The American people have as the song goes ”Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet”!

Cash is king or more precisely hard assets or commodities are especially gold, silver, etc.

Buy guns and safes to protect them.

Unfortunately the third wave of mortgage defaults will be in commercial real estate and will shortly follow the second wave.

The greedy, arrogant, stupid bastards that got us into this mess are really beginning to make me mad including the political class in Washington who were their pals.

No more bailouts–on strike–shut it down.

A phrase even the radical socialists might even be able to understand.

Result: 18 month to 24 month recession, unemployment rate peaks at 15% in next 12 months.

Hang on to your job if you have one.

Great investment buying opportunity in real estate and eventually equities over the next 12 to 18 months.

For the long run buy commodities or raw materials.

Just wait awhile.

You ain’t seen nothing yet.

Jim Rogers has it completely right. My favorite video–three cheers!

Jim Rogers about Tim Geithner testimony 2009.02.11

 

When it comes to economics President Obama is an economic illiterate advised by a group of arrogant big government economists who think government intervention is the answer to the world’s economic problems–living in the 1930s with the same results.
 

Tom Woods on Glenn Beck “Meltdown” 02/09/2009

 

History of Housing Prices Chart – *SHOCKING* You Need To See This!

 

Count me out.

Join the second American Revolution and march on Washington July 4, 2009:

 

American People’s Plan = 6 Month Tax Holiday + FairTax = Real Hope + Real Change!–Millions To March On Washington D.C. Saturday, July 4, 2009! 

Tea Parties Take Off In Texas–Spreading Nationwide–Are You Going To Washington Fair? Millions Celebrate The Second American Revolution–Saturday, July 4, 2009

 

This may be you last chance for a some time.

Time to take care of business and get out of Dodge.

Learn Chinese!

 

Bachman Turner Overdrive – You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet

 

Alt+A and Option Arm Mortage Crises Yet to Come – MORE BANKER FRAUD (1 of 2)

 

Alt+A and Option Arm Mortage Crises Yet to Come – MORE BANKER FRAUD (2 of 2)

 

 Deconstructing the Subprime Crisis

 

Mr Mortgage – HERE COMES THE ALT-A CRISIS

 

Mr Mortgage on the Pay Option ARM Implosion

 

Mark Zandi on the Risky Loans Behind the Meltdown

 

Jeremy Siegel on the Resilience of American Finance

 

Franklin Allen on Lessons from the Subprime Crisis

 

Richard Herring on What’s Next for Investment Banks

 

Wall Streets Day of Reckoning: Turmoil in the Global Market

 

John Berlau on Obama’s Mortgage Rescue Plan

 

1/3) Tom Woods: Meltdown (Lew Rockwell Show 2/11/09)

 

2/3) Tom Woods: Meltdown (Lew Rockwell Show 2/11/09)

 

Bachman Turner Overdrive “Takin Care Of Business” Live ‘74

 

 Background Articles and Videos

Jim Rogers on the Asian Financial Forum pt 1/2 Jan 21 2009

 

Jim Rogers on the Asian Financial Forum pt 2/2 Jan 21 2009

 

Investment guru Jim Rogers

 

Jim Rogers : Teach your children Chinese !!!!!!!!

 

Richard Herring on Mortgage-backed Securities

 

Angry renters, unite!

By Michelle Malkin  

“…I want you to look at this chart, via AngryRenter.com. While ACORN and the housing entitlement mob get all the press, look who’s not getting attention.

Now, here’s some feedback in response to my appearance on FNC’s Neil Cavuto show this afternoon in support of renters (self included) who are getting the shaft from the housing entitlement-mongers: …”

http://michellemalkin.com/2009/02/19/angry-renters-unite/

 

Neil Cavuto shout down

 

 

The Federal Response to Home Mortgage Distress:

Lessons from the Great Depression

David C. Wheelock

“…The sharp increase in mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures during 2007 prompted numerous calls for government intervention in housing and mortgage markets, including the creation of an HOLC-like agency to purchase delinquent mortgages. The right of lenders to foreclose on collateral is themain reason why the interest rates on secured loans, such as home mortgages, are typically much lower than those on unsecured loans, such as credit card debt. Ordinarily, mortgage foreclosures receive little notice from the public because they have little impact on parties other than the delinquent borrower. However, when the number of foreclosures is high or concentrated geographically, they can lower property values, destabilize neighborhoods, and impose other social costs. Such “externalities” can justify government intervention to reduce the number of foreclosures. …”

 

 

 

 

http://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/review/08/05/Wheelock.pdf

 

 

 

 

New data analysis helps identify future foreclosure trouble spots

“…First, some background on the data we used. This background discussion includes a brief overview of two recent and related changes in the mortgage market: namely, mortgage securitization and the use of risk-based pricing for mortgage loans.

