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Archive for the ‘Mortgage Meltdown’ Category

Only Half a Bailout

A week into the big bailout, banks are beginning to charge each other less for loans and companies are finding it easier to borrow short term. The Dow has been up and down, but so far this week, it is back above 9,000.

So has the worst passed? Probably not.

The unfortunate reality is that as long as millions of Americans continue to default on their mortgages and housing prices continue to slide, banks will continue to suffer big losses. Unless something is done quickly to help American homeowners avoid foreclosure and stay in their homes, those losses could swamp the bailout effort by exceeding the sums being spent to rescue the banks.

Despite the danger posed by foreclosures — to the bailout, homeowners, taxpayers and the economy — the Bush administration and Congress are still depending on banks and other participants in the mortgage industry to voluntarily modify troubled loans, say, by giving borrowers more time to pay or by reducing interest rates.

Mandatory modifications, bankruptcy, lawsuits — no one likes them, but they are tough tools for a tough problem. The bailout has dealt with only half of the problem: the credit freeze. Unless the government deals as aggressively with foreclosures, the system will likely face the abyss again.

Preparation Not Panic is the Answer to the Troubled Economic Times Ahead

NEW YORK (CNN) — Despite the best efforts of our politicians to convince us otherwise, there is no easy way out of the financial crisis we’ve created.

Gimmicks and Band-Aids won’t solve the underlying problem; they just delay its impact until after the election. While that might help politicians keep their jobs, it won’t help you and me keep ours.

A lot of us saw what was coming before the dam broke. We didn’t need fancy graphs or prize-winning economists to warn us. We just used common sense. But now that same common sense is now telling us something else: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

We can’t print billions of new dollars and expect there to never be a consequence for it down the road. We can’t unwind a bubble built on historic levels of greed by simply writing a check or passing a law.

Preparation, not panic.

Things could get really bad before they get better. Really, really bad. But you’ll never know what’s coming by watching the Dow every day — it’s a terrible indicator. In fact, the four largest percentage gains in the Dow’s history happened between 1929 and 1933, a period that wasn’t exactly a great time to buy.

The chorus of Billy Joel’s famous song about the Vietnam War still rings true today: We will all go down together.

What we’re experiencing right now are the outer bands of a hurricane with an eye that likely won’t hit us for another year or two. In the meantime, there will be plenty of sunny days, but they’ll just distract us from what’s coming. Stay focused on what your gut tells you is still churning just offshore.

When the eye of the storm finally comes ashore, nothing will be less relevant than whether you’re a registered Democrat or Republican. It didn’t matter during Pearl Harbor, the Cuban Missile Crisis or Oklahoma City, and I certainly don’t remember anyone asking to see a voter ID card before they gave you a hug on 9/11.

If September 11 was the worst day in American history, then September 12 was one of the best. Do you remember what it was like? Lines at blood banks; filled-up churches; neighbors watching out for each other; families sitting around the dinner table and talking to each other.

It was the America we all long for — and we can have it back. But if you’re waiting for another historic crisis to convince you to put the donkeys and elephants aside and reconnect with each other, then open your eyes; we’re in the middle of it.

90 Year Old Ohio Woman Attempts Suicide as Sheriffs Attempt to Evict Her

CINCINNATI (Reuters) – A 90-year-old Ohio woman, facing eviction from the home she has lived in for 38 years, shot and wounded herself this week, becoming a grim symbol of the U.S. home mortgage crisis.

Addie Polk was found lying on the floor of her home with what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound to her shoulder when police came to the home on Wednesday to serve an eviction notice, Akron police spokesman Lt. Rick Edwards said on Friday.

Home foreclosure rates are at record highs in the United States, in many cases because buyers with adjustable interest rates could not keep up with sharp increases in monthly payments. The foreclosure crisis has sparked a wider housing market downturn and is at the heart of the U.S. financial crisis.

No More Corporate Welfare for Wall Street

This bailout was a terrible idea. Here’s why.

