Category Archives: Real estate

Bill Black: The New York Times Publishes the Most Ironic Sentence of the Crisis

Yves here. I enjoyed this piece by Bill Black because 1. Anyone who tries to pretend the Administration is serious about prosecuting bank-related fraud needs to be named and shamed and 2. I like the device of using a single sentence as the basis for a post.

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Bill Black: Arnold Kling’s Cunning Hairdresser Theory of the Financial Crisis

Yves here. I have to confess that I love this title. It serves as a reminder that the meme that lenders in the crisis were somehow victimized by borrowers is a lame defense of rank incompetence or worse. The basic rule of lending is that all you have is downside from a credit perspective. The borrower is never going to perform better than the terms of the agreement, and he may well do worse. Any competent lender knows that borrowers can be overly optimistic, naive, unlucky, or downright crooked. Lenders therefore need to take prudent measures to protect themselves from these well-known borrower foibles, the most important being not lending to obvious bad risks, and adding enough margin to your cost of borrowing to cover debtor bad luck and your own miscalculation. So to have a huge explosion of borrower defaults, including a meaningful swathe of subprime borrowers defaulting in the first 90 days, is proof not of massive borrower chicanery, but massive lender incompetence or corruption (as in presuming they could dump the dodgy loan on the next fool in the securitization pipeline).

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Ilargi: Gordon Gecko Moved To London To Finish Where He Left Off

Last week I saw a headline in the Daily Telegraph that got me thinking. It encapsulates a lot of what poses as philosophy in our world today, as a valid way of thinking and a relevant approach to all the crises we live through simultaneously at the moment. One which, when you look longer and closer, appears at least at first glance to lack all philosophical value – since it doesn’t actually weigh any pros and cons -, and turns out to be a rehash of a hodge-podge of the very failed old theories that have led us into our crises.

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How the Foreclosure Crisis Made the Rich Even Richer

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It’s a welcome departure to see Adam Davidson’s weekly column in the New York Times, which usually puts a happy face on how the 1% are winning the class war in America, have a guest writer look at the other side of the story.

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David Dayen: Mortgage Settlement Monitor Lets Servicers Steal From Customers for Two Years Before Stepping In With Toothless Metrics

By David Dayen, a lapsed blogger, now a freelance writer based in Los Angeles, CA. Follow him on Twitter @ddayen Joseph Smith, the National Mortgage Settlement Oversight Monitor, created four additional servicing metrics on Wednesday, in what has to be seen as an admission of what we’ve known for a good while – that the […]

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Why the US Mortgage Market Will Remain Heavily Dependent on Government Support (Updated)

In Senate Banking Committee testimony today, Georgetown law professor Adam Levitin explains why the private label (non-government guaranteed) mortgage market is a textbook case of what Nobel prize winning economist George Akerloff called a “market for lemons”.

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Senator Diane Feinstein’s Husband Selling Post Offices to Cronies on the Cheap

To quote famed short seller David Einhorn: “No matter how bad you think it is, it’s worse.” On the “corruption among what passes for our elites” front, this story about self-dealing in the privatization of the Postal Service gives an indication of how bad things really are.

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Why You Should Not Be Enthusiastic About Janet Yellen as Fed Chairman

While it’s a relief to have Larry Summers out of the running for the Fed chairmanship, it’s also important not to labor under any delusions about Janet Yellen, the nominee presumptive.

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What the Orgy of “Lehman Five Years On” Stories Missed

One of the reasons I haven’t weighed in with the obligatory Lehman five year anniversary piece is that so many of them are variations on a limited range of themes. So it may be more instructive to discuss the stories that it would have been nice to see instead.

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Stoneleigh: Promises, Promises … Detroit, Pensions, Bondholders And Super-Priority Derivatives

By Stoneleigh (Nicole Foss), co-editor of The Automatic Earth, cross posted from Automatic Earth

On July 18th, the city of Detroit filed for Chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy, the largest such filing in US history. Detroit is merely the first of many municipalities to hit the wall, where the realization dawns that far too many promises have been made, and nowhere near all of them can be kept

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