the transactions resulted in a deemed
reissuance of the REMIC regular interests.
And by the way, the MBA's request to get by with FAS 5 instead of FAS 114 has nothing to do with a sudden acute shortage of accountants, either.
Then why? Is it really because, as your title indicates, they just don't want to work hard at this? Or is it that they'd rather sling the whole mess into a few big buckets and assign a haircut to each, so that when the whole ugly denouement is reached the bankers can say, "Geez, guess we put the wrong percentage of loans into each bucket. Sorry!" rather than admit its entire methodology on which loan viability (and by extension loss provisions) on individual loans is based is next to worthless?
BTW, I know nothing about FAS 5 or 114 ... I'm just offering this up because I'm a cynic by nature.
This morning I have been channeling Capital letters in the far reaches of space using Transcendental Meditation and bongwater and want to report that Capital letters are very annoyed when people use them to describe anything this admin does. They ask that they never be used for any communication referencing the bush admin or any of its members. You may think Capital letters have no power in this world but you would be very mistaken. They can be fierce when annoyed.
Q What do you do with an engineer when they turn 40
A: You take them out back and shoot them
Point being there's a supply of trainable talent there to replace them at a lower cost. There is no mortgage university or curriculum to train people to solve these relatively complex issues.
sk
You rascal!!!
The C&H Snow stuff knocked me out of my chair. I havent laughed so much for quite a time. God I miss C&H. Please come back the world needs you.
It was always a job that you got by working your way up. And furthermore, it was not exclusively but very largely one of the few decent-paying jobs women got. A lot of the canny old grizzled veteran women I know who did that work didn't have college educations.
True dat!
I can attest the accuracy of that statement, at least from my own experience. Back in the late 90's, I managed a 'special collections' staff, which included our workout specialsts, who were overwhelmingly: older, female, and most were without college degrees. I found the best I had were all ex-underwriters. Athough I tried promoting and training junior collectors, but that took so much time, and only a few really had a knack for it. It's really hard to teach the 'spidey-sense' that is required - that almost has to come via experience. They taught me more than I ever taught them.
That said, these ladies could be, a bit of a pain in the ass at times to manage. Anyway - 'Grizzled' is apt.
That said, these ladies could be, a bit of a pain in the ass at times to manage.
Of course they were. Your Tanta has been a bit of a pain in the ass at times to manage. At times your Tanta has been a Five Alarm CAT 4 DEFCON 3 Adam 12 Agony in the Ass to manage. (Being myself college-educated and then some, I have all the attitude problems of those ladies (many of whom trained me as a young puppy) married to a vast vocabulary and a total inability to be cowed by people with MBAs. Oh, when it's good it's good, and when it's bad, it's a "management crisis."
As in, a crisis for the manager. It didn't really bother me that much.
Tanta, i think it's fair to ban moe showers now (see thread below this). please?
Oops! And I accidentally deleted some of his comments, too, while I was at it.
Silly me.
Moe, you can come back if you promise to stop copying pages of stuff that is or is not on topic into these threads. In other words, you gotta act like you're reading them. If you had actually read them, you'd have seen my threat to ban you earlier.
"Of course, if you ask Paul Krugman, he'll tell you that it's not so much that the dog ate the homework; it's that we're grading on the Bush Curve:
By Bush administration standards, Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary, is a good guy. He isnt conspicuously incompetent; and he isnt trying to mislead us into war, justify torture or protect corrupt contractors.
There's a masterpiece of damning with faint praise."
Krugman is not exactly the most unbiased person politically, so I do not take his his statements at full value and in this context his comment is irrelevant.
The fraud and greed perpetrated by borrowers is, of course, overlooked by Krugman. They are all victims of "predatory lending" or "distressed and defrauded borrowers". We are told that Barney Frank's proposal "would actually help working families".
You can almost feel the pain Krugman must be bearing: "Another is human suffering: hundreds of thousands, and probably millions, of American families will lose their homes."
Is Krugman a disgruntled former worker from the mortgage industry?
Paul's masterpiece? Get off your knees.
I'd call you an idiot but that would be insulting to all the idiots out there; by comparing them to you!
This is just hatefull jibberish and in no way enlightening.
"At least no one is (yet) suggesting that we load the nonperforming loans up in CIA planes and fly them to secret detention centers"
Oh? The white guys from the south have always mourned the passing of slavery. It won't be called slavery next time, but indentured servitude is coming back to the US of A - count on it. read the new bankruptcy laws, and go visit one of them "illegal immigrant detention centers". If you can't pay your loans, you and your family may be living in one soon.
