Why Amazon Is on a Warehouse Building Spree

For a company whose showrooms are all online, Amazon.com (AMZN) spends a staggering amount on bricks and mortar. The e-commerce giant has invested roughly $13.9 billion since 2010 to build 50 new warehouses, more than it had cumulatively spent on storage facilities since its 1994 founding, bringing the total to 89 at the end of 2012.

(It’s announced five more in the U.S. this year.) Amazon aims to be able to deliver most items the day they’re ordered, so it can keep rivals such as EBay (EBAY) and Wal-Mart Stores (WMT) from peeling off customers. EBay offers same-day delivery in some cities, and Wal-Mart is moving more sales online.

“What Wal-Mart and EBay are working on is, can they be faster than Amazon?” says Wells Fargo (WFC) analyst Matt Nemer. “It might not be the highest-margin sale in the world, but they can potentially get something to you in an hour.”

Amazon introduced its expedited-shipping program, Prime, in 2005. Prime offers two-day service for $79 a year, plus $3.99 or more per order for same-day or one-day delivery; non-Prime Amazon customers pay $8.99 and up for same-day delivery. But Amazon can’t guarantee top speed for most items or locations. Read more >>

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 >>

Re-Default: Up To 46% Of Bailed Out Homeowners Can’t Pay Their Mortgage (Again)

The Treasury Department and managers of the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) are scrambling to figure out why homeowners who used the government’s bailout mechanism to save their homes are re-defaulting on their payments.

The program, originally designed to assist homeowners who were facing foreclosure following the 2007 sub-prime crisis, has reportedly saved 1.2 million people from losing their homes, but a report from the Special Inspector General who oversees the government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) says that the loan modifications that were supposed to get American families back on their feet aren’t working as well as expected.


If your mortgage payment is $1500 monthly, and you just lost your job and are collecting $800 in unemployment insurance monthly, then it is impossible for you to make good on your loan. Even if the government helps to reduce your mortgage payment to $850 monthly and provides you with emergency funds to cover all of your other expenses like food, health insurance and utilities, you still can’t service your debt.

It’s that simple. Read more >>

Five Lies About the American Economy

The Obama team’s favorite slices of fiscal baloney
Tim Cavanaugh from the April 2010 issue

The ongoing recession has raised a troubling question for otherwise resurgent Keynesian economists: How can the American economy keep getting worse under the intensive care of an interventionist economic team almost universally praised for its brilliance? The answer may be that the Obama administration is dealing with a fictional economy, one that bears little resemblance to the economy the rest of us inhabit. And when the difference between fact and fiction becomes too apparent, they just make stuff up. Herewith, five big lies the administration loves to tell and the mainstream media (with some notable exceptions) love to repeat:

1. Bold government action staved off a Depression, saving or creating 1.5 million jobs.

“Just remember,” Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said on November 1, 2009, “a year ago today, last year, you had markets around the world come to a stop. Economic activity just stopped, came to a standstill, like flipping a switch.”

Geithner implies that the American business climate improved substantially in the first year of the Obama administration. In fact, nearly every indicator, from employment to freight transport to rents to retail sales to real estate, has headed steadily south. In some cases, such as unemployment, the numbers have been far worse than the Obama economic team’s worst-case projections. In others, such as real estate, the weakness of the market is masked by expensive government support, including but not limited to the unkillable First-Time Homebuyer Credit, an assault on loan underwriting standards (see Lie No. 2) by the Federal Housing Authority and the government-run mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the completely opaque $75 billion Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP).

The $787 billion in stimulus spending authorized by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 is now best known for its inflated and unsupportable job creation numbers. At press time, Council of Economic Advisers Chairwoman Christina D. Romer (who, confusingly, made her academic reputation proving that fiscal stimulus did not help the U.S. economy during the Great Depression and World War II) was giving the stimulus credit for 1.5 million American jobs in 2009. All efforts at checking her claims, however, have turned up very different numbers. The Associated Press, the Boston Globe, the L.A. Weekly, and local papers around the country have failed to find actual jobs to match up with those being reported at Recovery.gov. The administration’s only concession to this reality has been rhetorical: After claiming that hundreds of thousands of jobs had been “created” early in 2009, the Council of Economic Advisers turned to the phrase “saved or created” by mid-year. In December the Obama administration again changed its measure to jobs “funded” by the stimulus.

