We Are ALL Subprime Now

wow, SHE'S ON FIRE!

We poor bloggers up at the wee hours can't keep up!

anybody know how long until thornburg goes BK?

it sounds like THM is cornered by its bankers who are actually going to take and hold its assets for their putative value (very low as their is no market) knowing that, short of a complete us financial collapse, they will come good as they are low default.

In other words it is a play by bankers who not only want back their umbrella now it is raining, but can snatch the wallet (ahead of the stock holders) as their ex customer drowns..

Yen is below 102 now. The dollar is subprime too.

4am??? Tanta you either up way past your bedtime or way before the cows!

I believe Tanta is on the East Coast, like me.

It seems there is blood in the water, IB's are hitting the juicy leveraged targets first, Thornburg, Carlyle...

Hmmm, what song comes to mind today, especially if the jobs report comes in low?

YouTube - Steely Dan - "Black Friday" 

I think they have a week from the original letter of default, which they got last Thursday, to respond.

If they can't meet the margin call today, I would not be surprised to see the stock halted and next week they file chapter 11.

Caveats - I'm not certain so if you have money in their stock, check with a professional.

it has been asked before but what allows you to sleep at night if you want to preserve the purchasing power of ones liquid assets? stocks? no way. t-bills? yeah how will that feel when a buck buys 50 cents worth of consumer items next year? foreign currency? what bank will sail through a meltdown immune?

Every option looks to be a potential disaster depending on the meltdown scenarios. Inflation? Deflation? asset collapse? bank runs?

I can't think what a conservative action plan is.

Who goes under first - FMT or TMA??

Emergency rate cut rumors...after jobs number

anon e mouse-"I can't think what a conservative action plan is."

well i've been a big fan of gold and the rydex inverse dollar fund for a number of years now.

sell your gold when aunt milly or your cab driver starts talking about what a great investment it is or when fed rates start to rise.

Even Cramer is on the gold band wagon. His target 1600.

yeah gold is the obvious when there are inflationary aspects but it has been pointed out to me that in the event of a market slaughter, gold is likely to fall off a cliff due to sales to raise money to pay the man. Inflation vanishes overnight and the only thing standing still are t-bills.

So you get this ride up up up until a break point then shazam your gold is just not worth that much post apocalypse.

read this and see..
Ian McAvity on the Economy and Gold -- Seeking Alpha

but it doesn't offer a solution..

This whole mess never would have happened if they hadn't repealed Prohibition.

Emergency rate cut rumors...after jobs number - c&c

People don't seriously expect that to work again do they? Oh, puleeeze. Surely everybody has worked out by now that these endless rate cuts aren't working. They are not bringing mortgage rates down and they are not preventing the stock market from trending down. I'm sure they are good for something tho...let me think...oh yeah, higher commodity prices. Well done, Ben.

When everything blows up, those of us on the bottom, get great entertainment from watching our betters eat each other.

Yea one day gold will go too.

OT: Tanta, in the future if you could make your Newsletter Pig jokes more relevant to your younger readership, MoM and i would really appreciate it. tia!

"...endless rate cuts aren't working..."

I think the purpose of the rate cuts is to get short rates down and long rates up so that banks can make money. Banks are in the business of taking short term deposits, aggregating them and lending them for a somewhat longer term. Banks can't make money on a flat or inverted yield curve. When the FED drops short rates, it has two effects - it makes it possible for banks to borrow more cheaply, and it raises inflationary expectations so long rates go up. That gets the yield curve positive so banks can make money again.

They have money for bonuses, but:

WaMu, other banks looking for cash: report

WaMu, other banks looking for cash: report - MarketWatch

ac writes:

This whole mess never would have happened if they hadn't repealed Prohibition.


I blame it on the Magna Carta. If only the upper crust had rights (and money), we peons would be properly engaged in dirt farming, sickening, and dying. Not wasting money on McMansions.

I can just see the surly JP Morgan as a seventies-TV-police-show bad guy, "Hey, Thornburg, I got my rights, Pig."

TAF increased to $100 billion...right now. The jobs number must be bad

"but it doesn't offer a solution.."

the solution is to buy low and sell high. the RE market was a great buy in '92 and a great sell in '05. this blog is a wonderful tool to help in plotting those trends.

albeit, this is a historic transition time, so normal market forces are, well, let's say becoming "unhinged". gold tends to be a commodity driven higher by fear and greed. it appears we are heading to the fear section of economic investing.