The current mess would never have occurred in the absence of ill-conceived federal policies. The federal government chartered Fannie Mae in 1938 and Freddie Mac in 1970; these two mortgage lending institutions are at the center of the crisis. The government implicitly promised these institutions that it would make good on their debts, so Fannie and Freddie took on huge amounts of excessive risk.

The fact that government bears such a huge responsibility for the current mess means any response should eliminate the conditions that created this situation in the first place, not attempt to fix bad government with more government.

The obvious alternative to a bailout is letting troubled financial institutions declare bankruptcy. Bankruptcy means that shareholders typically get wiped out and the creditors own the company.

Bankruptcy does not mean the company disappears; it is just owned by someone new (as has occurred with several airlines). Bankruptcy punishes those who took excessive risks while preserving those aspects of a businesses that remain profitable.

In contrast, a bailout transfers enormous wealth from taxpayers to those who knowingly engaged in risky subprime lending. Thus, the bailout encourages companies to take large, imprudent risks and count on getting bailed out by government. This “moral hazard” generates enormous distortions in an economy’s allocation of its financial resources.

Talk of Armageddon, however, is ridiculous scare-mongering. If financial institutions cannot make productive loans, a profit opportunity exists for someone else. This might not happen instantly, but it will happen.

Largest Bank Failure in U.S. History

Sept. 26 (Bloomberg) — Washington Mutual Inc. was seized by government regulators and its branches and assets sold to JPMorgan Chase & Co. in the biggest U.S. bank failure in history.

WaMu became “unsound” after customers withdrew $16.7 billion since Sept. 16, the Office of Thrift Supervision said yesterday. Branches are open today and depositors have full access to their accounts, Sheila Bair, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., said.

The failure of WaMu, which has $188 billion in deposits, ratchets up pressure on lawmakers to piece together a rescue package for the nation’s financial system. The government’s inability yesterday to reach agreement on a bailout and the seizure of the biggest savings and loan sparked a sell-off of bank stocks, led by a 27 percent tumble in Wachovia Corp.

“We are going to see a lot more bank failures before the cycle is all over,” said Brian Horey, president of Aurelian Management LLC in New York, which had bet on a decline in Washington Mutual before a ban on such so-called short sales was imposed. “There are sufficiently large clusters of bad assets on a fair range of banks out there.”

Federal Reserve is Bailing Out A.I.G. to the Tune of $85 Billion

The decision, only two weeks after the Treasury took over the federally chartered mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, is the most radical intervention in private business in the central bank’s history.

A major concern is that the A.I.G. rescue won’t be the last. At Tuesday night’s meeting. lawmakers asked if there was any way of knowing if this would be the final major government intervention. Mr. Bernanke and Mr. Paulson said there was not. Indeed, the markets remain worried about the financial condition of major regional banks as well as that of Washington Mutual, the nation’s largest thrift.

The decision was a remarkable turnaround by the Bush administration and Mr. Paulson, who had flatly refused over the weekend to risk taxpayer money to prevent the collapse of Lehman Brothers or the distressed sale of Merrill Lynch to Bank of America.

Earlier this year, the government bailed out another investment bank, Bear Stearns, by engineering a sale to JPMorgan Chase that left taxpayers on the hook for up to $29 billion of bad investments by Bear Stearns. The government hoped at the time that this unusual step would both calm markets and lead to a recovery by the financial system.

But critics warned at the time that it would only encourage others to seek bailouts, and the eventual costs to the government would be staggering.

Worst Housing Crisis Since the Great Depression

Sept. 5 (Bloomberg) — Silver State Bank of Henderson, Nevada was closed by U.S. regulators today, the 11th bank to collapse this year amid a surge in soured real-estate loans stemming from the worst housing slump since the Depression.

Silver State, with $2 billion in assets and $1.7 billion in deposits, was shut by the Nevada Financial Institutions Division and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the FDIC said today in a statement.