Of all the government interventions since the start of the real estate decline, only one—the rescue effort for too-big-to-fail Wall Street players, which predates Obama—has had a measurable effect. The Troubled Asset Relief Program, the Federal Reserve’s promiscuous use of discount windows and dollar-destroying low interest rates, and the Treasury Department’s open wallet for incompetent financial institutions have cumulatively ensured the survival of the biggest, failiest financial institutions, including such devourers of the commonweal as Citigroup, which managed to lose $7.6 billion in the fourth quarter of 2009 despite an infusion of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars over the year.

2. “No one wants banks making the kinds of risky loans that got us into this situation in the first place.”

President Obama made this claim following a December meeting with big bank officials, then contradicted himself by urging bankers to take “third and fourth” looks at rejected business loan applications. But the administration has been even more enthusiastic about encouraging another type of credit: the precise risky loans that got us into this situation in the first place.

Mortgage lending standards have declined, and the amount of risky debt taxpayers are underwriting has rapidly increased, under Obama’s guidance. A 2009 audit found that the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) was failing to vet lenders, ignoring missing borrower documentation, and declining to consider negative information prior to guaranteeing loans. More important, the FHA still guarantees mortgages with a minimum down payment of only 3.5 percent, despite abundant evidence that a borrower with low equity is more likely to default than any other type of borrower. (See Lie No. 3.) Defaults on government-approved loans continue to rise, as do redefaults on mortgages refinanced under HAMP.

Undaunted, the administration wants to give unpromising borrowers greater access to debt. At press time, the Treasury Department was considering allowing borrowers to get HAMP modifications by using only pay stubs, rather than tax records, to prove their financial status.

3. The economic crisis is a “subprime crisis.”

“We believe the effect of the troubles in the subprime sector on the broader housing market will be limited,” Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said in May 2007, “and we do not expect significant spillovers from the subprime market to the rest of the economy or to the financial system.”

To understand how Bernanke could be so wrong on something so important (see Lie No. 4), note that the real estate bust was not a problem with self-identified “subprime” loans (mortgages that are made to borrowers with bad credit and not backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac). In fact, the rapid expansion in subprime lending was a late phenomenon that occurred in the last 18 months of a decade-long real estate bubble. Subprime defaults are actually slightly below their worst-ever historic records, and the explosion of subprime defaults that began in 2005 was accompanied or slightly preceded by a statistically equal explosion in prime defaults.

How is this possible? The period going back to the mid-1990s has seen a massive increase in mortgages that look prime (and are backed by Fannie and Freddie) but in fact feature dangerously low down payments, tricky interest-only and adjustable rate mechanisms, and other inadvisable debt schemes. Late in 2008, Fannie Mae admitted in a footnote that its portfolio had for years been stuffed with alt-A, negative amortization loans, and other junk debt.

Statistically speaking, the only reliable gauge of default probability is how much equity the borrower has as a share of debt. Fannie, Freddie, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Federal Housing Administration, and all other federal real estate concerns have been working since the 1990s to increase the loan-to-value ratio of mortgages. They have succeeded: Americans now own a smaller percentage of their homes than at any other time in history.

4. Ben Bernanke is a heroic leader.

“The man next to me, Ben Bernanke, has led the Fed through one of the worst financial crises that this nation and the world has ever faced,” Obama said when nominating Bernanke for a second term as Fed chairman. “As an expert on the causes of the Great Depression, I’m sure Ben never imagined that he would be part of a team responsible for preventing another. But because of his background, his temperament, his courage, and his creativity, that’s exactly what he has helped to achieve.”

