by Jack Guttentag

Yes, the mortgage market is more rigged against borrowers than ever before. If only PMI had been required on all buyers between 2001 and 2007…what if?

In my last column, I indicated that most mortgage borrowers who need private mortgage insurance are not aware that they have options in the kind of premium plan they select. Almost all are directed into monthly premium plans. Yet for many borrowers, the total cost over the period the borrowers will have the mortgage will be higher on a monthly premium plan than on a single financed-premium plan. In every case, furthermore, the increase in payment will be larger on a monthly premium plan.

A Market Rigged Against Borrowers: Why aren’t borrowers offered the option?

More on Mortgage Market Rigging

mortgage market is rigged against borrowers, private mortgage insurance, mortgage meltdown

Just last week, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held a hearing on the U.S. Federal Reserve’s decision to directly pay billions of dollars to banks as part of its scheme to bail out insurance giant American International Group Inc. (NYSE: AIG).

According to committee Chairman Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, the testimony that congressmen heard just didn’t “pass the smell test.”

What really stinks about the whole mess is not only the cover-up of what really happened and why, but the inability of anybody in Congress to actually do their homework and be able to frame pointed questions and get to the truth.

It’s not complicated, but it is convoluted. Here are the facts and some questions that Congress needs to ask – and that the American people deserve straight answers to.

Read the entire article here.

Technorati Tags: recession, financial crisis, mortgage meltdown, credit crunch, business cycle

America’s Founding Fathers were afraid of any concentration of power in the republic. They were particularly afraid that banking interests could hijack our fledgling democracy.

And yet today, 234 years later, our Founding Fathers’ worst fears have come true. Wall Street’s stranglehold on the economy threatens our very prosperity, and the future of a truly democratic republic.

It’s high time we address the truth about Wall Street’s tyranny and set a course for a more secure economic future – one that’s anchored by a safe banking system, not a system rigged by banks.

This is a good article that delves into the banking and financial system crisis a little deeper than most I’ve seen. It’s a bitingly sarcastic look at what has happened over the past decade (or so).

A quartet of top U.S. bank stocks rose on Wednesday after J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. reported earnings that surpassed Wall Street estimates, and the insurance sector also weighed in with gains to lift financial stocks more than 2%.

I suggest that the management at JPM horde all that cash, as the next big mortgage resets occur in 2012 (5 years after the peak of 2007, when everybody and their mother, dog, parakeet, and gerbil bought houses with no money down, poor credit, and insufficient income).

Now that many of those same people are now either unemployed or still making less money than their mortgage payment, the pressure is going to be HUGE on the housing market, banking sector, and overall economy. Let’s hope the news that the economy and employment pictures are improving, else we fall into a really nasty tailspin. Let’s also hope I’m wrong about the resets (here’s the good personal news: my mortgage from 2004 reset at a lower interest rate).

Senior administration officials pressed executives from the nation’s largest banks Tuesday to speed help to distressed borrowers after a frustrating start to the government’s foreclosure-prevention effort and set a goal of more than doubling the number of homeowners receiving aid by November.

U.S. Asks Banks to Speed Up Mortgage Modifications for Troubled Homeowners – washingtonpost.com
Technorati Tags: mortgage meltdown, credit crunch, housing crisis, foreclosure

July 21 (Bloomberg) — For CIT Group Inc., the emergence of a $3 billion loan agreement with bondholders preventing bankruptcy shows there is life after death in the credit markets.

What About Greedy Bankers?

Some like to point out that Wall Street creating the easy home securities like ARM and sub-prime loans, but realize that Wall Street would not have been able to create these things if Alan wouldn’t have allowed interest rates to drop well below market rates.

Its Official, Alan Greenspan Is To Blame | PennyJobs

Not sure I agree with the statement (it seems like a circular argument), but I, too, place a lot of blame on Greenspan and the Federal Reserve. And my opinion isn’t influenced, in this case, by the fact that I think the Fed does too much. It’s based on the idea that one of the, if not THE, central functions of the Federal Reserve is to regulate banks and other financial institutions.

The Fed failed in its oversight of the banks; in fact, they encouraged risky behavior. I think they were of the mind that all of these “derivatives” were reducing — if not eliminating — the risk naturally inherent in risk-based securities. After all, mortgages, for example, have inherent risks and their priced almost solely according to this risk (in the form of the interest rate).

A simple economic lesson: Higher interest rate = Higher perceived risk

As interest rates dropped to historically low numbers, the market clearly perceived lower risk. But people still lose jobs, hurricanes still happen, blight still occurs.

As the bubble inflated, more and more people pumped more and more air into it. As a bubble expands, it becomes more likely to burst.

And BURST it did.

It would be interesting to know what the money multiplier was during the early 2000s versus other 5- or 10-year periods. I would guess that it was rather high.

Technorati Tags: Alan Greenspan, Federal Reserve, the Fed, Fed, Wall Street, Mortgage Meltdown, Credit Crunch, interest rates, housing, recession

General Growth Properties Inc, the second-largest U.S. mall owner, declared bankruptcy on Thursday in the biggest real estate failure in U.S. history.

They are the owners of over 200 malls. They filed for restructuring (Chapter 11), so hopefully their creditors will renegotiate with them. Said General Growth Chief Executive Adam Metz:

While we have worked tirelessly in the past several months to address our maturing debts, the collapse of the credit markets has made it impossible for us to refinance maturing debt outside of Chapter 11.

Or else my wife will have to start shopping at – here it comes! – strip malls!

I say this tongue-in-cheek, of course. There are many culprits in the Mortgage Meltdown and Credit Crunch and DeRecession that followed.

But it’s refreshing to see that some knucklehead with a propeller cap had something to do with it. And the great thing about it: We all knew this.

