Housing Madness

This is the legacy of Greenspan and his chairmanship at the Federal Reserve.

Yes, the borrowers are also at fault, and 'no one made them borrow' as the Wall Streeters and their sock puppets like to say at bubble-bust times like these (remember the tech bubble: 'no one made them buy stocks' - CNBC).

But let's not allow the spin to muddy the waters.

It was fraud. Fraud on a massive and pre-meditated scale. Not unprecedented unfortunately.

It had its core in the Clinton-Bush administrations and the chairmanship of Alan Greenspan. It was aided and abetted by a host of enablers in the media and the universities. And at the heart of it all was the Wall Street Banks.

There is madness in crowds, but the genesis of the madness is in those who assemble the crowds, give them weapons, and walk among them whispering.... madness.

Let there be no doubt. The housing bubble was a financially engineered Ponzi scheme with the Wall Street Banks at the center. And its not over yet. They will not, and probably cannot, stop on their own. The banks must be restrained.

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency...the banks and the corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs." Thomas Jefferson, 1802

U.S. Foreclosures Jump 57% as Homeowners Walk Away
By Dan Levy

April 15 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. foreclosure filings jumped 57 percent and bank repossessions more than doubled in March from a year earlier as adjustable mortgages increased and more owners gave up their homes to lenders.

More than 234,000 properties were in some stage of foreclosure, or one in every 538 U.S. households, Irvine, California-based RealtyTrac Inc., a seller of default data, said today in a statement. Nevada, California and Florida had the highest foreclosure rates. Filings rose 5 percent from February.

About $460 billion of adjustable-rate loans are scheduled to reset this year, according to New York-based analysts at Citigroup Inc. Auction notices rose 32 percent from a year ago, a sign that more defaulting homeowners are ``simply walking away and deeding their properties back to the foreclosing lender'' rather than letting the home be auctioned, RealtyTrac Chief Executive Officer James Saccacio said in the statement.

``We're not near the bottom of this at all,'' said Kenneth Rosen, chairman of Rosen Real Estate Securities LLC, a hedge fund in Berkeley, California and chairman of the Fisher Center for Real Estate at the University of California at Berkeley. ``The foreclosure process will accelerate throughout the year.''

Rising foreclosures will add more inventory to an already glutted market, keep home prices down through at least next year and thwart efforts by Congress and President George W. Bush to help homeowners avoid default, Rosen said in an interview.

`Drag' on Prices

About 2.5 million foreclosed properties will be on the market this year and in 2009, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. analysts led by Michelle Meyer said in an April 10 report. U.S. home price declines will probably double to a national average of 20 percent by next year, with lower values most likely in metropolitan areas in California, Florida, Arizona and Nevada, mortgage insurer PMI Group Inc. said last week in a report.

Borrowers who owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth may be buffeted by increasing job losses in a ``very substantial recession,'' Rosen said. About 8.8 million borrowers had home mortgages that exceeded the value of their property, Moody's Economy.com said last week.

``At least 2 million jobs will be lost because of this recession, so we'll get a cumulative negative spiral,'' Rosen said. ``A normal recession is 10 months. We think this one may be twice as long.''

Bank seizures climbed 129 percent from a year earlier, according to RealtyTrac, which has a database of more than 1 million properties and monitors foreclosure filings including defaults notices, auction sale notices and bank repossessions. March was the 27th consecutive month of year-on-year monthly foreclosure increases. In February, foreclosure filings rose 60 percent.

Nevada Leads

A surge in defaults among subprime borrowers, those with poor or limited credit, spurred the collapse of the U.S. home loan market and has led more than 100 mortgage companies to stop lending, close or sell themselves. As the value of securities tied to mortgages plummeted, lenders and securities firms have reported writedowns and credit losses of at least $245 billion since the beginning of 2007, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Nevada had the highest U.S. foreclosure rate in March at one for every 139 households, almost four times the national rate, RealtyTrac said. Filings there increased almost 62 percent from a year earlier to 7,659.

