U.S. accuses Bank of America of mortgage-backed securities fraud

The U.S. government on Tuesday filed two civil lawsuits against Bank of America that accuse the bank of investor fraud in its sale of $850 million of residential mortgage-backed securities.

The lawsuits are the latest legal headache for the second-largest U.S. bank, which has already agreed to pay in excess of $45 billion to settle disputes stemming from the 2008 financial crisis.

While most of the cases Bank of America has already confronted pertain to its acquisitions of brokerage Merrill Lynch and home lender Countrywide, the lawsuits filed on Tuesday pertain to mortgages the government said were originated, securitized and sold by Bank of America's legacy businesses.

The residential mortgage-backed securities at issue, known as RMBS, were of a higher credit quality than subprime mortgage bonds and date to about January 2008, the government said, months after many Wall Street banks first reported billions of dollars in write-downs on their holdings of subprime mortgage securities. Read more >>

For sale: U.S. highways and bridges

The nation's roads are up for sale. But who should have control over them?

State and local governments are in desperate need of cash for all manner of road, building and bridge repair, and are increasingly turning to private money for funding.

But the involvement of private investors is raising concerns over how much control the public may lose over its roadways. Companies putting up the money include construction and engineering firms like Bechtel and Samsung, and big banks like Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch that aim to attract money from pension funds and insurance companies.

In exchange for the funding, the firms are getting an ownership stake in the projects. That means they'll get a cut of the tolls, and also be responsible for the maintenance. The arrangement has some people nervous. There is a fear that governments are losing some control of the roadways. If the maintenance doesn't get done, what recourse do they have to force the private firms to act? Read more >>

Millionaires shrug off the downturn

Image by Getty Images via @daylifeMillionaires across the world are now richer than they were before the financial crisis, the latest sign that the wealthy have weathered the downturn far better than other groups.

Global wealth among individuals with $1m of investable assets or more rose to $42,700bn in 2010, up from $40,700bn in 2007, according to the Merrill Lynch Cap Gemini World Wealth Report.

Rising equity markets and Asian growth helped expand the fortunes of the global elite, with the number of Asian millionaires now exceeding that of Europe.

There were 3.3m millionaires in Asia-Pacific at the end of 2010, compared to 3.4m in the US and just 3.1m in Europe, the report found. There were 3m millionaires in both Europe and Asia at the end of 2009. More...

Why Is All This Happening? It’s the War Between Bankers

Image via Wikipedia

by Bill Sardi

The public may have casually become aware of recent news announcements about an agreed upon goal between bankers to reach an 8-percent cash reserve requirement in their institutions. A list was recently published showing few banks currently have reached this reserve requirement. This list was obviously issued to apply public pressure via the public’s ability to direct their deposits to more stable banks, thus nudging other banks to increase their reserves.

Banks deploy depositors’ money into interest-bearing loans in order to generate profits and keep a portion in reserve to meet depositors’ immediate needs. Recall that withdrawal of $16.7 billion in cash from Washington Mutual bank over a 9-day period is what drove that bank into insolvency even though it had $307 billion of (over-valued) assets and deposits of $188 billion at the time. So cash reserves are of greater importance into today’s unstable financial environment.

It all sounds so collegiate – a bunch of the world’s bankers have agreed to stabilize their institutions so as to better withstand current economic challenges and create greater public confidence in banks. News reports make it sound like bankers are cooperative. But in reality, there is a war going on between bankers, in particular central bankers, those bankers who supply money to depository banks where the public banks their money.

First shots fired

The first shots in this war were apparently fired by banks in Japan a number of years ago. This dispute between bankers is what has led to the current worldwide financial crisis.

Bruce Wiseman makes us aware of this war in his report A Look Behind The Wizard’s Curtain: The Financial Crisis: The Hidden Beginning. Wiseman’s upcoming book and movie on this topic are scheduled for release in 2010.

Wiseman reports that the top ten banks in the world in the 1970s were American banks. But in the 1980s six Japanese banks rose into the top-ten ranking. Wiseman explains this sudden rise, which was said to shift the center of world banking from New York to Tokyo, was due to the low reserves (said to be as low as 3%) kept by bankers in Japan.