The money quotes from Krugman (or, Joe Shmoe told you so):
"In fact, theres a growing consensus among financial observers that the Paulson plan isnt mainly intended to achieve real results. The point is, instead, to create the appearance of action, thereby undercutting political support for actual attempts to help families in trouble."
"In particular, the Paulson plan is probably an attempt to take the wind out of Barney Franks sails." (or, as Tanta put it, to stop Mr Frank from regulating lenders' asses into infinity")
"As Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard bankruptcy expert, puts it, The administrations subprime mortgage plan is the bank lobbys dream. Given the Bush record, that should come as no surprise." (That one is my personal favorite)
"Paulsons plan or, to use its official name, the Hope Now Alliance plan is entirely focused on reducing investor losses. Any minor relief it might provide to troubled borrowers is clearly incidental. And it is does nothing for the victims of predatory lending."
"But wont the borrowers gain, too? Not if the planners can help it. Relief is restricted to borrowers whose mortgage debt is at least 97 percent of the houses value which means that in many, perhaps most, cases those who get debt relief will be borrowers who owe more than their house is worth. These people would be nearly as well off in financial terms if they simply walked away."
"only a small fraction of subprime borrowers will qualify for relief, and many of these borrowers will eventually face foreclosure anyway. So the plan is unlikely to reduce overall mortgage-related losses by more than a few percent, at most not enough to make any real difference to financial stability."
Thank you Mr Krugman, and Tanta and CR.
Now where did we put those mobile biological weapons trailers that we found Saddam sharing with Al Qaeda in Iraq?????? Oh, they got confused with the trailers full of toxic formaldahyde that we gave to the evacuees in New Orleans? So, you see, trailers can be used for chemical warfare.
Joe
It's sort of like public policy as a form of jazz improvization. I personally don't like jazz improvization.
"FAS 5 provides for a cost-effective approach to accurately measuring probable credit losses on large volumes of loans..".
How's that "probable credit loss" model been working up to this point sport?
OT: "Consumer credit rose at an annual rate of 2-1/4 percent in October. Revolving credit rose briskly, while nonrevolving credit declined."
FRB: G.19 Release--Consumer Credit--November 6, 2009
What is your take? Is the whole country upside down? Look how the Maturity (months) and Amount financed (dollars) for new car loans keeps rising, now at 63.7 months and $30,738. And these are averages???
"I don't know that I've ever really seen this much homework eaten by this many dogs before. I guess the good news is that the dogs aren't going to starve."
We all know the results when dogs eat things that are bad.
I'ts going to get mighty stinky around here....
Anonymous
Jazz improv requires incredible skill and knowledge, plus teamwork within a band. FYI, when Beethoven played his own music he received the most notice for his improvisations.
The GWB Admn is the opposite of improvisation. GWB succeeded politically (to the extent that he did) by carrying rigidity to an extreme. He avoided press conferences, fixed those he did have wioth friendly fake reporters, and intimidated the press with post 9/11 threats that they woudl be seen as enemies of freedom. Bush stayed "on message," as the Karl Rove-ites put it, never deviating. And he approached the world with simplistic dichotomies of good vs evil. He has no capacity for improvisation at all.
It is okay if you don't like jazz . . . but the politics of this is too urgent to be left to matters of taste.
Joe
Yep, the dogs are getting LOTS of fiber in their diets these days...
reg. homesales, is below quote from jsmineset.com fact or fiction?:
"Foreclosures change the name of which the deeds are held, which then is counted as the sale of existing house. This is also true for new home sales when a builder fails on his builders loans like the majority do in these conditions."
Is waterboarding loan files allowed now and then... is it ethical?
O-Joe
Typical... promise to keep profit margins up. Do it by shorting the work... and give credit to "increased productivity" or "new paradigms."
Until the roof falls in.
Tell me, is the best we can hope for that we repeat the cycle of 1) economic collapse 2) regulation 3)regulation abolished by resurgent business 4) economic collapse? Onward and onward until the melting ice caps inundate Wall Street?
O Joe,
Only if it keeps them liquid!
O-Joe,
Loan files are guaranteed no rights. You can do whatever you think is necessary to extract information from them.
What the problem is here is that we really don't wan to know what information they have. So I think the loan files are safe.
C: Hi Susie! Did you write your report?
S: Yeah, I spent all last evening on it. Did you?
C: Well, when you know as much as I do, it doesn't take as long. Mine took about 15 minutes.
S: 15 minutes? Let's see.
C: I guess you won't be setting the grade curve THIS time, Susie! Read it and weep. "Bats: the big bug scourge of the skies." Note the professional clear plastic binder.