Ironic? Nope, we’re all just stupid. Read Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street for the full, horribly depressing story.

Here’s a recap of how correlation – the heart of the issue, or horrible assumption most everybody made – works:

To understand the mathematics of correlation better, consider something simple, like a kid in an elementary school: Let’s call her Alice. The probability that her parents will get divorced this year is about 5 percent, the risk of her getting head lice is about 5 percent, the chance of her seeing a teacher slip on a banana peel is about 5 percent, and the likelihood of her winning the class spelling bee is about 5 percent. If investors were trading securities based on the chances of those things happening only to Alice, they would all trade at more or less the same price.

But something important happens when we start looking at two kids rather than one—not just Alice but also the girl she sits next to, Britney. If Britney’s parents get divorced, what are the chances that Alice’s parents will get divorced, too? Still about 5 percent: The correlation there is close to zero. But if Britney gets head lice, the chance that Alice will get head lice is much higher, about 50 percent—which means the correlation is probably up in the 0.5 range. If Britney sees a teacher slip on a banana peel, what is the chance that Alice will see it, too? Very high indeed, since they sit next to each other: It could be as much as 95 percent, which means the correlation is close to 1. And if Britney wins the class spelling bee, the chance of Alice winning it is zero, which means the correlation is negative: -1.

Now, read the story to find out all the rancid, juicy details. Here’s the crux of the matter:

They [bankers] didn’t know, or didn’t ask. One reason was that the outputs came from “black box” computer models and were hard to subject to a commonsense smell test. Another was that the quants, who should have been more aware of the copula’s weaknesses, weren’t the ones making the big asset-allocation decisions. Their managers, who made the actual calls, lacked the math skills to understand what the models were doing or how they worked. They could, however, understand something as simple as a single correlation number. That was the problem.

Oh, snap, here comes the the guy letting the single culprit off the hook:

“Li can’t be blamed,” says Gilkes of CreditSights. After all, he just invented the model. Instead, we should blame the bankers who misinterpreted it. And even then, the real danger was created not because any given trader adopted it but because every trader did. In financial markets, everybody doing the same thing is the classic recipe for a bubble and inevitable bust.

Dammit, I want my goat, as in scape!

Oh, but let’s rejoice in knowing that Li is doing his “magic” in China now, and we can celebrate our competitor across the Pacific’s demise (I’m being flip here, I don’t want to see this sort of catastrophe again, to anybody. And I like China. So do most Americans, too, judging by their Wal-Mart shopping sprees.):

In fact, he is no longer even in the US. Last year, he moved to Beijing to head up the risk-management department of China International Capital Corporation.

It’s on!

Oh, wait. Li himself said,

The most dangerous part is when people believe everything coming out of it (his model).

I guess he sort of warned us. Read the article. It’s very interesting and it’s written in such a way that even I could understand it.

Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street

As in all complex things in life, there wasn't one specific cause. Here's my general thought process on this topic.

People who want to get to the root of any cause always use a root cause analysis to determine the true cause of any issue. One of the practices that process improvement folks use is the fishbone diagram, where if you keep asking "why?" to a question you'll get to the root of it.

But this simple approach often neglects the contributing factors to an issue or a failure. For example, a barn might have caught fire and burned to the ground. The root cause might have been determined to have been a spark from a passing-by freight train.

But the contributing factors were that there was damp hay in the barn, along with kerosene, dry timber, a poorly-maintained exterior, and weeds that had grown rampant over the course of several years.

All of these things led to the fire. Of course, the fire could not have started if not for the spark. But the weeds, hay, timber, etc. allowed the fire to spread at such a rate that the fire crew could not stop it before the entire barn burned down.

Such is the case with the economy. There were many contributing factors: Declining home values, rising bad debt, companies trying to stay afloat cutting staff, phoney financial instruments dreamed up by mathematicians rather than business folks, etc. The list is literally endless.

But what was the root of it all?

As in any mania, it was the madness of crowds. Adam Smith's "invisible hand" and "pursuit of self interest" was the downfall.

Home buyers thought, "If I don't buy this house now, somebody else will."

"Or, if I don't buy this house today, it will cost me $60,000 more to buy this house in 6 months." (By the way, this was the rate of price appreciation for a below-median home price in the Bay Area in California in 2003-2006.)

Lenders said, "If I don't fund this mortgage, somebody else will."

Insurers surmised, "If I don't insure this asset, somebody else will."

Bottom line:

If I don't _____ this, somebody else will!

It was all about getting "it" before somebody else got "it." Or, in other words, what I call "relative greed." It wasn't that everybody was greedy, in and of itself. It was more along these lines:

Scenario 1
You get a 10 percent pay raise. Your neighbor gets a 15 percent pay raise.

Scenario 2
You get a 5 percent pay raise. Your neighbor gets nada.

Do you know which one most people would take? Yeah, #2. It's getting "more" than your neighbor, co-worker, competitor. That's what happened here, in my humble opinion.

It's also "the market" filling in voids. If Bank of America doesn't do this mortgage, Wachovia will. And Wachovia did. And did, and did and did and did.

BofA saw this and said, "We're losing market cap. And we're the biggest and baddest bank around." So, they got into the game, and then some!

People did it, too. If I don't buy a house now, I may never be able to afford one.

"Investors" did it, too. If I don't buy this duplex now and flip it, I may never get another golden opportunity like this.

Do yourself a favor: Read Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

You only really need to read any one of the stories. They're all the same, really. Market goes up and up, creating self-fulfilling prophecy. Something happens. Market goes down and down, creating self-fulfilling prophecy. What stops it? Who knows?

Money isn't everything. It's the only thing. Wait. That's only for football.

Enjoy life. Spend time with your family.