With lower reserve requirements, Japanese banks had more available funds to loan than competing banks throughout the globe. These Nippon bankers could establish branch banks throughout the world and dominate the world’s financial markets.

The 8-percent reserve requirement agreed upon in the Basel I agreement, named for the location of its signing at the Bank of International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, is intended to put the world’s banks on a level playing field when it comes to doing business outside their own countries.

Wiseman says this low-reserve requirement practiced by banks in Japan was perceived as drawing a samurai sword against the rest of the world’s bankers and this didn’t rest well with Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the US Federal Reserve Bank and Board Member of the International Bank of Settlements, a bank for the world’s central bankers headquartered in Basel, Switzerland. Something had to be done about unfair competition in the banking arena.

Bankers in Japan were informed via the Bank of International Settlements, the "central bankers’ bank," that they would not be allowed to continue their operations in major foreign markets unless they agreed to a minimum reserve requirement – the 8% rule. Japanese bankers were coerced to agree to what has become known as the Basel I accord which was signed in 1988.

Foot dragging over reforms

But it’s now 21 years later, and bankers are still dragging their feet to comply with a stability measure that, had it been implemented, may have staved off part of the current economic crisis long before it occurred.

Don’t get a false impression that Japanese banks are solely to blame for bank instability. Five investment banks in the U.S. (Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill-Lynch and Morgan Stanley) appealed to the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) and won the privilege to carry a 20-to-1 or even 30-to-1 ratio of capital to loans (not the same as cash reserves, as mentioned above).

For example, instead of these investment banks employing a more traditional capital-to-loan ratio of 10-to-1 (let’s say $1 billion of capital to issue $10 billion in loans), they were given the green light to loan at the ratio of 20-to-1 or even 30-to-1 ($1 billion of capital to issue $20 billion or even $30 billion in loans). This was a conscious decision by the SEC that probably was coerced by political influence.

Basel II spawns real estate bubble

This bankers’ war continued over the following decade and a half, culminating in Basel II in 2004, another agreement between banks to standardize reporting requirements for credit worthiness and capital that each depository bank holds. This is when the so-called "mark-to-market" rules were established. The Bank of International Settlements is attempting to get banks to value their real estate assets on real market value and to reveal all of the non-performing loans (foreclosures) they have on their books. Such revelations and transparency would doom many banks, including some of the world’s largest banks.

Basel II also made provision for reduced reserve requirements for mortgage-backed home loans. This made home loans more profitable and is set off the explosive false growth in residential real estate and created the financial bubble that finally popped in 2008. Central bankers are to blame for setting off this wild fire in the real estate market.

How many banks intend to comply?

A recent survey conducted by the Financial Stability Institute attempted to determine how many banks in 115 jurisdictions in less developed nations in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East intend to comply with Basel II. The survey was not sent to banks in Japan, possibly for good reason. The 2004 survey revealed 95 countries currently plan to comply with Basel II reporting requirements, and even more countries said they intended to comply with Basel II in a 2006 survey.

However, according to a report in Risk Magazine, the banking industry is fighting finalized reforms in the Basel II mandates, claiming the amount of capital required cannot be raised within the allotted time framework. Finance ministers and central bank governors of the 20 leading economies (called the Group of 20) wants full implementation by 2012.

Prudent banking

Prudent banking is not beyond the capability of bankers. For example, according to a Wall Street Journal article, while Basel II requires a capital to loan ratio of 9%, banks in India are required to have a 12% standard.

Bankers in China have been even more prudent. Chinese banks adhere to a cap on loan-to-deposit ratios of about 75% (the actual ratio is more like 67%), and leverage ratios (capital-to-loan ratios) in the single digits – considerably below what the big U.S. banks have been allowed to accumulate. Furthermore, in China, home buyers can only borrow up to 70% of the value of their property (60% if it's a second purchase).

Fang Xinghai, director-general of Shanghai's financial-services office, recently described the difference between the Chinese and U.S. approaches to bank regulation in the Wall Street Journal: "In the U.S., the regulators don't believe in regulation to begin with," he said, and pointed a finger at former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's belief that the Fed's job wasn't to prevent or deflate assets bubbles, but to "deal with the consequences."