S: Bats aren't BUGS!
"Foreclosures change the name of which the deeds are held, which then is counted as the sale of existing house. This is also true for new home sales when a builder fails on his builders loans like the majority do in these conditions."
I have no idea what this writer thinks he means.
If we are talking about the pending sales report that was just released, that is based on signed contracts. That means it could include REO, where a buyer signed a contract to buy the REO.
It would not include any foreclosure sale because those are auctions.
There may be other kinds of statistical reports on home sales that rely simply on deed filings. In that case, FCs could be included because there is a deed recorded from the borrower or trustee to the lender or anyone who outbid the lender at the FC auction.
How would you know? You would read the footnote on the press release.
bacon dreamz,
LoL! Calvin and Suze.... CR and Tanta?
"In fact, theres a growing consensus among financial observers that the Paulson plan isnt mainly intended to achieve real results. The point is, instead, to create the appearance of action, thereby undercutting political support for actual attempts to help families in trouble."
"In particular, the Paulson plan is probably an attempt to take the wind out of Barney Franks sails."
That's pretty evil.
I'm starting to like this Paulson guy.
Robert, this is not the first time Tanta has reminded me of Susie Derkins!
Interesting article: a bit and link:
Over the past decade, Wall Street built a market for more than $2 trillion in securities sold globally and backed by loans to U.S. homeowners on two long-accepted beliefs and one newer one. The prevailing logic: The value of the American home would never fall nationwide, and people would almost always make their mortgage payments. The more recent twist: Packaging mortgage loans and turning them into securities would make the global economy more resilient if anything went wrong.
In a matter of months, though, much of the promise of the new financial architecture -- together with its underlying assumptions -- has proven to be a mirage. As house prices fall and homeowners default on mortgages at troubling rates, the pain has spread far and wide. An examination of the resulting crisis shows that it is comparable to some of the biggest financial disasters of the past half-century.
U.S. Mortgage Crisis Rivals S&L Meltdown - WSJ.com
Thank you Tanta, yes it was about pending home sales.
I am always curious once I learned about all the little hedonic data forming.
There may be other kinds of statistical reports on home sales that rely simply on deed filings.
DataQuick does exactly that. In Feb they made a change to ignore non-arms length transactions but that's someplace i don't want to go. Is "John & Jane Doe HW/JT" transferring to "J&J Living Trust 012" counted?
ps Tanta, i mean that in the best possible way.
Robert, this is not the first time Tanta has reminded me of Susie Derkins!
Nor I. I was just waiting for the right moment to conjure the image of 'kerpow!' and a lacrosse stick but you beat me to it.
Greenspan acknowledged that derivatives, by construction, are highly leveraged, a condition that is both a large benefit and an oversized Achilles' heel. It appeared that the benefit had been reaped in the past decade, leading to a wishful declaration of the end of the business cycle. Now we are faced with the oversized Achilles' heel, with "the possibility of a chain reaction, a cascading sequence of defaults that will culminate in financial implosion if it proceeds unchecked". According to Greenspan, "only a central bank, with its unlimited power to create money, can with a high probability thwart such a process before it becomes destructive. Hence central banks have, of necessity, been drawn into becoming lenders of last resort."
Greenspan asserted that such "catastrophic financial insurance coverage" by the central bank should be reserved for only the rarest of occasions to avoid moral hazard. He observed correctly that in competitive financial markets, the greater the leverage, the higher must be the rate of return on the invested capital before adjustment for higher risk. Yet there is no evidence that higher risk in financial manipulation leads to higher return for investment in the real economy, as recent defaults by Enron, Global Crossing, WorldCom, Tyco and Conseco have shown. Higher risks in finance engineering merely provide higher returns from speculation temporarily, until the day of reckoning, at which point the high returns can suddenly turn in equally high losses.
==========================
LoL! Calvin and Suze.... CR and Tanta?
Robert Coté
Quite OT, but with all the snow round here ( yeah we know its not THERE Robert !), here is some Calvin and Hobbes snow "art" ( no relation to me )
MoM's Calvin & Hobbes Snow Art Gallery
-K
Who gets to be Hobbs?
I woulda thought of Tanta as Hobbs.. but that's just me..
pardon.. it's Hobbes
Larry, Moe and Curly are sloppy.
I keep waiting for the next bad news - hoping to know when we've hit bottom, so that we can begin the clean-up.
Strangely, bad economic news is followed by two responses: new Stock Market rallies and more disinformation, spin, and twisted accounting from our government.