Seconding that emotion, Time anointed Bernanke its 2009 Person of the Year, swooning over the Fed chairman’s cranial power, his “tired eyes,” and such bold action as lowering interest rates to zero and paying banks to keep deposits in the Fed’s vaults—none of which has translated into noticeable economic health during the last two years. (See Lie No. 5.) “He wishes Americans understood that he helped save the irresponsible giants of Wall Street only to protect ordinary folks on Main Street,” Time wrote.

Alas, no sooner had the year turned than Bernanke’s reality distortion field began to fail. His reappointment, though inevitable, turned out to be a bigger challenge than expected, with a left-right Senate coalition rising up to make hay out of Bernanke’s abundantly documented record of wrong bets and absurd predictions. Had Bernanke limited himself to defending fictions about his own career, he might have stayed out of trouble. Yet he continues to maintain, in one of many examples, that former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan’s artificially low interest rates in the early part of Decade Zero did not contribute to the real estate bubble. The hapless banking chief’s performance may have been summed up best by the financial blogger Mish Shedlock: “Bernanke did not get a single thing right.”

5. The worst is behind us.

“Here is what I know,” Larry Summers, Obama’s top economic adviser, told ABC in December. “We were talking about Depression; we were talking about the financial system collapsing. Today, everybody agrees that the recession is over, and the question is what the pace of the expansion is going to be.”

Shortly after Summers made that comment, third-quarter GDP numbers were revised downward substantially. (They have traveled from 3.5 percent to 2.8 percent to 2.2 percent so far.) Former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker told Der Spiegel in December 2009, “You know, people get very technical about these things. We had a quarter of increased growth, but I don’t think we are out of the woods.” In January regional unemployment rates, which had shown some signs of improvement, began moving up again. The unwinding of consumer and homeowner credit continues. Christmas spending turned out to be only slightly higher (around 1 percent, according to MasterCard’s Spending-Pulse unit) in 2009 than in 2008—when, according to Summers and others, the United States was flirting with depression and financial collapse. The only good news: a return to GDP growth in the second half of 2009, based largely on inventory investment and nonresidential fixed investment, not a return to demand or underlying growth.

But the truly dire evidence is in real estate, the market that drove both the bubble and the bust. A record 7.6 percent of U.S. homeowners are at least 30 days late on payments, according to Equifax, and delinquencies continue to rise at an increasing pace. About 1.2 million loans out there are in limbo: The borrower is in serious default, but the bank has not started the foreclosure process. Another 1.5 million are in the early stages of the foreclosure process, but the banks haven’t yet taken possession of the homes. By a conservative estimate, there may be 3 million to 4 million foreclosed homes coming onto the market in the next few years. This is the inevitable, and salubrious, reaction to many years of real estate inflation, and it will continue to happen no matter how hard the government pretends it can control economic outcomes. See Lie No. 1.

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

From a Vanity Fair Blip:
Michael Burry always saw the world differently—due, he believed, to the childhood loss of one eye. So when the 32-year-old investor spotted the huge bubble in the subprime-mortgage bond market, in 2004, then created a way to bet against it, he wasn’t surprised that no one understood what he was doing. In an excerpt from his new book, The Big Short, the author charts Burry’s oddball maneuvers, his almost comical dealings with Goldman Sachs and other banks as the market collapsed, and the true reason for his visionary obsession. Read an excerpt here.

This interesting little tidbit from Scion Capital's website:

Thank you for visiting. Dr. Michael Burry has liquidated Scion Capital, LLC and is currently focusing on his private investments. Dr. Burry is not accepting outside investors. If you have an interest, Dr. Burry has made Scion Capital's earliest investor reports available.

____________________________________________

Further, Dr. Burry feels the financial crises originating in the United States and elsewhere were eminently predictable and preventable. The following timeline regarding developments at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is illustrative of why the crises were not prevented.

