Added: 3. März 2010
Tags: AIG, Bailout, Banks, Bill Clinton, Bubble, CO2, Commodities, Derivatives, Derivatives market, Economy, Financial Crisis, Global News, Goldman Sachs, Government, Henry Paulson, Internet, Larry Summers, Mortgage crisis, Mortgages, Oil, Oil Prices, Politics, Robert Rubin, Timothy Geithner, U.S., Wall Street
Fannie Mae headquarters in Washington, D.C.
(CNSNews.com) - Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) says the Obama administration is using an accounting “gimmick” in its budget by not including the debt owed by mortgage firms Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
“The accounting gimmicks that are used today would make an Enron and WorldCom accountant blush,” Hensarling told reporters. “The American people know that under the policies of this administration-under the policies of this Congress-we are drowning in a sea of red ink.”
Hensarling, a member of the House Financial Services Committee, joined a group of House Republicans Tuesday in announcing the introduction of a bill that would require President Obama’s Office of Management and Budget to include the liabilities of Fannie and Freddie in the national debt calculation.
The two companies are defined as government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) whose portfolios include trillions of dollars in American mortgages, many of which are now “under water.” The federal government took control of the mortgage giants in 2008, as they neared financial collapse.
Billions of taxpayer dollars ($61 billion for Fannie Mae and $51 billion for Freddie Mac) has been spent so far to keep the GSEs solvent. Just this week, Freddie Mac reported a $7.8 billion loss in the final three months of 2009, but said it will not require another taxpayer infusion at this time.
Hensarling on Tuesday suggested that the administration is under-reporting the nation’s debt by failing to account for the potential liability incurred if Fannie and Freddie go deeper into the red.
The potential liabilities incurred by Fannie and Freddie, Hensarling said, would amount to “the mother of all bailouts.”
Headquarters of the federally chartered mortgage giant, Freddie Mac, in McLean, Va.
“When the final chapter is written on the history of our financial debacle, it will show that the cause was the government policies that cajoled, incented (sic) and mandated financial institutions to lend money to people to buy homes that, ultimately, they could not afford,” Hensarling said. “At the epicenter of those federal policies was Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and before all the dust settles in the final accounting, they will prove to be the mother of all bailouts.”
Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.), the ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee, estimated that the unfunded liabilities of Fannie and Freddie could exceed $5 trillion.
Under Republican’s proposed bill, the White House Office of Management and Budget would have to treat the GSEs’ estimated liabilities as part of the federal debt, and those liabilities along with the rest of the debt would have to remain under the debt ceiling.
Congress recently voted to raise the debt ceiling above $14 trillion dollars for the first time to accommodate other spending. Continue reading »
Tags: Barack Obama, Congress, Economy, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Government, Jeb Hensarling, Mortgage crisis, Mortgages, Obama administration, Politics, U.S.
On January 21st, Lloyd Blankfein left a peculiar voicemail message on the work phones of his employees at Goldman Sachs. Fast becoming America’s pre-eminent Marvel Comics supervillain, the CEO used the call to deploy his secret weapon: a pair of giant, nuclear-powered testicles. In his message, Blankfein addressed his plan to pay out gigantic year-end bonuses amid widespread controversy over Goldman’s role in precipitating the global financial crisis.
The bank had already set aside a tidy $16.2 billion for salaries and bonuses - meaning that Goldman employees were each set to take home an average of $498,246, a number roughly commensurate with what they received during the bubble years. Still, the troops were worried: There were rumors that Dr. Ballsachs, bowing to political pressure, might be forced to scale the number back. After all, the country was broke, 14.8 million Americans were stranded on the unemployment line, and Barack Obama and the Democrats were trying to recover the populist high ground after their bitch-whipping in Massachusetts by calling for a “bailout tax” on banks. Maybe this wasn’t the right time for Goldman to be throwing its annual Roman bonus orgy.
Not to worry, Blankfein reassured employees. “In a year that proved to have no shortage of story lines,” he said, “I believe very strongly that performance is the ultimate narrative.”
Translation: We made a shitload of money last year because we’re so amazing at our jobs, so fuck all those people who want us to reduce our bonuses.