Over the last 7 years (which just happen to coincide with the administration of our government by the "CEO" President) precedents have been set that will haunt us far into the future. Chief among these is the notion that the rules and laws don't have to be followed. This ideology is based on, and fatally flawed by, the underlying meme that any form of regulation of business is an unacceptable trampling of the rights of the people by an out-of-control liberal government bent on some vague but nefarious goal (little or no thought is given as to the reason our parents and grandparents adopted the laws and regulations in the first place).
Deficit spending, tax cuts for the wealthiest, falling dollar, outsourcing, cronyism, debt-based economy, bloated government bureaucracy, undocumented workers, preemptive war on false pretenses, the employment of an overpriced mercenary army, the ruin of our reputation, torture, destruction of evidence, incompetence rewarded as brilliance - all sold to us under the brand of "Conservatism".
Here's a news flash: There has never been a more liberal government in the US than the Bush administration. They have liberalized us beyond the point of criminality. What can be more liberal than no regulation? What can be more liberal than no law enforcement?
The more we loosen the system, the more we lose ("we" being the alleged government by the people). We are not only being robbed, we are being robbed forward.
Mark these words: when an audit of the BA is finally conducted (in as much as one can accurately audit the books of a criminal organization in the first place), the true extent of the damage to our economy and our nation will make the current situation look like a springtime walk in the park.
"Conservatism" is a lie.
We are being robbed.
Market's up 119 pts! WoooHooo!
moe showers, if you do not quit pasting in long unidentified snippets of someone else's text that are or are not relevant to the current thread, I will ban you.
I, Rosalind, have spoken.
PS: I am not Susie. I am The Babysitter.
though.. to be technical.. maybe Tanta should be Calvin.. and CR should be Hobbes.
Hobbes is generally seen as Calvin's projection of adult behaviour.
so.. in this case, you could look at CR as Tanta's stuffed animal.. upon which she projects her ideas of what it would be like to be an adult.
..anyhoo, it's up to them to decide what cartoon characters they represent.
you mean Rosalyn i think, but yes that would also seem to make sense.
Rosalind,
You had best review Revenge of the Baby-Sat before trying to keep this unruly bunch in line.
moe showers, if you do not quit pasting in long unidentified snippets of someone else's text that are or are not relevant to the current thread, I will ban you.
ahhhh! thank you.. I think moe is a chat bot anyhow.
More from the Petruno article that meets my biases:
...The American Securitization Forum, a trade association that includes servicers, lenders and investors, worked to craft the rate-freeze plan with the White House. On Thursday, the group put out a lengthy document asserting that servicers have the legal right to pursue modifications that are "in the best interests of investors."
But this is the kind of stuff governed by detailed contracts between investors and loan servicers. And in general, Gundlach said, "if you're going to modify more than 5% of the loans [in a pool], you're in blatant breach of contract."
As for the idea that the servicers would get permission from every pool investor, good luck. Specific pools can have hundreds of investors, many of them foreign. The logistics of achieving some kind of consensus are daunting at best.
Josh Rosner, a managing director of financial consulting firm Graham Fisher & Co. in New York, figures that a rash of legal challenges to loan modifications is inevitable. "I think that's exactly where we're going to be" in 2008, he said.
When the executive and legislative branches encourage this stupidity and the 4th Estate is out at Lunchtime O'Boulez, all that's left is the judicial branch. At the very least it will slow down this crap.
btw - thanks Tanta - I'd started to dread scrolling thru the comments.
-K
unless of course you're making some obscure shakespearean reference, in which case: Nerd!
unless of course you're making some obscure shakespearean reference
Nah, I just misspelled it. I was too lazy to look it up.
I have you guys for that.
Is "John & Jane Doe HW/JT" transferring to "J&J Living Trust 012" counted?
Robert Coté | Homepage | 12.10.07 - 1:09 pm | #
Robert,
Here in Charlotte County,Fl. they are included into the counties monthly sales figures on the website. I randomly checked 3 months over the last year and came up with about a 10-11% rate. I just back those out of all 200.00 and less sales and it gets me pretty close on FC's.
We have been running roughly 50% of all sales as REO...Good times ahead!!!
Chris
...some obscure shakespearean reference, in which case: Nerd!
It was you sir, who resurrected the immortal intellectual gulf twixt John Calvin (1509-1564) and Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679).
Normally I would leave you to ponder the implications for yourself to discover but that would make me a Calvinist and thus destroy another mystery.
Rosalind, with your permission, I'm doing a little catching up from an earlier thread on this furious news day.
