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Vic Smith

On Fri, 10 Oct 2008 12:27:33 -0700 (PDT), wrote:

"jlrogersÂ±Â³Â©" wrote:
Many investment banks bought huge amounts of the mortgages and packaged them
into "Collateralized Mortgage Obligations" ("CMO"), slicing and dicing the
packages into multiple tranches and then selling the various tranches to
investors, including banks, private investors, and hedge funds. Â*The MBA's
on Wall Street kept getting wilder and wilder until no one knew what they
were buying anymore, or what the CMOs were worth. Â*When rates went up and
mortgage holders with adjustable rate mortgages started defaulting some of
the higher yielding tranches (riskier tranches) cash flow became impaired
and investors started asking hard questions. Â*The answers scared them and
they quit buying. Â*Market values fell, mark to market rules required write
downs, and now we are in free fall.

Yep, looks right on the mark to me... but how is it the CRA's fault?
Just because everything from gas prices to warm beer is always blamed
on the nearest handy Democrat?

Looks to me like the crash was caused by greed & stupidity, helped
along by some concurrent bubbles popping.

As a private individual, if I buy an investment without carefully
researching it's true risk, then it's my fault if it goes south. I
take the hit. If dozens of investment banks do the same thing, to the
tune of squajillions of dollars, then it drags the rest of us down...
a bail-out to avoid massive bank failure may be in the best public
interest (although my vote would be to take the first round of bail-
out money from the pockets of those CEOs)... it's sure not the fault
of some muddle-headed doo-gooders who decades ago said, "hey wouldn't
it be nice if banks offered nice mortgages to poor people?"

The proble is that we Americans have a whole slew of unhealthy
addictions. Addiction to oil and addiction to credit are the two
biggies. Our borrow-and-spend government is merely a reflection of the
fact that the U.S. has a negative savings rate. The "average" US
household carries about $10K in credit card debt and our total average
indebtedness is over $150K per person. I've pointed this out as a
problem many times (even though it's not the way I manage my own
finances) long before the current banking/mortgage/credit crisis hit
the headlines.

We are addicted to oil and credit. Both are very destructive habits
that we *will* break in the near future... one problem we have is that
oil companies and financial companies are both profiting heavily from
these bad habits, just like cigarette companies profit from addiction
to nicotine. It's going to be either a fight break free or a complete
wreckage of the nation when we hit bottom.

That is all right on. Indebtedness has been encouraged for maybe 15
years now. IMO the 401k, which allowed Wall Street directly into the
paycheck of many workers, was the beginning of the problem.
The new money allowed inflation of stock prices, and made everybody
happy with the magic money of "created wealth."
But it took consumer spending and indebtedness to maintain the facade
of equity wealth.
That's a simplistic outline, and the whole truth is really complicated
by other elements, like shipping manufacturing overseas, which
increased stock prices at the expense of more worker indebtedness.
We've really been living in a financial fantasyland for many years.
A long-running Ponzi scheme.
But the worst mistake is that most of those in charge - gov and
business - abandoned their fiduciary responsibilities.
A vast fleet of ships with drunken captains.

--Vic