Goldman wasn’t alone. The nation’s six largest banks - all committed to this balls-out, I drink your milkshake! strategy of flagrantly gorging themselves as America goes hungry - set aside a whopping $140 billion for executive compensation last year, a sum only slightly less than the $164 billion they paid themselves in the pre-crash year of 2007. In a gesture of self-sacrifice, Blankfein himself took a humiliatingly low bonus of $9 million, less than the 2009 pay of elephantine New York Knicks washout Eddy Curry. But in reality, not much had changed. “What is the state of our moral being when Lloyd Blankfein taking a $9 million bonus is viewed as this great act of contrition, when every penny of it was a direct transfer from the taxpayer?” asks Eliot Spitzer, who tried to hold Wall Street accountable during his own ill-fated stint as governor of New York.
Beyond a few such bleats of outrage, however, the huge payout was met, by and large, with a collective sigh of resignation. Because beneath America’s populist veneer, on a more subtle strata of the national psyche, there remains a strong temptation to not really give a shit. The rich, after all, have always made way too much money; what’s the difference if some fat cat in New York pockets $20 million instead of $10 million?
The only reason such apathy exists, however, is because there’s still a widespread misunderstanding of how exactly Wall Street “earns” its money, with emphasis on the quotation marks around “earns.” The question everyone should be asking, as one bailout recipient after another posts massive profits - Goldman reported $13.4 billion in profits last year, after paying out that $16.2 billion in bonuses and compensation - is this: In an economy as horrible as ours, with every factory town between New York and Los Angeles looking like those hollowed-out ghost ships we see on History Channel documentaries like Shipwrecks of the Great Lakes, where in the hell did Wall Street’s eye-popping profits come from, exactly? Did Goldman go from bailout city to $13.4 billion in the black because, as Blankfein suggests, its “performance” was just that awesome? A year and a half after they were minutes away from bankruptcy, how are these assholes not only back on their feet again, but hauling in bonuses at the same rate they were during the bubble?
The answer to that question is basically twofold: They raped the taxpayer, and they raped their clients. Continue reading »
Tags: AIG, Alan Greenspan, Bailout, Bank of America, Bankruptcy, Banks, Ben Bernanke, Bonds, Brad Sherman, Bubble, Citigroup, Debt, Economy, FDIC, Fed, Federal Reserve, Goldman Sachs, Government, JPMorgan, Matt Taibbi, Morgan Stanley, Mortgage crisis, Mortgages, Politics, Ponzi schemes, Robert Rubin, Societe Generale, Taxpayers, Timothy Geithner, Treasury, Wall Street
- Commercial Real Estate Losses Could Hit $300 Billion: TARP Panel:
“The banks that are on the front lines of small-business lending are about to get hit by a tidal wave of commercial-loan failures,” said Elizabeth Warren, a law professor at Harvard University who heads the COP.
Warren and her fellow panel members warn that “a significant wave of commercial mortgage defaults would trigger economic damage that could touch the lives of nearly every American.”
• Commercial property set to lose $300bn on $1.4bn of loans
• Nearly 3,000 banks face dangerous exposure as loans mature
Wall Street banks and other financial institutions may be heading for the wall as a further crisis looms in 2011 over commercial property loans. Photograph: Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images
America’s fragile high street banks are bracing themselves for a fresh financial crunch as a wave of commercial property mortgages go sour on offices, shops and factories, causing losses of up to $300bn (£192bn) hitting nearly 3,000 small- and medium-sized financial institutions.
A congressional oversight panel charged with scrutinising the Obama administration’s bailout efforts has warned that $1.4tn of loans covering commercial premises will reach maturity between 2011 and 2014. After a plunge in property prices, nearly half of these loans are underwater, with borrowers owing more than their underlying property is worth.
An analysis by the panel found that 2,988 of America’s 8,100 banks have potentially dangerous exposure to commercial property loans. The impact could damage hopes of a US economic recovery and could cause a further squeeze in the availability of credit to consumers and businesses. Continue reading »
Tags: Bailout, Banks, Barack Obama, Government, Mortgage crisis, Mortgages, Obama administration, Politics, Real Estate, Wall Street
Green shoots!