The Wall Street Journal report goes on to say that bankers in Spain certainly incurred exposure to an overbuilt real estate market (an estimated 1.2 million unsold new homes), but they avoided further trouble by consolidating all their assets, even non-performing home loans, onto their balance sheets. For comparison, "Special investment vehicles," employed by American banks, "cooked the books" and keep risky debt off of bank ledgers.

Resorting to the unthinkable

Unable to create a level competitive field for banking, the bank reform effort has now shifted away from cooperation to a master plan to take down the world’s economies and exercise complete control in the aftermath by introduction of a master plan to control banking and currency.

According to Wiseman, the plan underway now is to intentionally "take down the United States and the U.S. dollar as the stable datum of planetary finance and replace it with something called a Global Monetary Authority" that will issue a single global currency via the world’s central bankers, who in turn distribute money to depository and investment banks.

What Wiseman is talking about here is that a small group of less than a dozen central bankers are likely to rule the world via control of currency.

As confirmation of Wiseman’s claim, the call for a "global monetary authority" was echoed by a Yale professor in the Financial Times in 2008.

What looms is a single global currency, probably issued by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which will then exert control over the world’s banks. A more complete picture of what is likely being planned is provided here and here.

The intentional take-down of the world’s economies and establishment of a world currency will be spawned out of planned chaos which would provoke the planet’s masses to beg for relief. The new currency and its new central bank will be offered up as the quickest solution to the world’s economic turmoil.

But will world control be lost?

However, the bankers and elites risk losing control of the world that they now hold. As investigative journalist Daniel Estulin reports, "One of Bilderberg’s primary concerns accordingly is the danger that their zeal to reshape the world by engineering chaos in order to implement their long term agenda could cause the situation to spiral out of control and eventually lead to a scenario where Bilderberg and the global elite in general are overwhelmed by events and end up losing their control over the planet." (The Bilderberg Group, comprised of over 100 influential people, meets annually to discuss issues of world concern.)

Yet central bankers and elitists plod ahead, all the while attempting to tighten their grip on the masses. Following the G20 (20 leading countries of the world) meeting at the beginning of April, 2009, it was reported that, "The world is a step closer to a global currency, backed by a global central bank, running monetary policy for all humanity." A communiqué released by the G20 leaders stated that, "We have agreed to support a general standard drawing rights (SDR) allocation which will inject $250bn (£170bn) into the world economy and increase global liquidity," and that, "SDRs are Special Drawing Rights, a synthetic paper currency issued by the International Monetary Fund that has lain dormant for half a century." Essentially, "they are putting a de facto world currency into play. It is outside the control of any sovereign body."

IMF plants an agent in our midst

The IMF has the right man in place to do the job in the U.S. Timothy Geithner, U.S. Treasury Secretary, was director of the Policy Development and Review Department (2001–2003) at the IMF. Geithner is also well connected in other circles. He was also part of a consulting firm in the 1980s owned by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Furthermore, Geithner was also president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and a staffer at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Geithner, as U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, apparently sees no conflict between his duty to uphold the U.S. Constitution and a one-world currency. He goes along with the agenda to abolish the US dollar in favor of a global medium of exchange. Geithner was quoted to say: "Our hope is that we can work with Europe on a global framework, a global infrastructure which has appropriate global oversight."

What lies ahead

Foot dragging by the world’s bankers to comply with banking standards and the intentional collapse of world economies to force bank reform has dragged the world into a quagmire that could lead to mass starvation, suicide and even war. A former top British bank regulator recently called for the formation of an international bank police agency to bring the bankers into line. But such an idea appears to be too late. Efforts to usher in an IMF-issued currency appear to be steaming forward.

Such plans, to usher in a one-world government and a single currency, were made decades ago by elitists and central bankers, but they were waiting for world events to be engineered in a manner to create the perfect storm that would cause Americans to give up their sovereignty, and their greenbacks, in exchange for a new type of play money and subservience to another rule of law outside the U.S. Constitution. Professor Carroll Quigley described this covert plan in the 1960s in his book entitled Tragedy and Hope: A History Of The World In Our Time. Another broad description of this plan is found here.

