February 2012 archive

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

6 pm tomorrow.

Oh, so not the haircut you thought I was talking about.

How about this-

Banks Paying Homeowners to Avoid Foreclosures

By Prashant Gopal, Bloomberg News

Feb 7, 2012 12:00 AM ET

As lenders shift their focus to sales, they are finding that some borrowers would rather risk repossession while they wait for a loan modification, according to Guy Cecala, publisher of Inside Mortgage Finance, a trade journal. In a loan modification, the monthly payment, and sometimes principal, is reduced to help prevent seizure. Homeowners facing foreclosure may live rent-free for years before they are forced out.

“That’s why the banks have got to pay the big bucks,” Cecala said. “The real question is why is the bribe so big? Is that what it takes to get somebody out of their home?”

…

Cecala of Inside Mortgage Finance said he wonders whether lenders are making big payments on properties with underlying title problems. Evan Berlin, managing partner of Berlin Patten, a real estate law firm in Sarasota, Florida, said representatives of a large bank told him the incentives are primarily given to borrowers when it doesn’t have the proper paperwork needed to win its foreclosure case.

Because that’s where the money is-

Greece, Troika Work on Final Rescue Draft

By Marcus Bensasson, Maria Petrakis and Natalie Weeks, Bloomberg News

Feb 7, 2012 9:45 AM ET

Adding to pressure on Papademos and political leaders jostling ahead of the elections, the biggest public-sector and private-sector union groups, ADEDY and GSEE, held a 24-hour general strike today, shutting down government services, courts, schools and ferry services. Dockworkers and bank employees also walked off the job while a walkout by culture ministry workers forced the closure of museums and other tourist attractions.

“What is taking place isn’t a negotiation,” GSEE president Yannis Panagopoulos said in an e-mailed statement. “It’s raw, cynical blackmail against a whole people.”

…

The troika argues that lower wage costs is among reforms necessary to boost competitiveness in the country. Those opposed say the cuts would deepen the country’s recession, now in its fifth year.

Antonis Samaras, the head of the second-biggest party, New Democracy, has indicated he will oppose measures that will deepen the country’s downturn.

Guarantees from Greek political leaders such as Samaras, who leads in opinion polls, are key to securing the funds from the EU and IMF. International lenders want assurances that whoever wins the next election will stick to pledges made now to receive financing.

The rescue blueprint includes a loss of more than 70 percent for bondholders in a voluntary debt exchange that will slice 100 billion euros off 200 billion euros of privately-held Greek debt and loans that will probably exceed the 130 billion euros now on the table. A formal offer for the debt swap must be made by Feb. 13 to allow all procedures to be completed before the March 20 bond comes due.

Creditors are prepared to accept an average coupon of as low as 3.6 percent on new 30-year bonds in the exchange, said a person familiar with the talks, who declined to be identified because a final deal hasn’t been struck yet.

The End of Wall Street As They Knew It

By Gabriel Sherman, New York Magazine

Published Feb 5, 2012

To understand how radically Wall Street is changing, you have to first understand how modern Wall Street made its money. In the quaint old days, Wall Street tended to earn its profits rather boringly by loaning money, advising mergers, and supervising bond issues and IPOs. The leveraging of the American economy-and the supercharging of the financial industry-began in earnest in the early eighties. And banks have profited from a successive series of financial bubbles, each bigger and more violent than the one preceding it. “Wall Street did a really good job convincing people it was really complicated and they were the only ones who could do it and it justified paying them millions of dollars,” a former Lehman trader explained. Credit was the engine that powered the explosion in bank profits. From junk bonds in the eighties to the emerging-markets crisis in the nineties to the subprime mania of the aughts, Wall Street developed new ways to produce, package, and sell debt to willing investors. The alphabet soup of complex vehicles that defined the 2008 crash-CLO, CDO, CDS-had all been developed to sell more credit. “If you look at the past 25 years, the world economy was going through a process of leveraging,” a senior Citigroup executive said. “Debt has grown faster than economic growth. The banking industry was at the epicenter of facilitating the growth of credit creation. It drove every business.”

…

After the big investment banks went public, the sense of restraint that sometimes could hold back private partnerships from taking on too much risk-it was their own money-was removed. Bank earnings and ever-rising asset values allowed them to borrow ever-larger amounts of money, which in turn juiced ever-greater profits. Banks, which had previously made their money advising corporations and underwriting securities, essentially became giant hedge funds (in 2007, Morgan Stanley held $1.05 trillion in assets supported by just $30 billion in equity). The triumph of the Wall Street system was the exploitation of the real-estate boom: Real estate enabled the biggest credit bubble ever conceived-and a bust of similar magnitude, which some shrewd traders also took advantage of. “The mortgage mess is the biggest financial mess we’ll see in our lifetime,” Jamie Dimon told me.