In the past, lenders originated, serviced, and owned their mortgages. However, in recent years, it has become more common to separate these functions. Typically, mortgages are now pooled and sold to secondary market investors, while the rights to service the loans are sold to a servicer, a firm that specializes in conducting this activity for a fee. The share of U.S. residential mortgage debt in a mortgage pool or trust has grown in the past decade. As of the second quarter of 2007, it accounted for 57 percent of total mortgage debt.^1/

As the use of securitization expanded, lenders found that investors had a ready appetite for securities backed by nonprime (that is, subprime and alt-A) loans. By 2006, the number of nonprime mortgage originations increased substantially, accounting for 40 percent of all newly securitized mortgages, compared to only 9 percent in 2001.^2/

In retrospect, it appears as though the chain of securitization failed to align the interests of mortgage originators, who earned fees by making loans, and investors in mortgage-backed securities, who ultimately bore the credit risk of the loans. Why investors did not exert sufficient oversight to ensure the quality of securitized mortgages is beyond the scope of this article.

The data used in our analysis capture a good deal of information about the simultaneous growth in and fusion of nonprime lending and mortgage securitization. In particular, the data include a sizable proportion of all loans sold into subprime or alt-A securities. As noted above, alt-A and subprime loans are considered riskier than prime loans and more prone to default. The risk is due mainly to quality and size considerations that make these loans “nonconforming” in the eyes of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.^3/

Our understanding is that LP captures about 70 percent of subprime securities and 95 percent of alt-A securities. Still, it is important to remember that these data do not include any loans held on a bank’s books. The data used in this article are from October 2007. …”

http://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications_papers/pub_display.cfm?id=2453

 

The Rise in Mortgage Defaults

Chris Mayer, Karen Pence, and Shane M. Sherlund

“…The mortgage market began suffering serious problems in mid-2005. According to data from the Mortgage Bankers Association, the share of mortgage loans that were “seriously delinquent” (90 days or more past due or in the process of foreclosure) averaged 1.7 percent from 1979 to 2006, with a low of about 0.7 percent (in 1979) and a high of about 2.4 percent (in 2002). But by the second quarter of 2008, the share of seriously delinquent mortgages had surged to 4.5 percent. These delinquencies foreshadowed a sharp rise in foreclosures: roughly 1.2 million foreclosures were started in the first half of 2008, an increase of 79 percent from the 650,000 in the first half of 2007 (Federal Reserve estimates based on data from the Mortgage Bankers Association). No precise national data exist on what share of foreclosures that start are actually completed, but anecdotal evidence suggests that historically the proportion has been somewhat less than half (Cordell et al., 2008).

Mortgage defaults and delinquencies are particularly concentrated among borrowers whose mortgages are classified as “subprime” or “near-prime.” Some key players in the mortgage market group these two into a single category, which we will call “nonprime” lending. Although the categories are not rigidly defined, subprime loans are generally targeted to borrowers who have tarnished credit histories and little savings available for down payments. Near-prime mortgages are made to borrowers with more minor credit quality issues or borrowers who are unable or unwilling to provide full documentation of assets or income; some of these borrowers are investing in real estate rather than occupying the properties they purchase. Near-prime mortgages are often bundled into securities marketed as “Alt-A.” Since our data are based on the loans underlying such securities, we use the term “Alt-A” to refer to near-prime loans in the remainder of this paper. …”

