Yesterday, Fannie Mae said that it would need another $8.4 billion to cover losses on the home loans it backs, and today the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees both Fannie and sibling Freddie Mac, said that the ultimate taxpayer tab of supporting the two housing giants is still unclear.
That’s the sort of news …
Apparently, the stock market took a little tumble last week while I was away on vacation. Now that I’m back, things are looking so much more cheery. Here we are, at 4 p.m., and the Dow, S&P and Nasdaq are all up by more than 3%. I’ve been asked to write a blog post about why.
As the Senate continues debating financial-industry reform this week, I’d like to re-iterate a point I first made in a Time.com article: lots of businessmen are in favor of a sweeping overhaul.
You wouldn’t necessarily know that from reading the headlines, since headlines tend to capture the highest profile lobbying—like what comes …
Things keep getting worse for Goldman Sachs. Late yesterday news broke that federal prosecutors are looking into whether to bring criminal fraud charges against the Wall Street firm. (The outstanding SEC lawsuit involves only civil charges.) No word yet on any details about what those new charges may entail.
Nonetheless, stock analysts …
As the Senate takes up debate on financial industry overhaul, there is one issue above all others that is imperative to work out: how to deal with institutions that are Too Big To Fail. The reason the government stepped in with taxpayer money at firms like Citigroup and AIG is still alive and well. Our financial giants are so behemoth …
Last month a software engineer at Apple accidentally left his iPhone in a bar. A fellow patron picked up the phone and asked the people in the bar around him if it belonged to any of them. It didn’t. He took the phone home and the next day noticed that the phone looked odd. He jimmied open its case and saw that the phone was different …
Today’s Goldman Sachs hearing in the Senate is fantastic theater. The kind of theater that makes you want to run to the restroom to vomit.
I’ve been watching the hearing on TV, and I am nauseated to report that they still don’t get it. The world came to the brink of financial ruin, and the people driving the mortgage securities …
Today’s WSJ op-ed page has a curious defense of keeping more-complex derivatives off exchanges. It goes like this: when someone (like John Paulson) takes a short position on a derivative (like a synthetic CDO), that’s really important information for the market to have since it signifies John Paulson’s opinion that the thing tied to the …
Today the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations held a hearing on the role credit ratings agencies played in the financial crisis. These are the companies that gave high marks to securitization deals, like the one Goldman Sachs is currently being sued over, even though the underlying collateral—namely, home loans—was …
Today President Obama gives a speech on financial re-regulation in New York City—a.k.a., the city he and Congress are out to hurt with financial re-regulation. Okay, I exaggerate. Although as my colleague Michael Scherer pointed out yesterday, if financial reform is done right, Wall Street banks will see profits decline, at least in …
Of all the unfortunate circumstances to emerge from the housing bubble and bust, one of the most underappreciated is the development of a market-timing mindset when it comes to the decision about when to buy a home. I mention this now because this morning’s New York Times has a story about using price-to-rent ratios to tell whether or …
Good news in the WSJ this morning: mortgage delinquencies are on the decline. According to LPS Applied Analytics, the number of loans that were at least 30 days past due or in foreclosure declined by 8.6% in March. That’s the second month in a row we’ve seen a drop. The president of LPS, which does mortgage processing for most large U.S. …