World control

Few Americans catch on to the fact that central bankers, not elected representatives, have controlled America for some time now. It was the British banker Mayer Amschel Bauer Rothschild who said in 1791: "Allow me to issue and control a nation's currency, and I care not who makes its laws."

The world exists for the central bankers to plunder, and no one else. What is good for the central bankers is good enough for the rest of the world. It’s like the world is a tiger that is being slung around by its tail. If central bankers aren’t paid their dues, the world must suffer. Yet the bankers must not be deprived of their seven, eight and even nine-figure commission checks amidst the turmoil. The world is being slung into economic chaos over a long-standing war between central bankers. If the masses only knew.

December 14, 2009

Bill Sardi [send him mail] is a frequent writer on health and political topics. His health writings can be found at www.naturalhealthlibrarian.com. He is the author of You Don’t Have To Be Afraid Of Cancer Anymore.

AIG’s mysterious Schedule A finally revealed

reuters.com
The heavily-redacted regulatory filing that spells out the details of the New York Federal Reserve’s controversial bailout of American International Group is a secret no more.

Reuters has obtained a copy of the five-page document the giant insurer and the New York Fed had asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to keep confidential. The effort by the New York Fed to keep the document under wraps has sparked a furor on Capitol Hill and was the subject of a hearing on Wednesday by House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

The unredacted version of the “Schedule A – List of Derivative Transactions” fills out some of the missing pieces in the AIG bailout, in which an entity set-up by the New York Fed effectively funneled tens of millions of dollars to 16 big U.S. and Europeans banks that had bought credit default swaps from the insurer.

The unredacted version of the Schedule A enables some to identify all of the 178 mortgage-related securities, or collateralized debt obligations, that AIG wrote insurance-like protection on.

It’s been known for months that Goldman Sachs and Societe Generale were the two banks who recieved the most money in the dea because they had insured the most CDOs with AIG. But the new information enables traders, investors and the general public to see just which deals the banks had purchased insurance on.

The new information also reveals that of the 178 tranches of CDOs that AIG insured, some 14% were on deals issued after 2005. That’s critical because in December 2007, former AIG Financial Products head Joseph Cassano had said AIG largely got out of the CDS business by the end of 2005.

The newly disclosed information also reveals that Goldman not only bought a lot of CDS from AIG to protect itself; the Wall Street firm also originated a good number of the CDOs that were in SocGen’s portfolio. Some of the Goldman deals in SocGen’s portfolio that AIG had insured includes CDOs with names like Adirondack 2005, Putnam Structured Product CDO 2002 and Davis Square Funding IV.

Janet Tavakoli, a derivatives consultant who has called the AIG bailout a gift to the Wall Street banks, said the issue isn’t just what deals AIG insured, but the underlying assets in those deals. She noted that a goodly number of the CDOs held by the banks also held pieces of other CDOs.

Goldman Sachs, Societe Generale, Deutsche Bank, Merrill Lynch and other banks sold their ailing collateralized debt obligations to the New York Fed-sponsored entity, Maiden Lane III. AIG then canceled out the CDS contracts it had sold as default insurance on those 178 CDOs.

“If all of this had come out in the public domain in late 2008, Goldman Sachs and Merrill would have been deeply embarassed and the Federal Reserve woudl have been questioned,” said Tavakoli.

In the process, the banks were made whole and AIG no longer had to pay out billions of dollars in cash collateral to the banks everytime the CDOs dropped in value.

The Recession Is Over, the Depression Just Beginning

...In his upcoming State of the Union address, Obama is expected to repeat his post-China trip message that fiscal austerity (meaning sharp social spending cuts) is necessary to cut the public debt. In other words, bankrolling Wall Street, health insurers, the drug cartel, other corporate favorites, and war profiteers will continue while working Americans won't be helped during the greatest economic crisis in their lifetimes, a protracted one that will last years.

Looking ahead in 2010, the state of the nation for most people is dire and worsening, and 2011 looks no better. City mayors are on the front lines dealing with it. So are governors at their state levels, but increasingly they're getting less help from Washington from an administration with priorities leaving them out and the millions they serve, on their own and out of luck.