And without real estate to fuel growth, many on Wall Street know it’ll be a long time before there is ever a profit center like it again. “The number of houses being sold is 25 percent of what it was,” a former Lehman trader says. “You don’t have the mortgages behind it. Essentially the pump has stopped working. All the IPOs, the mergers-everything is slowing down. And the number of new homes will never jump back to what it was. If you look at history, the past 50 years have been incredible. Never has there been a period of time of so little disease and so few wars and such growth of such absurd wealth.”

…

(R)ecently, hedge funds have fared just as poorly as the banks. The bad economy plays a role in this, of course. But just as important is the fact the hedge-fund industry is almost as overbuilt as the housing and credit markets that drove its profits. In 1990, there were 610 hedge funds in the world. In 2000, there were 3,873; in 2011, there were 9,553, according to a report by Hedge Fund Research. All these funds are chasing fewer surefire trades. “When markets are panicked and there’s global risk fear, the markets move in the same direction,” one analyst at a Manhattan hedge fund says. “It’s just a lot harder to make money.” The easy, obvious plays are oversubscribed, which shrinks margins.

…

“We used to rely on the public making dumb investing decisions,” one well-known Manhattan hedge-fund manager told me. “but with the advent of the public leaving the market, it’s just hedge funds trading against hedge funds. At the end of the day, it’s a zero-sum game.” Based on these numbers-too many funds with fewer dollars chasing too few trades-many have predicted a hedge-fund shakeout, and it seems to have started. Over 1,000 funds have closed in the past year and a half.

…

On Wall Street, the misery index is as high as it’s been since brokers were on window ledges back in 1929. But sentiments like that, accompanied by a full orchestra of the world’s tiniest violins, are only part of the conversation in Wall Street offices and trading desks. Along with the complaint is something that might be called soul-searching-which is, in itself, a surprising development. Since the crash, and especially since the occupation of Zuccotti Park last September (which does appear to have rattled a lot of nerves), there has been a growing recognition on Wall Street that the system that had provided those million-dollar bonuses was built on a highly unstable foundation. Disagreeable as it may be, goes this thinking, bankers have to go back to first principles, assess their value in the economy, and take their part in its rebuilding. No one on Wall Street liked to be scapegoated either by the Obama administration or by the Occupiers. But many acknowledge that the bubble­-bust-bubble seesaw of the past decades isn’t the natural order of capitalism-and that the compensation arrangements just may have been a bit out of whack. “There’s no other industry where you could get paid so much for doing so little,” a former Lehman trader said. Paul Volcker, whose eponymous rule is at the core of the changes, echoes an idea that more bankers than you’d think would agree with. “Finance became a self-justification,” he told me recently. “They made a lot of money trading with each other with doubtful public benefit.”

Pobrecitos.  Que lastima.

The bees come up from the apple orchard next door to die on our porch, as if they were simply exhausted from being whisked around from farm to farm as slaves to our surplus feeding habits.  Animals without choice sometimes simply choose to die.  I’d bet bees have “feelings” somewhere inside their little buzzing mammillary bodies.  Maybe they just can’t hack it anymore.

My understanding is that they’re eusocial, but vote individually on where to feed based on who makes the best sexy waggle dance symbolizing food direction and quality, and have bee quorums concerning when and where to move the hive.  Elections have consequences, as they say, so they are rather “picky” in their own little individual and species-specific manners.

We humans feel a need to enslave everything, from ourselves to mackerel to feed the formerly-wild salmon now bred in large ocean nets to friggin’ anti-biotic-resistant bacterial plasmids to run off our hot RNA strands for in situ sense and non-sense, and other sexy gene-jock what-not.  Yes, we purposely create anti-biotic resistant bacteria as slaves.  Please don’t forget to flame the lip of that beaker when you’re finished with that batch!  Thanks!  Wouldn’t want those little E. coli republicans to escape just any non-containment facility.

Calling the real Clint.  Well beyond halftime, how about we are down by 27 with 10 seconds to go.  Had an excellent conversation with a follow white haired guy like me about how far gone this country is.  Then we discussed preppers and bug out options.

Cop chases self.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new…

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This is an Open Thread

Waiting for slaughter.

Today I’m going to pick on the National Council for La Raza which you may remember fondly as a Hispanic empowerment group on the forefront of Immigration Reform.

Having completely and totally failed at changing the Obama Administration’s worse than George W. Bush deportation policy (MSNBC, not exactly a hotbed of rumor and innuendo), La Raza has now attempted to gather the shreds of credibility that remain to sell out once again in defense of the Obama Bankster Bailout: Robo Signing Edition.