[Even with a modest decline in the national aggregate price this year, its important to keep in mind that nearly two-thirds of the metro areas in the U.S. are showing price increases, he said. The apparent disparity results from fewer sales in high-cost markets, so a change in the mix of sales is dragging down the national median home price.]
Does the NAR even have a shred of a sense of ethics left? "apparent disparity" - what the hell is that?
This is the most deliberate attemt to misrepresent that I can recall, even frm the NAR. Perhaps the 15% declines in the most expensive and most active markets are overwhelming the 1% increases in the least expensive and slowest markets.
I wish they would turn their raw data over to an independent auditor for analysis.
Bacon Dreamz=Spaceman Spiff
MS changes call, now says recession likely
Morgan Stanley - Global Economic Forum
I keep waiting for the next bad news - hoping to know when we've hit bottom, so that we can begin the clean-up.
Each new wave of bad news pushes the final reckoning further off into the future -- if the financial sector can clean up the SIV and CDO oopsies with minimal fallout, we might see the bottom by Spring. This is the soft landing scenario. If the recession turns vicious, it could be years before we hit bottom.
There has never been a more liberal government in the US than the Bush administration. They have liberalized us beyond the point of criminality. What can be more liberal than no regulation? What can be more liberal than no law enforcement?
There is nothing liberal about the Bush administration -- this is government of the Autocrats, for the Kleptocrats, by the Incompetents. BushCo is the Larry Curly & Moe Gangsters-R-Us writ large -- dedicating to making the rich richer, and turning everything else they touch into shit.
Liberalism is about using the power of government for the common good -- right wing smears may have tainted the word, but the concept is still valid.
All of the talk about unfettered free markets is a load of crap -- there has never been a free market in the history of the world. Governments always act to protect their vital interests, whether they be economic or political.
The current free market mania is nothing more than Wall Street gaming the system, so that Wall Street can loot the Treasury and the world's markets -- for the benefit of Wall Street.
The current economic crisis is the collapse of the Wall Street SIV CDO Ponzi scheme -- they finally ran out of suckers to buy their crap.
=======
So what's the official party line on Hillary's 5 bil bailout proposal? Wouldn't want to commit a fopah while rubbing elbows with the quality.
A little rockblogging for Dr. Freeze himself, Henry Paulson:
Snow Miser Youtube
I think Krugman has it wrong, but only partly wrong. He thinks the deal is designed to benefit investors. I don't think it does.
I asked before, cui bono? Unless I'm misreading, I think think it's the servicers who benefit--and the plan was designed that way. They escape costly talent ramp-ups to handle these loans the right way; they probably escape liability for mods conducted under the plan; and they escape at least some of this guano coming home to roost on their balance sheets.
Everybody else essentially gets hosed.
Why pander to the servicers? I think the clue is two little words in Krugman's piece: "bank lobby." There isn't yet a united front called the "Mortgage Sludge Bagholder Association."
Incidentally, I think Frank's proposal is best for everyone. I can't imagine why everyone thinks punch drunk lenders who threw all standards away should still be first in line at the creditors' punchbowl. And as a side benefit, a bankruptcy proceeding could force a true mark-to-market moment for housing's sinking asset values.
Tanta:
how long does it take to train in new personnel?
I keep hearing that the big banks/investment houses/servicers don't have enough bodies to do the work properly.
thus, my question would be: how long does it take to properly train in a person?
it would seem that you could train people rather quickly with the right incentives...
this would also increase employment and GDP, right?
Let's say it takes 1 year to train, then my response would be, "let's freeze mortgages for 1 year" and then go back and do a step by step review of all mortgages by newly trained personnel.
just a thought.
"fopah"
Man, I was about to commit a faux pas but I checked the urban dictionary and I tell ya I have to get with the program - although the recommended spelling is fopar
-K
Banker, On the MS piece, thanks for sharing! Which camp are you in now, or should I say, which bunker?
This is the most deliberate attemt to misrepresent that I can recall, even frm the NAR.
C: Why does the sky turn red as the sun sets?
Dad: That's all the oxygen in the atmosphere catching fire.
C:Where does the sun go when it sets?
Dad:The sun sets in the west. In Arizona actually, near Flagstaff.
C: Oh
Dad: That's why the rocks are so red.
C: Don't the people there get burned up?
Dad: No the sun goes out when it sets. That's why it's dark at night.
C: Doesn't the sun crush the wyhole state when it lands?
Dad: Ha Ha Of course not. Hold a quarter up. See, the sun's about the same size.
C: I thought I read the sun was really big.
Dad: You can't believe everything you read I'm afraid.
C: So how does the sun rise in the east if it lands in Arizona each night?
Dad: Well, it's time for bed.