Stephen Lendman
In late 2009, former Merrill Lynch economist, now with the Canadian firm, Gluskin Sheff, said the following:

"The credit collapse and the accompanying deflation and overcapacity are going to drive the economy and financial markets in 2010. We have said this repeatedly that this recession is really a depression because the (post-WW II) recessions were merely small backward steps in an inventory cycle but in the context of expanding credit. Whereas now, we are in a prolonged period of credit contraction, especially as it relates to households and small businesses."

Summarizing his 2010 outlook, Rosenberg highlighted asset deflation and credit contraction imploding "the largest balance sheet in the world - the US household sector" in the amount of "an epic $12 trillion of lost net worth, a degree of trauma we have never seen before," even after the equity bear market rally and "tenuous" housing recovery likely to be short-lived and illusory with a true bottom many months away.

As a result, consumer spending will be severely impacted. "Frugality is the new fashion and likely to stay that way for years," highlighting a secular shift toward prudence and conservatism because households are traumatized, tapped out, and mindful of a bleak outlook. It shows in new consumer credit data, contracting $17.5 billion in November, the largest monthly amount since 1943 record keeping began.

Surprisingly, only people over age 55 have experienced job growth. All others have lost jobs, can't get them, and for youths the "unemployment crisis (is) of epic proportions." In addition, there's a record number of Americans out of work for longer than six months, in part because the "aging but not aged" aren't retiring, and those who did are coming back, of necessity, to make up for wealth lost.

Rosenberg stresses that for a sustainable recovery to begin, the ratio of household credit to personal disposable income must revert to the mean and reach an excess in the opposite direction. In the 1950s, it was 30%. Today its 125%, down from the late 2007 139% peak, with a long way to go taking years, and when it's over, another $7 trillion in household credit will have to be extinguished.

Until he retired in 1992, Robert Farrell was a highly respected Merrill Lynch market strategist and theorist, best remembered for his "10 Market Rules to Remember." Number one was that "markets tend to return to the mean over time." Number two was that "excesses in one direction will lead to an opposite excess in the other direction," and number nine was that "when all the experts and forecasts agree -- something else is going to happen."

According to a November National Association of Business Economics (NABE) survey, 48 top economists expect the US economy to grow 3.2% in 2010 even though the job outlook is bleak. Overall, they're so optimistic that only 15% want more stimulus, 40% said leave the present package in place, and the other 45% want the amount approved but not spent cut because it's not needed. At the same time, according to Investors Intelligence, market sentiment is at the highest level since December 2007, shortly after equities peaked, headed down, and world economies began to crator.

In his January 5 commentary, David Rosenberg notes that "Sentiment is wildly bullish....almost every survey is overwhelmingly constructive," yet reviewing 2009's market performance in the face of economic fundamentals "almost wants to make you believe in the tooth fairy." He explained that "small business (still faces) a credit quagmire," there's no housing recovery, and household spending is retrenching and hunkering down for the long haul.

The latest US nonfarm payroll report provides more confirmation. Although the headline number was a modestly anemic -85,000, Rosenberg called it "horrible" because its details showed consistent weakness. As a result, he estimates a more accurate "465,000" December decline, based on what's occurring at the small company level "where the trend in orders, output, sales and employment" has been dismal.

Importantly, economic sectors sensitive to the business cycle actually "cratered" in December, "which flies in the face of the overwhelming view that this recession has fully run its course." Also disturbing was that while "temp help" gained 47,000 jobs, its fifth straight increase, full-time employment "plunged" 647,000 last month, a clear sign that no one is hiring, especially small businesses that do most of it.

The reason headline U-3 unemployment held steady at 10% was because the labor force plunged by 661,000, the sharpest (discouraged worker) decline in nearly 15 years. The broader U-6 unemployment is 17.3%, and economist John Williams (shadowstats.com) calculates it more accurately at 21.9% by excluding manipulated changes for more valid figures. He estimates about 500,000 December job losses, not the sanitized U-3 number. He also says that a "major double-dip downturn should be obvious by mid-year."