July 2003 (Scion Capital Quarterly Report to Investors): "Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae warrant special comment. Interestingly, Fannie Mae, when it was a much less significant force, was declared insolvent on a mark-to-market basis by the U.S. General Accounting Office back in 1981. As well, each of the two predecessors to the just- fired CEO of Freddie Mac left Freddie to run S&L’s that they subsequently ran into the ground during the 1980s. Yet the market reserved a muted reaction for Freddie Mac firing its top three executives last month over an accounting scandal and, with a straight face, blaming the mess on a lack of accounting expertise within the company.

After hearing from Fannie, Freddie and representatives of the President, U.S. Rep. Richard Baker, a longtime and vehement critic of these two companies, has elected to withhold any knockout punch. Fannie Mae’s CEO in particular lacked subtlety. Citing the company’s primary importance to the national housing market and relying on Fannie’s formidable political connections, he publicly dared the U.S. Congress to act. Not so much as one peep of indignation was heard in response. To the extent the national housing market is untouchable, we have evidence not of strength but of fragility."

October 2004 (Scion Capital Quarterly Report to Investors): "I recently watched Mr. Franklin Raines, CEO and Chairman of Fannie Mae, defend himself before a House subcommittee against allegations of fraudulent financial reporting brought by its regulator, OFHEO. I have already read OFHEO’s interim report on the matter, and you know from prior letters that I have had a dim view of Fannie Mae and its CEO for some time. My impression: Fannie Mae is unregulated, and they are very likely committing fraud.

An entity is not being regulated if it takes subpoenas and threats from the Department of Justice in order to obtain management’s cooperation in a regulatory review. Too, an entity is not being regulated if a Congressional investigation cannot be performed due to wholly inadequate knowledge of the business at issue on the part of the investigators. Watching our representatives flail at questioning Mr. Raines was rather shocking. They were in no manner capable of getting past the headline issues, and even those were covered only in superficial fashion. Remarkably, these particular representatives were members of the House subcommittee specifically charged with regulating the GSEs.

Then there are Fannie’s friends, with whom Mr. Raines apparently spends most of his days. Rep. Artur Davis suggested OFHEO was putting Fannie in more danger with the release of the report. Rep. Barney Frank, the House Financial Services subcommittee’s lead Democrat, went so far as to charge that OFHEO was "irresponsible." Yet, how can a regulator be irresponsible simply by letting the public know it suspects foul play on the part of the regulated?"

On the subject of fraud, OFHEO’s report makes clear Fannie’s intent to deceive. The report details not gray areas of accounting, but rather specific acts to manipulate earnings. Per the testimony of Armando Falcon, Jr., head of OFHEO, “The accounting violations cannot be dismissed as mere differences of interpretation in accounting rules. Fannie Mae understood the rules and simply chose not to follow them.” Time and again, the ethics of men and women have proven no match for a lucrative incentive structure.”

November 11, 2004 (The Washington Post): A senior House Democrat said yesterday that he will not support a budget increase for the federal regulator of Fannie Mae until questions raised in a confidential report have been addressed. Rep. Barney Frank (Mass.), senior Democrat on the committee overseeing Fannie and its regulator, said in a letter to colleagues that an inspector general's report on how the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight examined the mortgage funding company's accounting "raises very serious issues which must be thoroughly discussed and addressed." Frank said in an interview that the issues involve "the role that OFHEO has played." The report "has major public policy implications," but he could not be more specific because the report has not been made public, he said. OFHEO has said recently that budget restrictions threaten to hamper its continuing investigation of Fannie Mae's accounting...

2006 (The Washington Post): “Fannie Mae engaged in "extensive financial fraud" over six years by doctoring earnings so executives could collect hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses, federal officials said yesterday in a report that portrayed a company determined to play by its own rules. Regulators at the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, in announcing a settlement with Fannie Mae that includes $400 million in penalties, provided the most detailed picture yet of what went wrong at the congressionally chartered firm.”

2009 (Reuters): "The Obama administration on December 24 pledged to backstop all future losses for the mortgage giants, without limit, through the end of 2012. The Christmas eve announcement also eased earlier requirements for Fannie and Freddie to reduce the size of their portfolios. The 2010 limits on their portfolios, in fact, would allow their investment holdings to grow.”

