Post Tagged with: "derivatives"
Videos: Depositions of Alleged Robo-Signers From Nationwide Title Clearing
Over the past several years, Bryan Bly, Crystal Moore and Dhurata Doko have signed thousands of mortgage assignments as vice presidents of Citi Residential and other major lenders. Yet when asked in a recent deposition what a mortgage assignment is, Bly replied: "I’m really not sure." Moore, meanwhile, defined a promissory note as something "that
The Subprime Debacle: Act 2, Part 2
by John Mauldin They Knew What They Were Selling It’s hard to know where to start. There is just so much here. So let’s begin with testimony from Mr. Richard Bowen, former senior vice-president and business chief underwriter with CitiMortgage Inc. This was given to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Hearing on Subprime Lending and
An update on asymmetric information and corporate governance in bank bailouts
Last June I wrote a post on the topic of corporate governance that pointed to one of only two outcomes as the likely result of the bank bailouts. Outcome number one was bank prudence and low credit growth in the face of uncertainty. Outcome number two was a reckless heads I win, tails you lose
The Alchemy of Securitization
This is a cross-post from the new economic blog Global Economic Intersection. Ratings agencies have been criticized for inadequately determining risk in the massive collection of debt securities created in the credit bubble. A second major problem in the mortgage securitization process is the existence of holes in the legally required filings of mortgage documents.
Institutional Investors now suing Bank of America for put backs on MBS
Felix Salmon is right. This is going to be a big, big problem for the financial institutions. A group of investors holding $16.5 billion of mortgage bonds took a step toward a possible suit against a Bank of America Corp unit for failing to correctly handle loans that were packaged into bonds. The investors said
Josh Rosner on Problem Loans in Banks’ Mortgage Backed Securities
In the wake of Felix Salmon’s investigative reporting on how mortgage backed securities were put together with problematic loans, an increasing amount of focus has turned to the banks’ liability to investors. In the video below, Josh Rosner of the research firm Graham Fisher takes us through the details with Eliot Spitzer and Kathleen Parker.
Bank Holiday is Best Solution for Epidemic of Mortgage Fraud
by L. Randall Wray, Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, Research Director with the Center for Full Employment and Price Stability and Senior Research Scholar at The Levy Economics Institute. We have long known that lender fraud was rampant during the real estate boom. The FBI began warning of an “epidemic” of
Foreclosure crisis much deeper than robo-signers
I haven’t been writing about the foreclosure documentation crisis because I have been more focused on the ‘currency war’. But I want to flag three posts I wrote about this time last year on the mortgage and securitization market because they are relevant to this burgeoning foreclosure documentation crisis. The robo-signer problem is just a
Wednesday Washington Watch
by Annaly Capital Management Today Mike Farrell appeared as a panel participant at a House Financial Services Committee entitled The Future of Housing Finance – A Review of Proposals to Address Market Structure and Transition. The comments of each panel participant are available on the committee’s website. We post Mr. Farrell’s comments below. Chairman Frank,
Michael Burry Discusses Investing in Farmland, Real Estate, Gold
Michael Burry, the former head of Scion Capital LLC, made a big name predicting the housing market’s decline by taking short positions against it as lionized in Michael Lewis’ book "The Big Short." Here he talks with Bloomberg’s Jon Erlichman about the blame game post-housing crash. No one is taking any blame; He calls it
Goldman’s Gets 25% to 35% of Revenue From Derivatives
No wonder Goldman has resisted derivatives regulation so fiercely. A huge percentage of the firm’s revenue comes from these activities (hat tip R.W.). The Wall Street Journal is reporting that as much as a third of the firm’s revenue came from derivatives last year. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. told the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission that
The Shadow Knows
From Annaly Capital Management For those who missed it (and we had, until we were tipped by James Aitken, thank you very much), a vital paper was posted to the New York Fed’s website in the beginning of the month. “Shadow Banking,” a staff report authored by Zoltan Pozsar, Tobias Adrian, Adam Ashcraft and Hayley