This did not escape my notice over at The Great Orange Satan-

Attorneys General: It’s Time to Close the Deal

by NCLR

Mon Jan 30, 2012 at 11:58 AM PST

Details of a $25 billion robosigning settlement have begun to emerge and if the reported details are accurate, there is much to celebrate.

…

Clearly, $25 billion is not enough to repair all of the damage done to our homes and the economy, but that is why the robosigning settlement is only part of the solution. One of the most important deals struck in the negotiation is on the releasing of future legal claims. This means that the AGs and the Department of Justice can continue to pursue civil rights, origination, and securitization claims. In fact, the financial crimes task force, investigations underway by AGs in California, Nevada, and Massachusetts, and the Department of Justice’s landmark settlement with Countrywide give us every reason to believe that the march toward accountability is off to a good start. The robosigning settlement should be the next step. It is time to deliver the first installment of relief for homeowners that have not a moment to lose.

Is this the policy of La Raza?

If so it’s remarkably short sighted nor does it seem to match the policy goals of your organization.

This is a ridiculously small amount of money to cover over $700 Billion in lost value and most of it comes not from banks, but from the same taxpayers that bailed them out.

This is a horrible settlement on every level.  Supporters should be ashamed.

by ek hornbeck on Mon Jan 30, 2012 at 01:50:53 PM PST

NCLR Policy on AG Settlement

NCLR’s policy goal is to maximize relief for families in the timeliest fashion possible.  As we noted in the blog post, we agree that $25 billion is will not meet demand or atone for all the harms caused by the financial crisis. However, it is an important first step at a time when we really need momentum. The deals preserves the ability of the Department of Justice and the state Attorneys General to continue pursuing financial criminals and holding them accountable.  It would be short-sighted, and quite frankly irresponsible, to walk away from $25 billion and drag out negotiations for another six months or a year, while millions of families continue to slip toward foreclosure.  The settlement is not perfect and advocates will have to remain vigilant.  NCLR will continue our drumbeat for justice and meaningful relief for the millions of Americans who have been victimized by improper lending practices.

by NCLR on Tue Jan 31, 2012 at 07:50:06 AM PST

Oddly enough it’s the very same Janis Bowdler that Yves Smith cites today-

(S)ome core constituencies aren’t buying what the Administration is selling:

Aides to President Barack Obama have in recent weeks courted civil rights groups and borrower advocacy organisations, scheduling meetings and calls in an attempt to gain support for the expected settlement and muffle criticism from key political allies… The meetings have occasionally served as a “gripe session”, as one participant called them, because many of Mr Obama’s most ardent supporters have criticised the pending deal’s terms for the degree of relief provided and the extent of the release from legal claims it provides for banks desperate to minimise mortgage-related liability… Janis Bowdler, a housing expert at the National Council of La Raza, the largest US Hispanic civil rights group, said the settlement would be a good start for the White House as it seeks to prove it is doing all it can for homeowners. “Wrapping up the settlement now is the right thing to do, but it’s only going to be a win for them politically if they follow up with the financial crimes task force,” Ms Bowdler said…”Otherwise, if this is it, and they’re satisfied with just $25bn, I don’t think that will be enough to convince voters that they were doing all they could to fix the housing market.”

Oh, they plan to do more: put some small and maybe even mid sized players in stocks in the town square, the closer to the elections, the better. As we know all too well, the Administration only wants to appease voters, not fix the problem. What it seems to fail to recognize is the the housing market is in such distress that token measures and gimmickry are unlikely to do the trick.

La Raza.  A sold out failure on every level.  Exactly as influential as Planned Parenthood.

DHinMI called me dangerous and edgy.  Well, I am.

Ahhhhh…the wisdom of the ages.

A female CNN journalist heard about a very old Jewish man who had been going to the Western Wall to pray, twice a day, every day, for a long, long time.

So she went to check it out. She went to the Western Wall and there he was, walking slowly up to the holy site.

She watched him pray and after about 45 minutes, when he turned to leave, using a cane and moving very slowly, she approached him for an interview.

“Pardon me, sir, I’m Rebecca Smith from CNN. What’s your name?

“Morris Feinberg,” he replied.

“Sir, how long have you been coming to the Western Wall and praying?”

“For about 60 years.”

“60 years! That’s amazing! What do you pray for?”

“I pray for peace between the Christians, Jews and the Muslims.”

“I pray for all the wars and all the hatred to stop.”

“I pray for all our children to grow up safely as responsible adults and to love their fellow man.”

“I pray that politicians tell us the truth and put the interests of the people ahead of their own interests.”

“How do you feel after doing this for 60 years?”

“Like I’m talking to a fucking wall.”