"The evidence is that the government gave favorable treatment to it."
The government gave favorable treatment to gambling in the securities based on debt? If you mean that the government looked the other way when this market blew up then, yes, it is pretty clear that LACK OF REGULATION led to this meltdown.
As far as I can tell, and who knows if this is banker extortion or reality, the scope of this global fiasco far eclipses anything that the subprime mortgage industry (itself full of professional fraud) can muster. It is NOT JUST ABOUT MORTGAGES it is also about all kinds of debt.
It is also about LEVERAGE. It is also about OPACITY. It is also about GAMBLING ON AIR.
Simply blaming this on the Congressional desire to have homeownership widened is ridiculous. If there were no companies willing to take up the risk then mortgages would not be written. Developers would make smaller, less expensive homes that people could afford. Not a fun industry with fat profits but then neither is trying to sell big trucks in a Prisu market.
prospect.org
Who Benefited and Who Got Hurt?
Mortgage brokers, who occupy an unregulated niche of the lending world, made a commission for every borrower they handed over to a mortgage lender. These brokers are like the drug dealers on the street corner. They are the smallest link in a lending chain that includes some of the largest and most respectable Wall Street firms.
Large mortgage finance companies and banks made big bucks on sub-prime loans. Last year, 10 lenders -- Countywide, New Century, Option One, Fremont, Washington Mutual, First Franklin, RFC, Lehman Brothers, WMC Mortgage, and Ameriquest -- accounted for 59 percent of all sub-prime loans, totaling $284 billion.
Wall Street investment firms set up special investment units, bought the sub-prime mortgages from the lenders, bundled them into "mortgage-backed securities," and for a fat fee sold them to wealthy investors around the world. According to The New York Times, China's second-largest bank, Bank of China Ltd, held almost $9.7 billion of securities backed by U.S. sub-prime loans. These investors, who bought the collateralized securities, were happy as long as they got paid their higher interest on the bonds or other investments.
With the bottom falling out of the sub-prime market, more than 80 mortgage companies went under in the past six months. Major Wall Street firms took billion-dollar losses as the crisis ripped into foreign money markets, from London to Shanghai. Lehman Brothers underwrote $51.8 billion in securities backed by sub-prime loans in 2006 alone; as of September, 20 percent of those loans were in default, the Times reported. Similarly, about one-fifth of the sub-prime loans packaged by Morgan Stanley, Barclays, Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, RBS, Countrywide, JP Morgan, and Citigroup are 60 or more days delinquent, in foreclosure, or involve homes that have already been repossessed.
The executives and officers of some mortgage finance companies cashed out before the market crashed. The poster boy is Angelo Mozilo, the CEO of Countrywide Financial, the largest sub-prime lender. He made more than $270 million in profits selling stocks and options from 2004 to the beginning of 2007. And the three founders of New Century Financial, the second largest sub-prime lender, together realized $40 million in stock-sale profits between 2004 and 2006. Paul Krugman reported in The New York Times that last year the chief executives of Merrill-Lynch and Citigroup were paid $48 million and $25.6 million, respectively.
The hardest hit are the innocent borrowers of sub-prime loans. Many of them are working- and middle-class families who fell victim to the country's economic squeeze, a hardship not of their own doing but a symptom of the Bush years. They faced layoffs, stagnant wages, and rising costs of home heating, gasoline, utilities, food, and child care. For those without health insurance, one serious medical problem wiped out their savings. At a time when soaring housing prices were out of whack with the rest of the economy, sub-prime loans were the only way they could purchase a home. But when they could no longer keep up their mortgage payments, they had no safety net. They began skipping their monthly mortgage payments, especially after the adjustable-rate mortgages kicked in with higher interest rates, as high as a 30 percent spike for some borrowers. |