NEW YORK - One of every five U.S. homeowners owed more on their mortgage than their home was worth in the fourth quarter, a trend that poses a serious threat to the U.S. housing market’s recovery, real estate Web site Zillow.com said on Wednesday.
Homeowners with “underwater” mortgages are more prone to defaults and foreclosures. They typically do not qualify for refinancings and are unable to sell their homes because they would need to cough up cash at closing time to pay off their mortgage.
The percentage of American single-family homes with mortgages in negative equity rose to 21.4 percent in the fourth quarter from 21 percent in the third quarter, according to the Zillow Real Estate Market Reports.
U.S. home values declined again in the fourth quarter, as the Zillow Home Value Index fell 5 percent year-over-year and down 0.5 percent quarter-over-quarter, to $186,200. It was the 12th consecutive quarter of year-over-year declines, the reports showed.
“The prevalence of markets in or near a double-dip situation shows that we are not yet at the bottom, in terms of home values,” Stan Humphries, Zillow chief economist, said in an interview. Continue reading »
Tags: Economy, Foreclosures, Global News, Mortgage crisis, Mortgages, Real Estate, U.S.
Nov. 16 (Bloomberg) — Meredith Whitney, the analyst who cut her rating on Goldman Sachs Group Inc. last month, said bank stocks are overvalued after rallying faster than the U.S. economy and share prices will fall to tangible book value.
“I haven’t been this bearish in a year,” Whitney, founder of Meredith Whitney Advisory Group LLC, said today in a CNBC television interview. “I think you can sit on cash for a little bit, because you have to wait for a leg down in valuations. The S&P is expensive across the board.”
Tags: Banks, Economy, Fannie Mae, Fed, Federal Reserve, Freddie Mac, Meredith Whitney, Mortgage crisis, Mortgages, Real Estate, S&P 500, Stock Market, Wall Street
SAN JOSE, Calif. — When California wildfires ruined their jewelry business, Tony Becker and his wife fell months behind on their mortgage payments and experienced firsthand the perils of subprime mortgages.
The couple wound up in a desperate, six-year fight to keep their modest, 1,500-square-foot San Jose home, a struggle that pushed them into bankruptcy.
The lender with whom they sparred, however, wasn’t the one that had written their loans. It was an obscure subsidiary of Wall Street colossus Goldman Sachs Group.
Goldman spent years buying hundreds of thousands of subprime mortgages, many of them from some of the more unsavory lenders in the business, and packaging them into high-yield bonds. Now that the bottom has fallen out of that market, Goldman finds itself in a different role: as the big banker that takes homes away from folks such as the Beckers.
The couple alleges that Goldman declined for three years to confirm their suspicions that it had bought their mortgages from a subprime lender, even after they wrote to Goldman’s then-Chief Executive Henry Paulson — later U.S. Treasury secretary — in 2003.
Tags: Banks, Economy, Foreclosures, Goldman Sachs, Mortgage crisis, Mortgages, U.S.
Here is what Timmy, Benny and the boys did to sponsor Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Societe Generale and other banksters:
“…the New York Fed, led by President Timothy Geithner, took over negotiations with the banks from AIG, together with the Treasury Department and Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s Federal Reserve.”
“After less than a week of private negotiations with the banks, the New York Fed instructed AIG to pay them par, or 100 cents on the dollar. The content of its deliberations has never been made public.”
WTF have they (Timmy, Benny and the boys) done?
Janet Tavakoli, founder of Chicago-based Tavakoli Structured Finance Inc., a financial consulting firm, says the government squandered billions in the AIG deal.
“There’s no way they should have paid at par,” she says. “AIG was basically bankrupt.”
Far more money was wasted in paying the banks for their swaps, says Donn Vickrey of financial research firm Gradient Analytics Inc. “In cases like this, the outcome is always along the lines of 50, 60 or 70 cents on the dollar,” Vickrey says.
Why have they done it?