California had the second-highest rate at one filing for every 204 households, and the most filings for the 15th consecutive month at 64,711. Foreclosure filings more than doubled from a year earlier and were up about 21 percent from February.

Florida, Ohio

Florida had the third-highest rate, one filing for every 282 households, and ranked second in total filings at 30,254. Foreclosures increased 112 percent from a year earlier and decreased almost 7 percent from February, RealtyTrac said.

Ohio ranked third in filings at 11,273 and had the seventh- highest foreclosure rate, one for every 448 households. Georgia, Texas, Michigan, Arizona, Illinois, Nevada and Colorado also ranked among the top 10 states with the most filings, RealtyTrac said.

``The continued increase in new foreclosures implies an even larger drag on prices in 2008,'' Goldman Sachs Chief U.S. Economist Jan Hatzius wrote April 8. Home prices fell 8.9 percent in the fourth quarter, the biggest decline in 20 years as measured by the S&P/Case-Shiller home price index.

Some borrowers are ``hanging on at the margins'' in the face of resets, said Mark Goldman, a loan officer at Windsor Capital Mortgage Corp. in San Diego.

Goldman said one of his clients is a self-employed contractor whose adjustable-rate mortgage rose by two percentage points two months ago. His mortgage payment has increased to $7,200 from $4,900.

``I've had people sitting in my office in tears because there are no loans available,'' said Goldman. ``There are no loans for someone who's upside down on their house.''

To contact the reporter on this story: Dan Levy in San Francisco at dlevy13@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: April 15, 2008 05:25 EDT

The Fed Failed As Regulator - It Was in Good Company

Wall Street veteran Henry Kaufman says in an interview with the Financial Times this week: “Certainly the Federal Reserve should shoulder a substantial part of this responsibility. . . it allowed the expansion of credit in huge magnitudes."

In the Fed's defense, a significant feature of their failure was the chairmanship of Alan Greenspan, who is probably most personally responsible of all the Fed governors for failing to safeguard the US financial system. As the long term chairman he had a significant power and influence over the rest of the board.

Also in the Fed's defense, their failure was no worse than the failure of the SEC and the CFTC, the Bush Administration and the Republican Congress in acting in the public's best interests. However, Chairman Greenspan is a personal standout culprit to anyone who follows the markets closely.

We find it ironic indeed that the plans to 'reform' the markets include giving more power to the Fed, since they are most certainly culpable in the current fiasco, not a public agency, still opaque and unaudited, apparently lacking sufficient checks and balances and public oversight.

Kaufman says Fed failed as regulator
By Aline van Duyn in New York

Published: April 14 2008 03:39 Last updated: April 14 2008 03:39

Henry Kaufman, the distinguished Wall Street economist, has added his voice to the debate about the Federal Reserve’s role in the credit crisis, saying the central bank failed to give enough importance to its role as a regulator.

In a video interview with the Financial Times, Mr Kaufman criticised the Fed’s monetary policy. He said it allowed too much credit expansion over the past 15 years and that this contributed to the market turmoil.

“Certainly the Federal Reserve should shoulder a substantial part of this responsibility. . . it allowed the expansion of credit in huge magnitudes,” Mr Kaufman said.

“Besides its monetary policy approach, [the Fed] really indicated very clearly that it was performing its role as a supervisor . . . in a minute fashion, not in an encompassing fashion. Monetary policy had a high priority, supervision and regulation within the Fed had a smaller priority.”

Mr Kaufman, who is on the board at Lehman Brothers, has long advocated tougher regulation of the biggest financial firms, arguing that they need to be made “too good to fail”, rather than remain “too large to fail”.

The near-collapse of Bear Stearns last month, and the Fed’s intervention which resulted in a purchase of the Wall Street firm by JPMorgan Chase, has triggered a renewed debate about whether banks can regulate themselves, or whether regulators need to impose tougher rules.

The credit crisis, which stems from losses on securities backed by risky mortgages made during the height of the housing bubble, could lead to total losses and writedowns of nearly $1,000bn for banks and investors around the world, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Mr Kaufman said a distinctive feature of the financial crisis was “much greater lapses in official supervision and regulation than in earlier periods”.