2010 (Associated Press): “Freddie Mac, which has lost a total of almost $80 billion since the housing crisis started in 2007, is bracing for more pain. The McLean, Va.-based company said a record 4 percent of its borrowers are at least three months behind on their payments and facingforeclosure.Its chief executive, Charles Haldeman, warned Wednesday of a "potential large wave of foreclosures" still to come. This is a major problem for the federal government, which seized control of Freddie and Fannie in September 2008. The two companies have already siphoned $111 billion from the government to stay afloat. That number is expected to hit $188 billion by fall 2011.And while Freddie Mac didn't ask for any more bailout money last quarter, the company said it will likely need more financial aid and might never repay it.”

The eurozone will break-up whether Greece is bailed out or not

Image via Wikipedia

Greek saga won't kill the euro but the end may begin here

Liam Halligan
Greece accounts for only 3pc of the 16 member states' combined GDP, they say, and has lower debts than some of the banks bailed-out during sub-prime. A loan of €20bn (£17.5bn) would do the trick, we're told. That's less than the British government injected into either Lloyds or the Royal Bank of Scotland.

Such analysis sounds vaguely plausible. But its naïve and politically dishonest. Then again, the single currency was built on political dishonesty. That's because, at the heart of the eurozone project there was always a fundamental contradiction – one that the architects of monetary union never dared to address. Now its being highlighted for them, whether they like it or not.

While the European Central Bank controls eurozone interest rates and the money supply, the size of each country's fiscal deficit results from the spending and taxation decisions of its own sovereign government.

How can you enforce collective fiscal discipline in a currency union of individual sovereign states, each answerable to their own electorate? The truthful answer is you can't – not unless you subjugate the autonomy of democratically-elected politicians and, by proxy, their voters.

Voters don't like that. Neither do politicians. Faced with a choice between seriously annoying their own voters and seriously annoying the ECB, the most ardently "pro-European" lawmakers, even those with years of Brussels trough-nuzzling under their belt, will always side with their own. That's why the eurozone will ultimately break-up – whether Greece is bailed out or not.

The eurocrats blame "speculators" for the single currency's woes. That's a bit like sailors blaming the sea. The eurozone is ultimately doomed because, in the end, economic logic wins and the will of each country's electorate bursts through. This current Greek saga won't end the eurozone – but future historians will identify it, perhaps, as the beginning of the end.

Many have said it's hardly surprising that Greece e_SEnD with its history of financial profligacy and capital flight e_SEnD has emerged as the eurozone's Achilles heel. A more germane observation is that, while fiscally wayward, Greece is also the birthplace of democracy. If the Greek population wants to get upset, throw out its elected politicians and reject austerity, it must be allowed to do so. I think they'd be mad, but it must be their choice.

If Berlin and Brussels try to impose their own view on Greece and the "cuts" come from outside, the situation will become absolutely incendiary. Protests will turn into fully-blown riots. Greece will endure very serious social unrest. Deep-seated rivalries and suspicions between countries will be re-ignited. And for what?

Greece is running a budget deficit of 12.7pc of GDP. The real number could be 15pc or more as Greek politicians have lied for years about the extent of their country's liabilities. They're not the first European leaders to do so and they won't be the last. But Greece was, almost uniquely, assisted in its fiscal cover-up by Brussels – with the usual "convergence criteria" being bent to allow Greek euro entry.

As recently as September 2008, the euro seemed to be going well, despite the massive variation between member states. The five-year Greek credit default swap spread was less than 50 basis points. In other words, buying insurance against Greece reneging on its sovereign debt cost only slightly more than insuring German government bonds. Those, such as this columnist, who continued to warn that the eurozone was "dangerous and inherently unstable" were dismissed as cranks, xenophobes or worse.