One reason par was paid was because some counterparties insisted on being paid in full and the New York Fed did not want to negotiate separate deals, says a person close to the transaction. “Some of those banks needed 100 cents on the dollar or they risked failure,” Vickrey says.
For Timmy fans:
- The Federal Reserve buys Fannie Mae bonds; Timothy Geithner is a liar
- Treasury Secretary Geithner’s Closest Aides Reaped Millions Working for Banks, Hedge Funds
Timothy Geithner, U.S. treasury secretary, testifies at a House Appropriations Committee hearing in Washington, D.C.
Oct. 27 (Bloomberg) — In the months leading up to the September 2008 collapse of giant insurer American International Group Inc., Elias Habayeb and his colleagues worked nights and weekends negotiating with banks that had bought $62 billion of credit-default swaps from AIG, according to a person who has worked with Habayeb.
Habayeb, 37, was chief financial officer for the AIG division that oversaw AIG Financial Products, the unit that had sold the swaps to the banks. One of his goals was to persuade the banks to accept discounts of as much as 40 cents on the dollar, according to people familiar with the matter.
Among AIG’s bank counterparties were New York-based Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Merrill Lynch & Co., Paris-based Societe Generale SA and Frankfurt-based Deutsche Bank AG.
By Sept. 16, 2008, AIG, once the world’s largest insurer, was running out of cash, and the U.S. government stepped in with a rescue plan. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the regional Fed office with special responsibility for Wall Street, opened an $85 billion credit line for New York-based AIG. That bought it 77.9 percent of AIG and effective control of the insurer.
The government’s commitment to AIG through credit facilities and investments would eventually add up to $182.3 billion.
Beginning late in the week of Nov. 3, the New York Fed, led by President Timothy Geithner, took over negotiations with the banks from AIG, together with the Treasury Department and Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s Federal Reserve. Geithner’s team circulated a draft term sheet outlining how the New York Fed wanted to deal with the swaps — insurance-like contracts that backed soured collateralized-debt obligations.
Subprime Mortgages
CDOs are bundles of debt including subprime mortgages and corporate loans sold to investors by banks.
Part of a sentence in the document was crossed out. It contained a blank space that was intended to show the amount of the haircut the banks would take, according to people who saw the term sheet. After less than a week of private negotiations with the banks, the New York Fed instructed AIG to pay them par, or 100 cents on the dollar. The content of its deliberations has never been made public.
Tags: AIG, Bailout, Banks, Ben Bernanke, Derivatives, Derivatives market, Deutsche Bank, Economy, Fed, Federal Reserve, Financial Crisis, Goldman Sachs, Government, Henry Paulson, Mortgage crisis, Politics, Taxpayers, Treasury, Wall Street
Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur has become something of a crusader for homeowners’ rights in the wake of the housing crisis, as well as a major critic of US banks. Moyers played a clip of her giving a speech this past January in which she urged homeowners to ignore eviction notices and become “squatters in [their] own homes” if they need to:
“So why should any American citizen be kicked out of their homes in this cold weather? … Don’t leave your home. Because you know what? When those companies say they have your mortgage, unless you have a lawyer that can put his or her finger on that mortgage, you don’t have that mortgage, and you are going to find they can’t find the paper up there on Wall Street. So I say to the American people, you be squatters in your own homes. Don’t you leave. In Ohio and Michigan and Indiana and Illinois and all these other places our people are being treated like chattel, and this Congress is stymied.”
Source: Top economist: President Obama ‘missed opportunity’ to reform financial system
See also: Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur: There Has Been a Financial Coup D’Etat
FOR decades, when troubled homeowners and banks battled over delinquent mortgages, it wasn’t a contest. Homes went into foreclosure, and lenders took control of the property.
On top of that, courts rubber-stamped the array of foreclosure charges that lenders heaped onto borrowers and took banks at their word when the lenders said they owned the mortgage notes underlying troubled properties.
In other words, with lenders in the driver’s seat, borrowers were run over, more often than not. Of course, errant borrowers hardly deserve sympathy from bankers or anyone else, and banks are well within their rights to try to protect their financial interests.
