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Friday, September 19, 2008

$1 TRILLION Mortgage Bailout


In a very serious effort to save the American economy from outright collapse the federal government wants to write a blank check to all of the good old boys in banking and George W. Bush. Why the hell not? We could put California up on Ebay to pay for it and I bet we might just have a few bucks left over to go to McDonalds for lunch.

What angers me about this whole situation was the deliberate melt down of serious oversight of the financial markets by the federal government. George Bush and the Congress that let him ride for free will go down as the most destructive President to our economy in our nations history! Thanks W!

Over at Politico they have this on the $1 Trillion Dollar bailout…

Congressional leaders said after meeting Thursday evening with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke that as much as $1 trillion could be needed to avoid an imminent meltdown of the U.S. financial system.

Paulson announced plans Friday morning for a "bold approach" that will cost hundreds of billions of dollars. At a news conference at Treasury headquarters, he called for a "temporary asset relief program" to take bad mortgages off the books of the nation's financial institutions. Congressional leaders had left Washington on Friday, but Paulson planned to confer with them over the weekend.

"We're talking hundreds of billions," Paulson told reporters. "This needs to be big enough to make a real difference and get to the heart of the problem."
- Politico

Let there be no doubts on this financial disaster, John McCain is not walking away from this bailout squeaky clean. While some Senators were screaming for regulation even two and four years ago, Maverick was pushing for absolutely no regulation from the Federal Government. With John McCain fighting for less oversight he was in fact enabling the people in the financial markets to recklessly loan out money to people that could never afford to pay it back. But McCain still saw no problem with that issue till this week when he flip flopped on the bailouts needed from the Federal Government to save not just a few banks but dozens.

If you look at the facts then you can clearly see who bares responsibility here and it isn’t the SEC Chairman Cox! Going back to March of 2008, not that long ago really, Politico had this to say on Phil Gramm aka the Mavericks Campaign General and finance guru…

The general co-chairman of John McCain’s presidential campaign, former Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas), led the charge in 1999 to repeal a Depression-era banking regulation law that Democrat Barack Obama claimed on Thursday contributed significantly to today’s economic turmoil.

“A regulatory structure set up for banks in the 1930s needed to change because the nature of business had changed,” the Illinois senator running for president said in a New York economic speech. “But by the time [it] was repealed in 1999, the $300 million lobbying effort that drove deregulation was more about facilitating mergers than creating an efficient regulatory framework.”

Gramm’s role in the swift and dramatic recent restructuring of the nation’s investment houses and practices didn’t stop there.

A year after the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act repealed the old regulations, Swiss Bank UBS gobbled up brokerage house Paine Weber. Two years later, Gramm settled in as a vice chairman of UBS’s new investment banking arm.

Later, he became a major player in its government affairs operation. According to federal lobbying disclosure records, Gramm lobbied Congress, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department about banking and mortgage issues in 2005 and 2006.

During those years, the mortgage industry pressed Congress to roll back strong state rules that sought to stem the rise of predatory tactics used by lenders and brokers to place homeowners in high-cost mortgages.

For his work, Gramm and two other lobbyists collected $750,000 in fees from UBS’s American subsidiary. In the past year, UBS has written down more than $18 billion in exposure to subprime loans and other risky securities and is considering cutting as many as 8,000 jobs.
- Politico

I just want to be clear on this issue, John McCain is going to reform the banking system and Wall Street by taking advice from one of the people to blame for the crisis? Sorry, not buying that!

Don't stand there telling the people that you are going to clean up this mess when you Senator McCain and your best buddy for life Phil Gramm were more than complacent for this massive and very costly mess. This isn't even funny, how can McCain face the American people and claim total innocence and he knows how to fix it. To late Senator McCain, the damage you have done is now complete.

Papamoka

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Monday, April 14, 2008

Housing Crisis Numbers


Browsing through the Worcester Sunday Telegram I came across some interesting numbers on how the home foreclosure crisis is effecting Worcester County. Every week the paper lists all property transactions and from whom to whom. This is just a sampling of some of the real estate transactions in this little corner of Massachusetts so it had me wondering how bad things really are across the nation?