Then sub-prime hit in earnest. Insuring against Greek default suddenly became a lot more expensive, the CDS spread rising six-fold in eight weeks. The same risk measure is now around 400 basis points, the cost of insuring against Greek default no less than 20 times higher than it was in January 2008. Default risks are growing in Portugal and Spain too, the eurozone's fourth biggest economy.

The problem is that default dangers in Greece – where €20bn of debt falls due in April and May – are making creditors think twice about lending to other cash-strapped governments. Even if Greece avoids default, this latest crisis means governments everywhere will have to pay more for their finance, which in turn will push up borrowing costs for everyone – right across the eurozone and beyond, including in the UK. This is so-called "contagion".

The Greek government has been desperately trying to convince the rest of the world – the Germans in particular – that it will keep its promise to reduce the deficit in its still-shrinking economy to 8.7pc of GDP next year and less than 3pc by 2012. Yet this would amount to the most severe fiscal contraction in the history of modern Europe. It simply won't happen.

The reality is that Greece has two choices – both disastrous for the eurozone. One is to default, leave the euro and re-establish the drachma at a rate low enough to stimulate exports and growth. To write this is heresy. But with general strikes now in the offing, and the Greek public-sector unions resurgent, such a scenario is possible.

For years, the ECB has set rates low to suit France and Germany. This has made life difficult, causing dangerous debt bubbles, in smaller and more inflation-prone eurozone members. Were Greece to take the exit route, the governments of several other single currency members would come under intense pressure to do the same. The eurozone's vital cohesion would be seriously undermined. Its ultimate break-up - or, at least shrinkage to a Franco-German rump - would only be a matter of time.

The other, more likely, option is that Greece accepts a German-led bail-out and "muddles through". But even that would spark an eventual eurozone split. On extending assistance, Berlin and Brussels would talk tough and Greece would promise to behave. Anything less wouldn't be tolerated by German voters. After the horrors of inter-war hyperinflation, Germany has spent more than 50 years building policy credibility. Backing a Greek bail-out would be a massive step – the first time in decades Germany has departed from its fiscal and monetary hard line.

Yet the German government will do it. Refusing to bail-out Greece would risk being labelled "bad Europeans" – something anathema to Germany's post-war elite. Berlin also has a massive financial stake in the euro's status as the world's second most-used reserve currency.

Although Greece will be presented as a one-off e_SEnD a "very exceptional" case e_SEnD once that line has been crossed there is no going back. Other eurozone countries will want a bail-out. Why should Portuguese, Estonian or Spanish workers endure austerity and unemployment, while those in Greece were spared? Why them and not us? If big banks can compete for bail-outs, walking the line of "moral hazard", political leaders will do so too. A Greek rescue by the Germans would spark repeated bail-outs.

In the end, voters in the big eurozone economies, faced with their own fiscal problems will say enough is enough. Europe's monetary union will collapse, just like every other currency union in the history of man. The exception is America – yet the US, as the eurocrats hate to acknowledge, had been through a century and a half of political union before the Federal Reserve was founded in 1913.

That's the key difference. America is a political union, with a system of explicit inter-regional fiscal transfers, and the eurozone isn't. That's why the single currency will ultimately split and be exposed as what it is – a triumph of European hubris and political vanity over unavoidable economic logic.

* Liam Halligan is chief economist at Prosperity Capital Management

Over the Christmas holiday a nasty thing happened

Matt Taibbi
Fannie, Freddie, and the New Red and Blue

It has become conventional wisdom, perhaps even cliche, to pin the origins of the credit crisis on the big banks or, AIG or even the practice of financial modeling. Certainly, these actors have received the most play in the media, and have now endured the focus of populist ire for more than a year. We now think that the analysis leading commentators to focus blame on these entities is fatally flawed.

via Origins of an American Kleptocracy | zero hedge.

Over the Christmas holiday a nasty thing happened: Tim Geithner’s Treasury Department decided to lift the cap on aid to the Government-Sponsored Entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, apparently in response to Obama administration fears that the two agencies would become insolvent. The cap was raised from $200 billion on each and government backstopping of the mortgage market will apparently now extend into infinity for at least three years, through 2012.

