5Vote!
BloggingStocks (Free subscription) | 11/20/2009
Filed under: Economic data , Housing , Recession The loans that got us into this mess were generally the first to fall. Variable rate mortgages written without documentation for people with sketchy credit histories shocked nobody as their slide became an avalanche. But, the good stuff is starting to follow . An increasing amount of fixed rate mortgages offered to borrowers with solid credit histories...
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iStockAnalyst.com (Free subscription) | 11/19/2009
Hedge fund manager John Paulson is the hottest investor in the world right now. In 2007, he made $15 billion by shorting subprime mortgage backed securities (see "Trader Of The Year: John Paulson Made Billions Shorting Subprime Mortgages", Top Gun FP, April 8, 2008). Gregory Zuckerman aptly titled his recently published book about Paulson's trade The Great Trade Ever. [More...]
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Fool.com (Free subscription) | 11/10/2009
They had a great-looking quarter, but deeper problems remain.
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iStockAnalyst.com (Free subscription) | 10/24/2009
The paper Understanding the Subprime Mortgage Crisis by Yuliya S. Demyanyk and Otto Van Hemert has been previously discussed on PrefBlog, but it's about to be published on a formal basis (forthcoming in the Review of Financial Studies) and the authors are beating the drums for it on VoxEU. [More...]
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SeekingAlpha.com (Free subscription) | 10/04/2009
BlindReason submits: Pretty amazing story on someone who appears to be one of the driving forces in the rise of Paulson and their amazing returns through this crisis and the last 24 months. There are two valuable traits that once can have: 1) Recognizing a change in trend in a timely way (if you are too early, you'll be out before your bet plays out) 2) Assembling a strategy that effectively takes...
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FelixSalmon.com (Free subscription) | 09/24/2009
As Stacy-Marie Ishmael says, “there has been an outbreak of contrarian thinking on the links between ratings, securitisation and the mortgage market” of late. She points to a paper by Ronel Elul, while Zubin Jelveh , who has been following the contrarian line for a while now, picks up on a different paper by Ryan Bubb and Alex Kaufman. But the fact is that none of these findings are all...
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iStockAnalyst.com (Free subscription) | 09/23/2009
Is the government creating another subprime-mortgage bubble? The first time around, the three-headed federal serpent – the Bush administration, the Treasury Department and the U.S. Federal Reserve – used Fannie Mae (NYSE: FNM) and Freddie Mac (NYSE: FRE) to “legitimize” trillions of dollars worth of toxic financial waste known as subprime mortgages. [More...]
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CARPE DIEM (Free subscription) | 09/06/2009
NY Times -- Bankers plan to buy “life settlements,” life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash — $400,000 for a $1 million policy, say, depending on the life expectancy of the insured person. Then they plan to “securitize” these policies, in Wall Street jargon, by packaging hundreds or thousands together into bonds. They will then resell those bonds...
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SeekingAlpha.com (Free subscription) | 08/30/2009
Market Folly submits: This is the second quarter 2009 edition of our ongoing hedge fund portfolio tracking series. Before reading this update, make sure you check out our series preface on hedge fund 13F filings . Next up is Philip Falcone's Harbinger Capital Partners. Harbinger is a $6 billion hedge fund that started back in 2000 with $25 million in seed capital from Harbert Management. Recently,...
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FelixSalmon.com (Free subscription) | 08/25/2009
Kevin Drum and Ryan Avent bring up the question of optimal regulatory structure, and I agree with both of them. Kevin is right that the Federal Reserve — which is owned by big banks and whose regulatory function exists to keep them strong — is not naturally inclined to protect consumers: after all, banks which treat consumers badly are often that much more profitable. The Fed, writes Kevin,...
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iStockAnalyst.com (Free subscription) | 08/17/2009
On Friday, bank failures for the year reached 77. In January or March of this year people started projecting that we may make 100 by the end of the year. I think that is as sure a bet as you can get these days. Now, we are seeing forecasts of over 200 more bank failures in the next 18 months. The headlines over the past several days have been eye-catching. On Bloomberg.com, we saw “Toxic Loans...
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Hedge Fund Jobs (Free subscription) | 08/14/2009
Hedge Funds Buying Hedge Funds Taking Positions in Stocks Again The recent surge in the stock markets has been a result of the of the ongoing positive sentiments in the global markets. The comments from Nobel laureate Paul Krugman and other experts saying that markets have touched the bottom and it cannot go down further seem to have triggered the markets. More importantly, hedge funds have started...
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BloggingStocks (Free subscription) | 08/06/2009
Filed under: Personal finance , Housing , Recession , Financial Crisis Deutsche Bank (NYSE: DB ) expects almost half of all U.S. homeowners to be underwater -- figuratively, of course -- by 2011. Declines in home prices and the fact that some of those difficult mortgages just aren't going away put 26% of homeowners in this situation by the end of last March, and it seems the situation is only going...
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SeekingAlpha.com (Free subscription) | 07/29/2009
http://rortybomb.wordpress.com submits: Peter Wallison responds to the defense of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency by Elizabeth Warren over at the BaselineScenario . Here is Wallison: The irony here is that Warren is not herself perceptive enough to understand what the consumers who took the subprime mortgages actually understood. She assumes they were cheated or manipulated into taking a...
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