C: I hope someday I'm as smart as Dad.
Mom: Why, what did he tell you now?
Wyhole state.
Hmm.
Seems there'd be a joke in there somewhere.
I'm really tired of hearing everyone picking on our President. I think he should fly into JFK and announce one more time - "MISSION ACOOMPLISHED!"
Banker's Morgan Stanley link- "One risk is that both our outlook and the Feds are too optimistic, because they pay too much attention to the economic resilience of the past, and not enough to the future effects of financial and economic headwinds and the dynamics of the downturn. Dramatically slower growth in domestic demand leaves it vulnerable to shocks."
These guys still do not get it. If HELOC money dries up, consumption will IMMEDIATELY fall by 2.5%. No soft landing, no "mild recession." Mr. and Mrs. Jones will turn out the lights, and lowering the fed funds rate won't prevent it.
re: mp
The issue you raise about HELOC is interesting - in MBIA's statement on the $1B raised, they said:
MBIA also announced that as a result of continued deterioration in the performance of residential mortgage-backed securities, in particular, prime home equity lines of credit and closed-end second mortgage-backed securities the Company currently estimates that it will establish case basis loss reserves of between $500 million and $800 million in the fourth quarter related to those exposures.
Expired
(emphasis is mine)
-K
how long does it take to train in new personnel?
It depends on what you want them to do.
It is hard to "train" a first-rate workout specialist.
That's a job that people get to after many years in the biz. They know credit underwriting; they know BK and FC (processes, laws, uses and abuses); they know something about pricing and how securities work; they understand the collections process; they can read a payment history, a broker price opinion, a mortgage insurance policy cert and an adjustable rate mortgage rider at 20 paces while guzzling Diet Coke and sitting in on a conference call.
You don't "train" people to do that job. You promote experienced people into that job, and you pay them what they're worth (or as close to that as you can get, since they're worth their weight in gold).
I can train just about anyone to follow the checklist. But what you need, if you want good workouts done fast, is someone who doesn't need the checklist, knows when to stray from the checklist, and crucially: can make the decision, execute the document, and go on to the next problem.
Every servicer already has a bunch of disempowered paper pushers. We haven't let specialists make decisions in ages. Oh no; the bid bad Wall Street people might sue you if Marlene in Default Servicing decided to make the call and offer the workout today, before the borrower gets any more past due and while the borrower is on the phone and ready to sign. No, no, we can't have that; Marlene's decision might get Monday-morning quarterbacked by ten lawyers. So make Marlene keep handing it up the food chain until it lands on the desk with someone whose authority and skills are both the inverse of Marlene's. By then, of course, you may just have been overtaken by events . . .
That's all water under the bridge anyway, because we no longer have a pool of junior collections/special loan servicing people to promote up into specialist positions. We outsourced all that to a bunch of really nice Indians who work in call centers and read from scripts and don't get paid very much. You cannot ask them to make workout decisions. They've never even seen a deed of trust. They read scripts and log entries.
Ditto with the senior credit underwriters: we got rid of them when AUS took over. They'd be good candidates for the workout department, but they're gone.
End of story: there are hundreds (if not thousands) of people in this country who could do this job. If you put a first-class headhunter on the task, and paid (including relo, if necessary) to get them, you could have them in a few months.
Just typing that made me laugh so hard I almost fell off my chair.
That's all water under the bridge anyway, because we no longer have a pool of junior collections/special loan servicing people to promote up into specialist positions. We outsourced all that to a bunch of really nice Indians who work in call centers and read from scripts and don't get paid very much. You cannot ask them to make workout decisions. They've never even seen a deed of trust. They read scripts and log entries.
Repeat: We no longer have a pool of junior collections/special loan servicing people to promote up into specialist positions.
Tanta, welcome to the world of former engineers. When I was wet behind the ears engineering was a profession. Nowadays it is a cost center. Want a US hybrid automobile? How about a Ford Escape? Ford licenses Toyota 1st generation technology to make the Escape Hybrid. Toyota is offering generation 2.5 right now.
And by the way, the MBA's request to get by with FAS 5 instead of FAS 114 has nothing to do with a sudden acute shortage of accountants, either.
sk-
I am totally indebted to you for reawaking my sanity, for I have been too long without Calvin & Hobbes. I truly enjoyed the remembrance of "snow art" as it should be and will now look forward to the rest of winter and hopefully, snow!!! Let Paulsen and his ilk prepare for a lot hotter clime after life. Cheers all!
Robert, I think there is one important difference from the engineering situation.