He said there should be a new federal regulator appointed who would work with the Federal Reserve but who would have responsibility for “intensively” regulating the 30 or 40 biggest financial firms. Failure to do so could lead to a “crisis that’s bigger than the one which we have today”.

“The supervision of major financial institutions requires deep skills in credit, deep skills in risk analysis techniques and it requires within that organisation, very skilled, trained professional people,” Mr Kaufman said. “That is lacking in the supervisory area in the United States.”

He added that recent proposals from Hank Paulson, secretary of the US Treasury, to overhaul US regulation “lack focus”. “There is going to be some reform of financial supervision and regulation; hopefully it will be along my lines rather than the big compendium of suggestions that came out of the US Treasury”, he said.

Henry Kaufman Video Interview at Financial Times Online

Earnings Lower, Stocks to Follow?

The remedy being prescribed by economic thinkers at the Fed and at the academy is to 'bury the problem in liquidity.' They had better be prepared to pile it high and deep.

In the short term remember this is April stock options expiry week and the Bowery Boys are flush with hot money, so anything can happen.

Goldman Strategists Say U.S. Earnings Are `Awful'
By Alexis Xydias

April 14 (Bloomberg) -- An ``awful'' start to the first- quarter U.S. earnings season is a ``harbinger of things to come'' that will push stocks lower, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

``Early signs are awful,'' a team led by New York-based David Kostin, Goldman's U.S. investment strategist, wrote in a note today. ``We expect generally disappointing results and a swath of lowered profit guidance that will drive the Standard & Poor's 500 Index lower in coming weeks.''

The S&P 500, the benchmark index for American equities, dropped 2.7 percent last week after General Electric Co. said the credit-market crisis caused an unexpected earnings decline, while slowing economic growth and rising energy prices eroded profit at United Parcel Service Inc. and Alcoa Inc. Futures on the S&P 500 lost 0.1 percent at 10:50 a.m. in London.

Analysts surveyed by Bloomberg have cut their projections for first-quarter earnings at S&P 500 companies every week since Jan. 4. They now predict a 12.3 percent drop, compared with an estimate for an increase of 4.7 percent at the start of 2008.

Alcoa marked the start of the earnings reporting season on April 7 when it became the first company in the Dow Jones Industrial Average to post results.

Johnson & Johnson, the world's largest maker of consumer health-care products, is scheduled to report earnings tomorrow, while International Business Machines Corp., the biggest computer-services company, will follow a day later. Merrill Lynch & Co. will report April 17, while Citigroup Inc. will post results April 18.

Merrill and Citigroup will reveal at least $15 billion more of subprime mortgage writedowns this week, the Sunday Times of London reported yesterday, citing analysts it didn't identify...

To contact the reporter on this story: Alexis Xydias in London at axydias@bloomberg.net.

Wachovia Posts Loss, Plans $7 Billion Capital Raising
By David Mildenberg

April 14 (Bloomberg) -- Wachovia Corp., the fourth-largest U.S. bank, reported an unexpected loss because of subprime- infected mortgage holdings, cut its dividend and said it will raise about $7 billion in a share sale to replenish capital.

The first-quarter loss of $393 million, or 20 cents a share, compared with earnings of $2.3 billion, or $1.20, a year earlier, the Charlotte, North Carolina-based company said in a statement today. Analysts had been estimating Wachovia would earn about 40 cents a share, according to a survey by Bloomberg. Wachovia fell 8.4 percent to $25.66 in German trading.

Chief Executive Officer Kennedy Thompson said he was ``deeply disappointed'' after Wachovia posted its first quarterly loss since 2001 and reduced the dividend to preserve $2 billion of funds. The company's market value has dropped 50 percent since its ill-timed $24.6 billion takeover of Golden West Financial Corp. in 2006 at the peak of the housing market.

``The most painful decision was to reduce the dividend because it adversely affects our shareholders,'' Thompson said in the statement. ``But we believe the long-term benefit to shareholder value outweighs the disadvantage of the dividend reduction as we fortify our balance sheet against continued instability in the housing and capital markets.''

