Full Bore to the Vanishing Point
by ilene - October 5th, 2010 9:58 pm
Full Bore to the Vanishing Point
Last evening at twilight I was driving my rent-a-car up Interstate Five north of Seattle with a vivid testicular fear of being trapped in the very metaphor of a failing society racing into a dark future. All around me loomed the monuments of an out-of-control financial credit Moloch – the tilt-up chain store boxes with their giant logos glowing against the distant craggy peaks of the Cascades (many of them active volcanoes which, like Mt. Saint Helens, might blow their tops any day). At every compass point sprawled the McHousing pods of American dream mortgage time-bombs silently blowing families to financial smithereens, and banks with them, including, incidentally last Friday, the state of Washington’s own Shoreline Bank just off I-5 north of Seattle, seized by the FDIC. My way was lighted, as darkness finally stole in, by the endlessly replicated dispensaries of fast food-dom (pizza-burgers-chicken-fries-and-shakes) provoking this nation of overfed clowns to ever-greater feats of gluttony, medical catastrophe, and bankruptcy. And, of course, these were my fellow-travelers in the perpetual stream of cars plying this great thoroughfare of the tragic western littoral, burning up gasoline that had traveled all the way from the sands of Abqaiq or from some sweltering platform off the Niger Delta, where dangerous, angry, armed men in Zodiac boats plot mayhem nearby among the mangrove thickets. Not to mention the row-upon-row of idle cars parked in the lagoons surrounding the countless malls and strip-malls and auto dealerships that flanked I-5 for fifty miles north of Seattle. Cars, cars, cars, as far as the eye could see where the sodium-vapor lamps cut through the crepuscular murk. Sasquatch was a no-show. But Sasquatch don’t drive.
This was the week when the US housing fiasco got even more extra-special interesting as the Bank of America suspended mortgage foreclosures in twenty-three states, and the Connecticut Attorney General (Richard Blumenthal, who is running for Chris Dodd’s senate seat) declared a 60-day moratorium on foreclosures (a political ploy do ya think?). Also of interest, Ally Financial suspended foreclosures in twenty-three states – and note, by the way, that Ally is the mutant offspring of the bailed-out General Motors Acceptance Corporation (GMAC), which also spawned the infamous DiTech Mortgage finance company (remember those non-stop TV commercials a few years back) which specialized in jumbo…
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How Serious is the GMAC Problem? Pretty Serious and Not Just GMAC
by ilene - September 21st, 2010 11:56 pm
How Serious is the GMAC Problem? Pretty Serious and Not Just GMAC
Courtesy of Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism
Various accounts have described how one officer of GMAC Mortgage’s servicing unit has admitted during testimony that, while he signs thousands of affidavits each month in order to affect steps in the foreclosure process, he does not have personal knowledge of certain critical facts in the affidavit which he asserts to be true. Reader Stupendous Man provided the text of Federal Rule 56 on affidavits (although the cases in question are in state courts, the same principles no doubt apply). Boldface ours:
A supporting or opposing affidavit must be made on personal knowledge, set out facts that would be admissible in evidence, and show that the affiant is competent to testify on the matters stated.
The key here is you can’t delegate creating affidavits to parties who weren’t close to relevant matter out of administrative convenience; you need to find people who were directly involved. And evidence in a number of foreclosure suits indicates that this problem not only extends well beyond GMAC, and is not a matter of matter of officers providing affidavits based on a review of copies of the paperwork in a transaction. As one attorney wrote:
It is beyond people signing things when they don’t see the “originals” These people don’t see shit. We have depositions from these folks, the only thing they are able to verify on the documents is what title they are supposed to use, from the particular servicer they are working for – Executive Secretary, Executive Vice President, Asst. Sec., etc…..
So there is evidence to support the notion GMAC was not alone in providing cooked up affidavits. The only question is how widespread this practice was at other servicers.
What are the implications of the GMAC Mortgage actions and how serious are the problems? GMAC Mortgage and similarly situated parties
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Fa La La Friday – Scroogy Swap Prices Blacken Christmas
by phil - December 18th, 2009 7:58 am
Where is our Santa Clause rally?
We usually have one. Even last year the Dow went from 8,149 on Dec 1st to finish at 8,776 on Dec 31st. This year, we're lower than we were on Thanksgiving and challenging the 10,200 line, the lowest we've been since Nov 9th. Why has Santa Clause forsaken us? Most likely, it's because we already got our Christmas present in November, when the Dow ran from 9,712 on the 2nd to 10,406 on the 16th. That was when we threw in our bullish towel as it was way over our 2009 target (9,850), which is based on fundamental market valuations, rather than Christmas wishes.
We still face serious headwinds in the economy and, as I've said many times this year, the current market valuations are ignoring the risk factors of owning equities – an amazing thing considering how recently those risk factors showed up and bit people's faces off both last fall and this spring. For example, according to the NYTimes this morning, American International Group, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and GMAC, are not only unable to repay the government, they are in need of continuing infusions that make them look increasingly like long-term wards of the state. The total risk they pose to the taxpayer far exceeds that of the big banks. Fannie and Freddie, in the final days of the year, are even said to be negotiating with the Treasury about greatly expanding the money available to them.
While some banks are repaying TARP funds, these wards of the state need MORE money or we are right back to the default risk that sent the market plunging last year. What else sent the market plunging last year? Oh yes, it was credit default swaps. We still have many hundreds of Trillions of those nasty little suckers outstanding and now the cost of insuring sovereign debt against default in Europe is right back to where it was in March, when we thought the World was ending. “It’s going to prove extraordinarily difficult for countries to cut back on budget deficits,” said Ciaran O’Hagan, a fixed-income strategist at Societe Generale SA in Paris. “Many countries are facing severe difficulties in coping with the economic downturn.”
Credit-default swaps on Portugal’s debt…
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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 site