Economist Jack Rasmus' Outlook

Z Magazine's January issue features a bleak outlook from economist Jack Rasmus in his article titled, "Economic Crisis in 2010 and Beyond." In reviewing 2009, he argued that no recovery is possible as long as job losses and home foreclosures continue.

Looking ahead in 2010, he says "The fundamental problems of financial and consumption fragility have not been resolved." Both are deteriorating, and banks are in trouble, large and small, with 500 or more of the latter ones to fail this year. In addition, credit contraction will continue. Banks aren't lending to business or consumers. "Commercial property markets' deflation will deepen," so more Fed rescues will be needed in the face of defaults.

Business bankruptcies will increase, and so will the numbers of unemployed and those losing their homes. And if interest rates rise, the junk and Treasury bond markets will crater.

As for consumers, consumption will continue weak. Disposable income will decline, so recovery in 2010 isn't likely. In addition, without more stimulus (he believes won't come), unemployment will rise to 27 million from the current 24 million level, U-6 unemployment will reach 19% by year end, (the true number will be close to 25%), and hiring that does occur will be mostly low-wage temporary and part time.

Home foreclosures will also exceed seven million, "on their way to a possible 10 million." After stabilizing, home prices will again fall, and by year end "Between 33 percent to 50 percent of homes will be under water," a grave situation with many owners walking away from them and glutting the market more with unsold properties.

Rasmus also sees no interest rate hike until after the November mid-term elections, no meaningful financial reform, a lower dollar, more defaults like Dubai-World, perhaps in troubled economies in Latvia, Ukraine, Greece and Italy, and US states in greater trouble than today because of falling revenues, rising deficits, little in the way of relief, and forced budget cuts and layoffs exacerbating a dire situation. In other words, Rasmus, like Rosenberg, sees hard times ahead, in contrast to the consensus rosy outlook. More...

Now Goldman Wants Your Home and Could Care Less if You're Homeless

Greg Gordon|McClatchy
When California wildfires ruined their jewelry business, Tony Becker and his wife fell months behind on their mortgage payments and experienced firsthand the perils of subprime mortgages.

The couple wound up in a desperate, six-year fight to keep their modest, 1,500-square-foot San Jose home, a struggle that pushed them into bankruptcy.

The lender with whom they sparred, however, wasn't the one that had written their loans. It was an obscure subsidiary of Wall Street colossus Goldman Sachs Group.

Goldman spent years buying hundreds of thousands of subprime mortgages, many of them from some of the more unsavory lenders in the business, and packaging them into high-yield bonds. Now that the bottom has fallen out of that market, Goldman finds itself in a different role: as the big banker that takes homes away from folks such as the Beckers.

The couple alleges that Goldman declined for three years to confirm their suspicions that it had bought their mortgages from a subprime lender, even after they wrote to Goldman's then-Chief Executive Henry Paulson — later U.S. Treasury secretary — in 2003.

Unable to identify a lender, the couple could neither capitalize on a mortgage hardship provision that would allow them to defer some payments, nor on a state law enabling them to offset their debt against separate, investment-related claims against Goldman.

In July, the Beckers won a David-and-Goliath struggle when Goldman subsidiary MTGLQ Investors dropped its bid to seize their house. By then, the college-educated couple had been reduced to shopping for canned goods at flea markets and selling used ceramic glass.

Theirs is an infrequent happy ending among the hundreds of cases in which subsidiaries of Goldman, better known for sending top officers such as Paulson to serve in top Washington posts, have sought to contain bondholder losses by foreclosing on properties and evicting delinquent borrowers.

Goldman spokesman Michael DuVally declined to comment on individual cases or on the firm's new role in bankruptcy courts.

Joining other Wall Street firms that bought millions of subprime mortgages, Goldman companies have gone to courts from California to Florida seeking approval to foreclose on the homes of middle- and lower-income Americans who couldn't keep up with their loans' soaring monthly payments.

Some borrowers were speculators or homebuyers who exaggerated their incomes on loan applications, thinking they'd always have an escape hatch because housing prices would keep rising. Others, however, were victims of fast-talking mortgage brokers who didn't explain that the loans' interest rates could rise to as high as 15 percent. Many borrowers who defaulted on their mortgages may never qualify for a home loan again.