Wachovia also said today it will cut 500 investment banking jobs, without providing specifics. The planned capital raising, comprising common stock and convertible preferred shares, has attracted strong interest from investors and will ``enhance our ongoing financial flexibility,'' Thompson said. The bank listed a Tier 1 capital ratio of 7.5 percent.

Fed Says the Credit Crisis Is Not Over

From The Times
April 14, 2008

US Federal Reserve says that credit crisis is not over yet
Suzy Jagger in Washington

The credit crisis engulfing the banking system on both sides of the Atlantic has further to run, said the vice-chairman of the US Federal Reserve. As the US Treasury Secretary and central bankers gave warning that proposed financial reforms would not prevent a repeat of the biggest shock to the world economy since the Great Depression, Donald Kohn, of the Fed, said of the present trouble: “It is not over yet.”

His gloomy forecast about the duration of the credit crisis, delivered at the annual spring meeting in Washington of the Group of Seven leading economies, came after the International Monetary Fund had estimated that the market turmoil would trigger losses of almost $1 trillion (£507 billion) among banks, hedge funds and pension groups since last summer. Mr Kohn said: “The market is still adjusting. The turmoil has not settled down yet. It is still a very fragile situation.”

Finance ministers from the United States, Britain, Canada, Japan, France, Germany and Italy endorsed a set of wide-ranging financial reforms to address the credit crisis, but they also said that none of the measures would prevent a similar crisis in the future.

Among the ideas being considered are changes to the way that banks reward staff with huge annual bonuses. Officials are concerned that bonuses encourage risk taking and have proposed an alternative remuneration system that would pay out over a longer time period. Henry Paulson, the US Treasury Secretary, said: “No silver bullet exists to prevent the excesses of the past from re-occurring. It took time to build up recent excesses and it will take time to work through the consequences. We must expect more bumps in the road: 2008 will be a more difficult year.”

Mr Kohn said: “All we can do is to try to make the system more resilient. To make the effects more muted, absorbed by liquidity. Enhanced information and transparency will be greater and will, hopefully, make markets and economies more resilient.”

Mr Kohn was speaking as part of the executive team running the Financial Stability Forum, whose recommendations have been endorsed by the G7 group of nations in a bid to strengthen regulation. The G7 wants to force banks to adopt new crisis prevention measures, such as eventually raising the amount of capital that they hold on their books to act as a cash cushion during difficult market conditions. (The banks do everything they can to circumvent this, as in SIVs in response to the Basel II requirements. So what will change? This is a bandaid on an infected wound. - Jesse)

They have also issued more immediate demands for financial institutions to quickly declare their losses from the crisis. They want to make banks increase the level of transparency to shareholders and regulators about the strength of assets on their balance sheets and to urge regulatory bodies to co-operate better and to share information. They also threatened to introduce legislation that would compel credit rating agencies to admit to conflicts of interest when they rate securities. (Oooooh. Everything they do is a conflicted under the current system. - Jesse)

The G7 finance ministers and bankers agreed to implement reforms within a 100-day timetable, which would make banks set out “fully and promptly” losses and exposures to illiquid mortgage-backed securities blamed for the seizure of credit markets.

However, the policymakers were also keen to say that it was unrealistic to expect regulators to devise an early warning system that would identify the start of a financial crisis or a banking institution that was in difficulties. (Bring back Glass-Steagall. Firewall the guaranteed banking system from reckless speculation and conflicts of interest - Jesse)

Timothy Geithner, of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said: “If we could figure out a way to have on our desks a screen with the capacity to predict financial crises it would be terrific, but it is very hard to do. What we can do is make the system more resilient.”

(What we need to do is make the system accountable, credible, and honest. Bring back Glass-Steagall and close the loopholes as we saw with the S&L's. The banks spent hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying to repeal it. Firewall the banking system while they try to reform the speculative arenas. Let them steal from each other and not dip into the public's pockets. - Jesse)