There was a total of 207 transactions and of those 84 were listed as a bank transfer. That works out to 40.57% of possible foreclosures for the entire county. Then I looked at the transactions by city and town and the probability of predatory lending sneaks out.

Fitchburg 5 transactions 4 for the banks or 80%
Gardner 3 transactions 3 for the banks or 100%
Grafton 4 transactions 2 for the banks or 50%
Marlboro 7 transactions 4 for the banks or 57.14%
Milford 8 transactions 4 for the banks or 50%
Oxford 4 transactions 2 for the banks or 50%
Ware 2 transactions 2 for the banks or 100%
Winch. 4 transactions 4 for the banks or 100%
Worcester 45 transactions 33 for the banks or 73.3%

Just some numbers to think about. Have a nice day…

Papamoka
Cross posted at Bring It On! and To the Center

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Tuesday, January 29, 2008

F.B.I. Investigating Home Lending


Don’t for a minute think that this post is about you the disenfranchised foreclosed on former first time home owner. Even though you were told by your lending professional, abandoned on the side of the road used car salesman, small appliance repair, and fortune teller that you could afford your recently foreclosed home, this story is not about you. Justice is never about you so this post is not about anyone at or below the middle class income level that lost their home to dubious lending practices.

One thing is a given in America, the only justice is for the millionaires that can afford to demand it. All of the bum loans that the mortgage lending and banking industry gave out like free cheese to the poor was not a big enough problem to look into. And yet when the millionaire investors start loosing their shirts it just might be a problem.

F.B.I. Opens Subprime Inquiry

By REUTERS
Published: January 29, 2008


WASHINGTON, Jan. 29 (Reuters) — The F.B.I. has opened investigations into 14 corporations as part of a crackdown on improper subprime lending, agency officials said on Tuesday.

F.B.I. officials told reporters that the inquiry involved potential violations including accounting fraud and insider trading.

Separately, Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley said government investigators were seeking information from them about their subprime mortgage activities. But it was not immediately clear if the disclosures by the three banks were linked to the F.B.I. probes.

F.B.I. officials did not identify the companies they were looking at, but said the investigation reached across the industry to include developers, subprime lenders, companies that securitized loans and investment banks that held them.

The cases could lead to potential civil or criminal charges, the officials said.
The F.B.I. said it was investigating the cases with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which has opened about three dozen investigations into the subprime market collapse.

Targets of the S.E.C. probe include the investment banks Bear Stearns, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch, as well as the Swiss bank UBS and the bond insurer MBIA. It was not clear whether any of those companies were involved in the F.B.I. investigation.

The S.E.C., which has formed an internal subprime-mortgage task force, is looking at how financial firms priced mortgage-based securities and whether they should have told investors earlier about the declining value of those securities.
- New York Times

All of the businesses that sold the loans to you the former homeowner hardly ever hold on to those loans. They sell them to bigger banks and bigger banks bundle them all together and sell them as investment vehicles for the mega rich. Now that the loans are being defaulted on in larger than life numbers those investment vehicles are up on cinder blocks with tickets on them from the board of health as a public nuisance. AKA losing money for the mega rich people and businesses that invest in them.

What the F.B.I. is investigating at the banks is the fact that the SEC has some serious rules about selling bovine by product as any kind of investment product. Especially, when those products are purchased by the mega dough bucks people at the top of the income earners heap.

Now it’s officially a Subprime Lending crisis! Now let’s see who goes to minimum security, weekends off for god behavior prison? Maybe when these guys have to loose their golf handicap they might see what justice is really all about.

One more note, Bear Stearns, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs have all dropped in shareholder value between $15 and $20 in the last three months. Things that make you go hmmmm or screw them too?

Papamoka

Feel free to link to or borrow this post…
Cross posted at MichaelLinnJones.com

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