Dr. Faber just mentioned sugar as good commodity investment, which is sweet.

Ponies are good, the US Gov will be giving a bunch out soon, you can has one.

Fed just bumped the TAF to $100b.

Probably the jobs numbers are worse than bad.

Futures up a bit. I'd fade a strong open.

zack,

futes took a downward hicccup - think traders are getting the idea that the Fed running around with their hair on fire is NOT a good thing?

OriginalFrank-
"I blame it on the Magna Carta. If only the upper crust had rights (and money), we peons would be properly engaged in dirt farming, sickening, and dying."

aahhh! my favorite bit of hyperirony, a copy of the Magna Carta was bought by the Carlyle Group just recently -

"The only copy of Magna Carta in private hands sold for $21.32 million (£10.6 million) this morning in the first auction of the “birth certificate of freedom”."

"The 1297 example, described as the most important document to come up for sale, was acquired by David Rubenstein, the founder of the Carlyle Group, at Sotheby’s in New York. He has paid $8,528 a word."

Error Page

TAF increase is probably in response to rising interbank rates, not the jobs data.

I have a vague feeling that we are now working through the preliminaries and Spring, 2008, is when the main event begins.

TAF collateral will now include all items on Ebay, including countrywide braclets

even Bakersfield REO crispy? Wink

BTW I have some family up around Lake Isabella, was out your way last August...

Revision to Dec DOWN

Can we have -1/2%?

private sector -101 K
public sector + 38 K

US nonfarm payrolls DOWN 63,000

dang energy, you're quick on the draw!

interetingly: good news for the bulls.

Unemployment FELL to 4.8% (due to 450,000 people dropping out of the workplace)

Looks like Trimtab did pretty good.
8:30U.S. Feb. nonfarm payrolls fall 63,000 vs 20,000 gain seen

They said -77,000 if I remember right.

Yes, all new job are govt. What happens when they start laying off, happening in Ca right now.

With Banks now part of the government, the USA is now:

"Land of the Fees and Home of the Slaves."

Talking heads already have the FED possibly doing a full 100bp cut

end of error:

I was listening to CNBC and they were talking more about the Fed Futures market... where 75bps is 100% priced into the April contract I believe, and 100bps is something like 35-40% priced in...

the Fed Futures market is pretty volatile though, and prone to heavy swings

For Atrios - the unders win again.

UltraShort Financial ProShares (SKF) a double beta short financial services sector fund is up 21% in the past 12 days. Looks like it's going higher. What do you think? The market is going up (massive denial) or down (slowly and steadilly)? hmm

Yep, for a lender to "exercise its rights" under a repo means for it to blow out the collateral. Since collateral is pledged at a significant haircut, one imagines that the lenders will end up somewhere close to whole. The profits Thornburg was counting on when it securitized, sold or simply realized on the collateral will be lost (or, rather, will accrue to whomever JPMorgan sells to). In any case, the loan comes off JPM's balance sheet in exchange for an equal (or almost equal) amount of liquid capital. That result, given that JPM was calling several of its performing borrowers asking them to repurchases their own debt at a significant discount, ain't a bad outcome for the bank.

Vader writes:
When everything blows up, those of us on the bottom, get great entertainment from watching our betters eat each other.

Yea one day gold will go too.

Recession=Watching other people eat out of trash cans.
Depression=Eating out of trash cans.
Great Depression=People eating other people out of trash cans.

what we need to do here with tma is slide those pesky alt-a cdo's into the taf.

yeah, that'll do it.

He has paid $8,528 a word."

For that price he should have gotten a Tanta Ubernerd original, not some rinky-dink old copy of a big charter.

Tanta --

Any word on the whether the Jumbo Fannies will be priced and pooled with the Standard Fannies, or whether they will be segregated and priced in their own private pools?

-ck- writes:
Tanta --

Any word on the whether the Jumbo Fannies will be priced and pooled with the Standard Fannies, or whether they will be segregated and priced in their own private pools?
-ck- | 03.07.08 - 11:41 am | #

They will be priced and pooled in different pools. FNMA has implemented a .250 LLPA for jumbo-conforming loans, however you are still able to use your standard FNMA gfee when creating those new MBSs.

Login or register to post comments
Syndicate content