Nobody goes to college and gets a "loan workout specialist" degree. It isn't even close to the content of standard or specialized business majors. There are no recognized training institutes. Because RE finance is so local, there are zero international standards.
It was always a job that you got by working your way up. And furthermore, it was not exclusively but very largely one of the few decent-paying jobs women got. A lot of the canny old grizzled veteran women I know who did that work didn't have college educations. They had started thiry years ago on the teller line. They weren't "expensive" employees because they were in a high-status job; they were expensive because they'd been around so long they had eleventy jillion hours of unpaid vacation and weeks of severance eligibility and some of them even had old pension plans you couldn't force them off because they were too old. As far as base salary, they didn't make that much, but they had racked up some bennies.
The other issue is simply the cyclical nature of servicing. Who wanted to keep a bunch of these folks around during the boom, when .02% of loans were defaulting, and of those, you just worked out a refi or sale (not even a short one)?
I mean, automakers always need engineers. Servicers only really need workout people in bad economic cycles. So they always go through this thing of wanting to pare down the default-servicing people during booms, when they aren't busy enough.
That's a lot of what led to these subservicing arrangements with "special servicers." The problem with that is that it, in turn, became a lowest-bid-gets-the-contract thing, too.
I don't minimize the difficulties that engineers and programmers and other folks have and continue to go through. But these jobs were hard-won by people who started in entry-level jobs decades ago and earned their stripes. And they got turned out by "rightsizers" who make fat bonuses. It's part of the terrible shame of the corporate world in the last few decades and this is just an example of it. But it's why I'm so caustic about this whining by the industry that it lacks resources: it lacks resources because it cannibalized itself years ago to show Wall Street cool numbers.
Tanta,
There is this pervasive notion about the plan that it will somehow re-write existing contracts even though we know this isn't true. Even more disturbing is the concept that existing borrowers will immediately stop making payments on the mortgage because they think there is an automatic refi to better terms in the works. At some point it has nothing to do with reality but is more about what the plan is perceived to do.
I can easily imagine that someone who is underwater and desperate for a solution to their crises will view this plan as a white knight, or at least they'll stop making payments and error on the side of their own solvency. They can always claim ignorance after the fact! "I thought I was going to get a re-fi under the gubbermint plan" or "the president said that he would help people like me" etc.
Even Fleck doesn't seem to understand the details, why would the average subprime borrower, or anybody other than a mortgage banker for that matter? This is the REAL problem with the plan, imho.
Mortgage bailout just makes it worse - MSN Money
Revenue Procedure 2007-72 describes conditions under which modifications of certain subprime mortgage loans will not be cause the IRS to challenge the tax status of certain securitization vehicles in which the mortgages are pooled. It will be published in IRB 2007-52 dated Dec. 24, 2007.
SECTION 6. APPLICATION
In the case of one or more transactions to which this revenue procedure
applies
.01 The Internal Revenue Service will not challenge a securitization vehicles
qualification as a REMIC on the grounds that the transactions are not among the
exceptions listed in § 1.860G-2(b)(3);
.02 The Internal Revenue Service will not contend that the transactions are
prohibited transactions under section 860F(a)(2) on the grounds that the transactions
are not among the exceptions listed in section 860F(a)(2)(A)(i)(iv);
.03 The Internal Revenue Service will not challenge a securitization vehicles
classification as a trust on the grounds that the transactions manifest a power to vary
the investment of the certificate holders; and
.04 The Internal Revenue Service will not challenge a securitization vehicles
qualification as a REMIC on the grounds that the transactions resulted in a deemed
reissuance of the REMIC regular interests.
And by the way, the MBA's request to get by with FAS 5 instead of FAS 114 has nothing to do with a sudden acute shortage of accountants, either.
Then why? Is it really because, as your title indicates, they just don't want to work hard at this? Or is it that they'd rather sling the whole mess into a few big buckets and assign a haircut to each, so that when the whole ugly denouement is reached the bankers can say, "Geez, guess we put the wrong percentage of loans into each bucket. Sorry!" rather than admit its entire methodology on which loan viability (and by extension loss provisions) on individual loans is based is next to worthless?
BTW, I know nothing about FAS 5 or 114 ... I'm just offering this up because I'm a cynic by nature.
Legal Group Formed to Handle Subprime Suit Surge
Sorry. Page not found.
cnn money quick vote (scroll down a bit, on left)
I voted to leave rates where they are (I know they wont raise them tomorrow) I was saddened to see so many people think they should lower rates.