In court encounters, Goldman and other Wall Street firms have faced the impact of their own wheeling and dealing. Many of the families being put on the street never would've gotten their big mortgages if investment banks hadn't provided a seemingly insatiable secondary market for millions of loans to marginally qualified buyers.

Subprime borrowers were supposed to provide a safe income stream for investors who bought mostly high-grade, triple-A-rated bonds from Goldman and bigger subprime players, such as now-defunct Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch.

Now, millions of these borrowers have defaulted on mortgage payments, contributing to a historic slump in home prices and depressing the bonds' value. Half the homes in some California neighborhoods have been subject to foreclosures or short sales, in which a home is sold for less than the mortgage balance, and either the seller or the lender takes a loss.

Earlier this year in Los Angeles, the Wall Street giant took possession of the home of Gladys Aguirre, a housecleaner who's married to a construction worker. Together, the couple listed monthly earnings of $7,480, including $3,480 from a job she'd held for two months.

Aguirre originally took a $444,000 subprime mortgage on Sept. 1, 2005, from Argent Mortgage Co., a subsidiary of big subprime lender Ameriquest Mortgage Co., which shut down in 2007. The adjustable interest rate sent her monthly payments zooming to $3,800 from $2,479, and Aguirre couldn't keep pace on that loan or a $119,000 second mortgage. She filed for bankruptcy protection.

Aguirre's Los Angeles lawyer, Eber Bayona, declined to discuss her case, but said that subprime loans amounted to "setting up the person for failure" because interest rate adjustments hit borrowers with "shock payments."

For example, he said, loan agents promised applicants that they could buy a $600,000 house for payments of $1,200 a month, and the buyers "never read the fine print ... (and) didn't know their interest would increase and that eventually they would lose their house and their money."

In San Fernando, Calif., Dina Alfero-Pacheo qualified for two mortgages totaling nearly $500,000, with monthly payments starting at $2,004. By 2007, the payments had grown to $3,761. In a bankruptcy filing early this year, Alfero-Pacheo said she was a bartender earning $3,800 a month. Goldman bought her first mortgage from Argent and recently got title to the house, which had sunk in value to $280,000 from more than $500,000.

In Orlando, Fla., Adela Mendez seems to be someone who would've known the risks when she took a $164,000 mortgage from Argent on her home in 2005 and a $75,000 second mortgage a year later. In a bankruptcy filing this year, she listed her occupation as a loan specialist for Washington Mutual, a leading subprime lender that collapsed last year.

Not only did Mendez fall 11 months behind on her mortgage payments, but her home's value also plummeted to $100,000. Goldman Sachs Mortgage, which bought the Argent loan, took the house — and at least a 50 percent loss.

Alfero-Pacheo and Mendez, whose cases are detailed in court records, couldn't be reached to comment.

The Beckers charged that in their case, Goldman engaged in years of obfuscation and resistance.

"In bankruptcy court, they tried to portray us as incompetent or deadbeats,'' said Celia Fabos-Becker, blinking back tears as she sat with her husband in their living room, with boxes of mortgage-related documents surrounding them.

The couple thought they'd made a safe bet in 2000 when they opened a retail jewelry business in two San Diego County areas populated mainly by military personnel.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, however, brought big military call-ups, sapping their market. After a wildfire ravaged much of the area in 2002, the Beckers refinanced their house to generate some $70,000 in cash to prop up their two stores. They wound up with an adjustable-rate, subprime loan from WMC Mortgage Corp., an arm of General Electric's GE Money unit, and a 10.75 percent second mortgage with the same lender.

A second wildfire in 2003 all but killed their business and left the couple reeling financially as interest-rate adjustments pushed the mortgage payments higher.

"We'd gotten to the point where I was cutting my own hair. I was cutting his on occasion," Fabos-Becker said.

"And trolling the Goodwills," Tony Becker said.

Tony Becker, an engineer, took short-term contract jobs amid the technology bust. Celia Fabos-Becker, meanwhile, found a provision in the mortgages that allowed the borrower to push payments to the end of the loan term in the event of a disaster such as the two fires.