But if our current financial crisis has taught us anything, it is that many borrowers entered into mortgage agreements without a clear understanding of the debt they were incurring. And banks often lacked a clear understanding of whether all those borrowers could really repay their loans.
Even so, banks and borrowers still do battle over foreclosures on an unlevel playing field that exists in far too many courtrooms. But some judges are starting to scrutinize the rules-don’t-matter methods used by lenders and their lawyers in the recent foreclosure wave. On occasion, lenders are even getting slapped around a bit.
One surprising smackdown occurred on Oct. 9 in federal bankruptcy court in the Southern District of New York. Ruling that a lender, PHH Mortgage, hadn’t proved its claim to a delinquent borrower’s home in White Plains, Judge Robert D. Drain wiped out a $461,263 mortgage debt on the property. That’s right: the mortgage debt disappeared, via a court order.
So the ruling may put a new dynamic in play in the foreclosure mess: If the lender can’t come forward with proof of ownership, and judges don’t look kindly on that, then borrowers may have a stronger hand to play in court and, apparently, may even be able to stay in their homes mortgage-free.
The reason that notes have gone missing is the huge mass of mortgage securitizations that occurred during the housing boom. Securitizations allowed for large pools of bank loans to be bundled and sold to legions of investors, but some of the nuts and bolts of the mortgage game — notes, for example — were never adequately tracked or recorded during the boom. In some (many) cases, that means nobody truly knows who owns what.
Tags: Bankruptcy, Banks, Economy, Foreclosures, Marcy Kaptur, Mortgage crisis, Mortgages, Real Estate, U.S.
“When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.”
- Benjamin Franklin
Added: 22. October 2009
Fall Of The Republic documents how an offshore corporate cartel is bankrupting the US economy by design. Leaders are now declaring that world government has arrived and that the dollar will be replaced by a new global currency.
President Obama has brazenly violated Article 1 Section 9 of the US Constitution by seating himself at the head of United Nations’ Security Council, thus becoming the first US president to chair the world body.
A scientific dictatorship is in its final stages of completion, and laws protecting basic human rights are being abolished worldwide; an iron curtain of high-tech tyranny is now descending over the planet.
A worldwide regime controlled by an unelected corporate elite is implementing a planetary carbon tax system that will dominate all human activity and establish a system of neo-feudal slavery.
Tags: 1984, Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan, Africa, AIG, Alan Grayson, Alan Greenspan, Alex Jones, Bailout, Bank of America, Banks, Barack Obama, Barclays, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke, Bill Clinton, Bill of Rights, BIS, Brad Sherman, Bubble, Bush administration, carbon tax, cds, Central Bank, China, Citigroup, Congress, Constitution, Corporations, Corruption, cybersecurity, Debt, Democrats, Dennis Kucinich, Depression, Derivatives, Derivatives market, Detention, Deutsche Bank, Dictatorship, Documentary, Dollar, Economy, EU, Euro, false flag, Fascism, FBI, FDIC, Fed, Federal Reserve, Financial Crisis, First Amendment, Fourth Amendment, Fraud, G20, GDP, George Bush, George Orwell, Gerald Celente, Global News, Global Warming, Goldman Sachs, Gordon Brown, Government, Great Depression, Henry Paulson, Human Rights, Hyperinflation, IMF, Impeachment, Inflation, Internet, Iraq, Jesse Ventura, John Perkins, JPMorgan, Larry Summers, Law, Law enforcement, Lehman Brothers, Lobbyists, Martial Law, Max Keiser, Merrill Lynch, Military, Mind-Control, money supply, Morgan Stanley, Mortgage crisis, Mortgages, NAFTA, Nancy Pelosi, New World Order, NSPD 51, Obama administration, Patriot Act, Paul Volcker, Police State, Politics, Poverty, Privacy, Rahm Emanuel, Raytheon, Republic, Republicans, Rockefeller, Ron Paul, Rothschild, SEC, Second Amendment, Senate, Society, Surveillance, Taxes, Taxpayers, Terrorism, Timothy Geithner, Treason, U.N., U.S., Unemployment, Wall Street, War, warrantless wiretapping program, Wells Fargo & Co., White House, World Bank