Business, financial, personal finance news - CNNMoney.com
This morning I have been channeling Capital letters in the far reaches of space using Transcendental Meditation and bongwater and want to report that Capital letters are very annoyed when people use them to describe anything this admin does. They ask that they never be used for any communication referencing the bush admin or any of its members. You may think Capital letters have no power in this world but you would be very mistaken. They can be fierce when annoyed.
Robert, There's a line from the movie Primer -
Q What do you do with an engineer when they turn 40
A: You take them out back and shoot them
Point being there's a supply of trainable talent there to replace them at a lower cost. There is no mortgage university or curriculum to train people to solve these relatively complex issues.
sk
You rascal!!!
The C&H Snow stuff knocked me out of my chair. I havent laughed so much for quite a time. God I miss C&H. Please come back the world needs you.
It was always a job that you got by working your way up. And furthermore, it was not exclusively but very largely one of the few decent-paying jobs women got. A lot of the canny old grizzled veteran women I know who did that work didn't have college educations.
True dat!
I can attest the accuracy of that statement, at least from my own experience. Back in the late 90's, I managed a 'special collections' staff, which included our workout specialsts, who were overwhelmingly: older, female, and most were without college degrees. I found the best I had were all ex-underwriters. Athough I tried promoting and training junior collectors, but that took so much time, and only a few really had a knack for it. It's really hard to teach the 'spidey-sense' that is required - that almost has to come via experience. They taught me more than I ever taught them.
That said, these ladies could be, a bit of a pain in the ass at times to manage. Anyway - 'Grizzled' is apt.
That said, these ladies could be, a bit of a pain in the ass at times to manage.
Of course they were. Your Tanta has been a bit of a pain in the ass at times to manage. At times your Tanta has been a Five Alarm CAT 4 DEFCON 3 Adam 12 Agony in the Ass to manage. (Being myself college-educated and then some, I have all the attitude problems of those ladies (many of whom trained me as a young puppy) married to a vast vocabulary and a total inability to be cowed by people with MBAs. Oh, when it's good it's good, and when it's bad, it's a "management crisis."
As in, a crisis for the manager. It didn't really bother me that much.
Tanta, i think it's fair to ban moe showers now (see thread below this). please?
Tanta, i think it's fair to ban moe showers now (see thread below this). please?
Oops! And I accidentally deleted some of his comments, too, while I was at it.
Silly me.
Moe, you can come back if you promise to stop copying pages of stuff that is or is not on topic into these threads. In other words, you gotta act like you're reading them. If you had actually read them, you'd have seen my threat to ban you earlier.
No Moe Showers! hooray!
a Five Alarm CAT 4 DEFCON 3 Adam 12 Agony in the Ass
I pity the fool.
No Moe Showers! hooray!
um, i hope you at least plan to take baths then...
Shame on you Cirque du Soleil
.
...it lacks resources because it cannibalized itself years ago to show Wall Street cool numbers
Allocating the proper resources to areas that can mitigate risk were neglected and spent on "revenue" generating areas.
"Of course, if you ask Paul Krugman, he'll tell you that it's not so much that the dog ate the homework; it's that we're grading on the Bush Curve:
By Bush administration standards, Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary, is a good guy. He isnt conspicuously incompetent; and he isnt trying to mislead us into war, justify torture or protect corrupt contractors.
There's a masterpiece of damning with faint praise."
Krugman is not exactly the most unbiased person politically, so I do not take his his statements at full value and in this context his comment is irrelevant.
The fraud and greed perpetrated by borrowers is, of course, overlooked by Krugman. They are all victims of "predatory lending" or "distressed and defrauded borrowers". We are told that Barney Frank's proposal "would actually help working families".
You can almost feel the pain Krugman must be bearing: "Another is human suffering: hundreds of thousands, and probably millions, of American families will lose their homes."
Is Krugman a disgruntled former worker from the mortgage industry?
Paul's masterpiece? Get off your knees.
So many victims, so little time for workouts:
Tapped-out family's home is at risk | loan, countrywide, coffmans - Business - The Orange County Register
"I'm planning on staying here," Grayce Coffman said. "They are going to have to drag me out."
Very fair, balanced and succinct.
Kidding.
I'd call you an idiot but that would be insulting to all the idiots out there; by comparing them to you!
This is just hatefull jibberish and in no way enlightening.
"At least no one is (yet) suggesting that we load the nonperforming loans up in CIA planes and fly them to secret detention centers"
Oh? The white guys from the south have always mourned the passing of slavery. It won't be called slavery next time, but indentured servitude is coming back to the US of A - count on it. read the new bankruptcy laws, and go visit one of them "illegal immigrant detention centers". If you can't pay your loans, you and your family may be living in one soon.