When she wrote to Paulson, however, lawyers for Goldman denied that it owned the Beckers' mortgages. So did Germany's Deutsche Bank, a trustee that was holding thousands of subprime mortgages Goldman had converted to bonds.

To stall foreclosure, the Beckers wound up negotiating "forbearance agreements" with Ocwen Loan Servicing, a Florida company, that required the couple to pay several thousand dollars under the threat that their house would be auctioned off in a week or a month, Fabos-Becker said. Their monthly payments rose to nearly $3,300 from $2,650.

The couple already had taken Goldman and Morgan Stanley, another Wall Street firm, to arbitration over their $325,000 in stock market losses, accusing the investment banks of misleading investors about public offerings.

On the same day in June 2006, Goldman sued to end the arbitration, and Ocwen filed papers seeking to foreclose on the Beckers' home.

In desperation, the couple filed for bankruptcy protection. With no money to hire an attorney, they acted as their own lawyers.

As the months dragged on, Fabos-Becker finally found a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission confirming that Goldman had bought the mortgages. Then, when a lawyer for MTGLQ showed up at a June 2007 court hearing on the stock battle, U.S. District Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California demanded to know the firm's relationship to Goldman, telling the attorney that he hates "spin."

The lawyer acknowledged that MTGLQ was a Goldman affiliate.

That was an understatement. MTGLQ, a limited partnership, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Goldman that's housed at the company's headquarters at 85 Broad Street in New York, public records show.

In July, after U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Roger Efremsky of the Northern District of California threatened to impose "significant sanctions" if the firm failed to complete a promised settlement with the Beckers, Goldman dropped its claims for $626,000, far more than the couple's original $356,000 in mortgages and $70,000 in missed payments. The firm gave the Beckers a new, 30-year mortgage at 5 percent interest.

That lowered their monthly payment to $1,900, less than half the maximum $4,000 a month their subprime loans could've demanded.

Fabos-Becker, 60, said that the trauma has left her hair "a lot grayer." Much of the stress would have been alleviated, she said, if a law required lenders to identify themselves, especially to borrowers facing hardships.

"I take solace," Tony Becker said, "in knowing that I was up against the worst possible opponent — the biggest, strongest investment bank in the world."

FDIC Fund Is Now Negative

ZeroHedge

In an unprecedented disclosure, the FDIC has highlighted that it expects the DIF reserve ratio to be negative as of September 30. As there are a whopping 48 hours before that deadline, one can safely assume that the DIF is now well into negative territory: as of today depositors have no insurance courtesy of a banking system that has leeched out all the capital of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Let's pray there is no run on the bank soon.

Pursuant to these requirements, staff estimates that both the Fund balance and the reserve ratio as of September 30, 2009, will be negative. This reflects, in part, an increase in provisioning for anticipated failures. In contrast, cash and marketable securities available to resolve failed institutions remain positive.

Additionally, the FDIC has now raised its expectation for bank failure costs from $70 billion $100 billion. Feel free to expect this number to continue growing.

Staff has also projected the Fund balance and reserve ratio for each quarter over the next several years using the most recently available information on expected failures and loss rates and statistical analyses of trends in CAMELS downgrades, failure rates and loss rates. Staff projects that, over the period 2009 through 2013, the Fund could incur approximately $100 billion in failure costs. Staff projects that most of these costs will occur in 2009 and 2010. Approximately $25 billion of the $100 billion amount has already been incurred in failure costs so far in 2009. Staff projects that most of these costs will occur in 2009 and 2010.

First Mary Schapiro has failed at her task of "regulating" anything on Wall Street, and now Sheila Bair presides over a newly insolvent institution. Chalk one up to Washington's success at "containing" the crisis. Zero Hedge wishes Ms. Bair all the luck in the world in returning the DIF to its statutory minimum requirement of 1.15% of all insured deposits (a shortfall of a mere hundred billion or so). Maybe she can convert the FDIC to a REIT and have Merrill Lynch do a concurrent IPO and follow-on offering (while Goldman raises it to a Conviction Buy which incorporates the firm's expectations for 10% GDP growth in 2010 coupled with projections for $1,000 per barrel of crude)?

FDIC's full memorandum outlining its failure can be found here.