“…Conclusions and Future Research

Slackened underwriting standards–manifested most dramatically by lenders allowing borrowers to forego downpayments entirely–combined with stagnant to falling house prices in many parts of the country appear to be the most immediate contributors to the rise in mortgage defaults. The surge in early payment defaults and the rise in the share of mortgages with low or no documentation suggest that underwriting also deteriorated along other dimensions. Because downpayments were so small, when house prices declined many borrowers had little or no equity in their properties and thus less incentive to repay their mortgages. In the industrial Midwest, economic distress was also a factor in the heightened defaults. Unorthodox mortgage features such as rate resets, prepayment penalties, or negative amortization provisions do not appear to be significant contributors to date to the defaults because borrowers who experienced problems with these provisions could refinance into other mortgages. However, as markets realized the extent of the poor underwriting and house prices began to fall, refinancing opportunites became more limited. Borrowers may not be able to resolve their problems with these products through refinancing going forward and thus may be forced to default. Our conclusions are consistent with other studies (Sherlund, 2008, Gerardi, Lehnert, Sherlund, and Willen, 2008, Gerardi, Shapiro, and Willen, 2007, Haughwout, Peach, and Tracy, 2008).

Our conclusions run counter to the popular perception that unorthodox mortgage features are responsible for the surge in defaults. At first glance, the fact that the most common subprime mortgage was a confusing and complicated product–a short-term hybrid with a prepayment penalty–and that delinquency rates were highest on these products suggest that the mortgage type itself must be to blame. We suggest instead that default rates were highest on these products because they were originated to the borrowers with the lowest credit scores and highest loan-to-value ratios. This interpretation raises the questions of why the riskiest borrowers were matched with the most complicated products, and whether it was borrowers, lenders, or both who misjudged the likelihood that borrowers would default. Did borrowers seek out this product because it offered the lowest initial payment and they were focused on short-term affordability? Or did lenders offer this product to borrowers because they thought that this combination of features allowed them to manage the risks of lending to borrowers with high probabilities of default?

News accounts often suggested that borrowers were steered into subprime adjustable-rate mortgages when they could have qualified for fixed-rate or prime mortgages (Brooks and Simon, 2007). Given the poor credit profiles of these borrowers and the high price of housing relative to their incomes, however, it seems more likely that in the absence of subprime adjustable-rate mortgages these borrowers would not have gotten credit at all. If so, several more questions spring to mind. First, were these borrowers better off for having the opportunity of home ownership when the possibility of failure was so high? Second, were the associated gains in the homeownership rate illusory, or will some of these gains be sustained? Finally, to what extent were house prices pushed up by the entrance of these new buyers into the market?

Alt-A mortgages pose a similar set of questions and issues. As with subprime mortgages, the complicated provisions of these mortgages do not appear to be responsible for the sharp rise in delinquencies. Very few of these mortgages are scheduled to “recast” before 2010, when their payments could potentially increase dramatically. But even more than subprime mortgages, these mortgages were originated to borrowers who may have been speculating on future house price appreciation. As these borrowers were somewhat better credit risks than borrowers with subprime mortgages, they tended to have lower combined loan-to-value ratios at origination and better credit scores. However, the areas where investors speculated most heavily on house price appreciation were also the areas that experienced the most severe house price declines. Although the initial equity cushion kept Alt-A mortgages from defaulting as quickly as subprime mortgages, default rates on Alt-A loans, and on option adjustable-rate mortgages in particular, began to skyrocket in 2007, about twelve months after the surge in subprime delinquencies. Going forward, the key question is whether house prices will decline enough so that borrowers with prime mortgages are also left with little or no equity and thus a higher chance of default.

Any government response to mortgage distress would entail some cost. For example, a government purchase of delinquent mortgages, or expanded federal mortgage guarantees or insurance, could impose a substantial monetary cost on taxpayers. Some policies, including a government bailout of delinquent loans or expanded loan guarantees, could also encourage increased financial risk-taking and thereby lead to further instability in the future. Other actions, such as a government-imposedmoratoriumon loan foreclosures, could simply delay inevitable adjustments that are necessary to restore the functioning of mortgage and housing markets. Such direct government intervention could also increase the cost of loans for future borrowers by encouraging lenders to add a premium to loan interest rates to compensate for the risk that government officials might re-write the terms of loan contracts.

34 …” 

http://www.federalreserve.gov/Pubs/feds/2008/200859/index.html

 

Crosby Stills & Nash – Teach Your Children

 

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