Bill Black On Foreclosuregate
by ilene - October 25th, 2010 10:00 pm
Bill Black On Foreclosuregate: Calls For The Immediate Termination Of Bernanke, Geithner And Holder
Courtesy of Tyler Durden
Bill Black, who will soon, together with Neil Barofsky, be a guaranteed shoe-in for the POTUS/VP position (both as independents, of course), was on the Ratigan show today, following on his op-ed from last week (here and here) calling for the long-overdue nationalization of Bank of America, and discussing the rampant fraud at the heart of mortgage gate. And contrary to ongoing lowball estimates from the like of JPM and Goldman, Black provides numbers about the bank liability that are simply stunning: "Credit Suisse says that by 2006 49% of all mortgage originations were liars loans. When independent folks study fraud, it is in the 80-90% fraud range. That means there were millions of acts of fraud. Those loan frauds occurred because the banks created incentive structure for the loan brokers to bring them the absolute worst of the worst loans, and to lie on the application forms… These frauds came from the banks, and they propagated through the system through a series of echo epidemics…This fraud spread through the system and that’s why we have a crisis in foreclosures. This stems from the underlying fraud by the lenders in mortgage loans to the tune of well over a million cases a year by 2005."
Furthermore, Black points out the glaringly obvious, that the Fed should not be in charge of any investigation into mortgage fraud, due to its "massive" conflict of interest, to the tune of $1.5 trillion in MBS/agencies held on the Fed’s books, which would be immediately null and voided if rampant MBS fraud is indeed uncovered. Which is precisely why the entitlement of the Fed as supreme regulator (as inspired by the financial generosity of the Wall Street lobby) as part of Frank-Dodd was the one single most destructive decision ever made, and equivalent in many ways with electing America’s very own tyrannical despot, whose only interest is making the multi billionaires, into trillionaires, and leaving everyone else in the cold through the eliminating of the savings class and the destruction of the reserve currency.
And it goes much further… to the very top of the US ruling oligarchy in fact. Which is why, as we have claimed from day one, nothing less than a complete reset of the entire kleptocratic system…
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How Pimco Is Holding American Homeowners Hostage
by ilene - August 21st, 2010 3:56 pm
How Pimco Is Holding American Homeowners Hostage
Courtesy of DAVID STOCKMAN, courtesy of Minyanville
Some raids on the US Treasury by America’s crony capitalists are so egregious as to provoke a rant — even if you aren’t Rick Santelli. One such rant-worthy provocation is Pimco’s latest scheme to loot Uncle Sam’s depleted exchequer.
According to Bill Gross, who heads what appears to be the firm’s squad of public policy front runners, the American economy can be saved only through “full nationalization” of the mortgage finance system and a massive “jubilee” of debt forgiveness for millions of underwater homeowners. If nothing else, these blatantly self-serving recommendations demonstrate that Matt Taibbi was slightly off the mark in his famed Rolling Stone diatribe. It turns out that the real vampire squid wrapped around the face of the American taxpayer isn’t Goldman Sachs (GS) after all. Instead, it’s surely the Pacific Investment Management Co.
As overlord of the fixed-income finance market, the latter generates billions annually in effort-free profits from its trove of essentially riskless US Treasury securities and federally guaranteed housing paper. Now Pimco wants to swell Uncle Sam’s supply of this no-brainer paper even further — adding upward of $2 trillion per year of what would be “government-issue” mortgages on top of the existing $1.5 trillion in general fund deficits.
This final transformation of American taxpayers into indentured servants of HIDC (the Housing Investment & Debt Complex) has been underway for a long time, and is now unstoppable because all principled political opposition to Pimco-style crony capitalism has been extinguished. Indeed, the magnitude of the burden already created is staggering. Before Richard Nixon initiated the era of Republican “me-too” Big Government in the early 1970s — including his massive expansion of subsidized housing programs — there was about $475 billion of real estate mortgage debt outstanding, representing a little more than 47% of GDP.
Had sound risk management and financial rectitude, as it had come to be defined under the relatively relaxed standards of post-war America, remained in tact, mortgage debt today would be about $7 trillion at the pre-Nixon GDP ratio. In fact, at $14 trillion or 100% of GDP the current figure is double that, implying that American real estate owners have been induced to shoulder an incremental mortgage burden that amounts to nearly half the nation’s current economic output.
There’s no mystery as to how America got hooked on this…
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An Unusually Cheery Set of Links
by ilene - November 5th, 2009 12:55 pm
An Unusually Cheery Set of Links
By inoculatedinvestor, courtesy of Zero Hedge
Intro: "For a change, this week I decided to only comment on links that suggest that everything in the world is rosy and that the US is already in the middle of an impressively sound V-shaped recovery. Too bad I couldn’t find anyone who argued either of those points credibly. Oh well, guess everyone will have to settle for yet another dose of reality."
Peggy Noonan pulls no punches: In one of her latest missives in the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan poses a very simple question. Do today’s leaders of America really care about the future of this country? I often worry that the re-election cycle has gotten so short and the incentive to pass the burden onto future lawmakers is now so pervasive that we can do no better than short-sighted, even foolish near term fixes to current problems. Extend and pretend when it comes to financial companies and kick the can down the road when it comes to the bulging deficit seem to have become the official policies in Washington. Clearly, no one wants to force any more pain on already strained American households. But at what point do the consequences of the actions being taken actually become magnitudes worse than the painful rebalancing and restructuring we could choose to face today? It is within this context that Noonan posits an interesting theory. Her premise is that the current leaders have lived in a period of such US prosperity that they are essentially too arrogant to even contemplate the idea that country could be in the midst of a lasting decline:
When I see those in government, both locally and in Washington, spend and tax and come up each day with new ways to spend and tax—health care, cap and trade, etc.—I think: Why aren’t they worried about the impact of what they’re doing? Why do they think America is so strong it can take endless abuse?I think I know part of the answer. It is that they’ve never seen things go dark. They came of age during the great abundance, circa 1980-2008 (or 1950-2008, take your pick), and they don’t have the habit of worry. They talk about their "concerns"—they’re big on that word. But they’re not really
…
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the Favorites backup site
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