The move has already inspired a mini-firestorm, with several outlets delving deeply into the recent history of the GSEs and uncovering some disturbing new facts. Chief among those were an analysis of the GSEs by a former chief credit officer of Fannie named Edward Pinto, who found that Fannie and Freddie routinely mismarked subprime or Alt-A (a sort of purgatory class of nonprime risky mortgage, resting between subprime and prime) mortgages as prime. The Wall Street Journal explains:

In general, a subprime mortgage refers to the credit of the borrower. A FICO score of less than 660 is the dividing line between prime and subprime, but Fannie and Freddie were reporting these mortgages as prime, according to Mr. Pinto. Fannie has admitted this in a third-quarter 10-Q report in 2008.

This is a damning fact and if true certainly supports the Journal claim that the GSE actions were a “principal cause of the financial crisis.” But having established this, the Journal then goes in this direction:

Market observers, rating agencies and investors were unaware of the number of subprime and Alt-A mortgages infecting the financial system in late 2006 and early 2007. Of the 26 million subprime and Alt-A loans outstanding in 2008, 10 million were held or guaranteed by Fannie and Freddie, 5.2 million by other government agencies, and 1.4 million were on the books of the four largest U.S. banks.

Sometimes I’m amazed at the speed with which highly provocative information like this GSE business can be converted into distracting propaganda in this country. In the right hands Pinto’s analysis of the GSEs — just like the revelations in the past few years about practices at AIG, Moody’s, Countrywide, Goldman Sachs, the Fed, and, hell, let’s add the offices of Senator Chris Dodd — would have been a starting point for a deeper investigation into a financial system that is clearly a complex and intimate symbiosis of state and private corruption.

For what we’ve learned in the last few years as one scandal after another spilled onto the front pages is that the bubble economies of the last two decades were not merely monstrous Ponzi schemes that destroyed trillions in wealth while making a small handful of people rich. They were also a profound expression of the fundamentally criminal nature of our political system, in which state power/largess and the private pursuit of (mostly short-term) profit were brilliantly fused in a kind of ongoing theft scheme that sought to instant-cannibalize all the wealth America had stored up during its postwar glory, in the process keeping politicians in office and bankers in beach homes while continually moving the increasingly inevitable disaster to the future.

That is a terrible story and it is also sort of a taboo story, since we don’t really have a system of media now that is willing or even able to digest that dark and complicated truth. Instead, our media — which has always been at best an inadvertent accomplice to these messes — is basically set up to take every revelation about the underlying truth and split it down the middle, feeding half to one side of the political spectrum and one half to the other, where the actual point is then burned up in the useless smoke of a blame game.

The essentially complicit nature of the two ruling political parties was in this way covered up for decades, as the crimes of the Democrats were greedily consumed as entertainment by the Limbaugh crowd while the crimes of the Bushies became hot-selling t-shirts and bumper stickers for the Air America listenership. The abiding mutual hatred the red/blue groups shared consistently prevented any kind of collective realization about the structure of the overall scheme.

What worries me is that we’re now reverting to the same old pattern with the financial crisis story. We’re starting to see fault lines develop, where one side blames the government while another side blames Wall Street for the messes of the last two decades. The side blaming the government tends to belong to the free-marketeer class and divines in safety-net purveyors like the GSEs and in the Fed’s money-printing fundamental corruptions of the capitalist ideal, while the side blaming the bankers tends to belong to the left-liberal tradition that focuses on greed and seeming absence of community conscience among the CEO class as primary corruptors of the social contract.

In the former view the government is to blame for punting on its oversight responsibilities and for corrupting the financial bloodstream with market-altering guarantees, while in the latter view the bankers are at fault for lobbying the politicians to make exactly the same moves. The antigovernment folks like to focus on the irresponsible (and typically low-income or minority) home-borrower and their political allies in Washington as chief villains, while the anti-banker crowd looks at the massive personal profits and outsized influence of the executive class and waves the Cui bono? stick in that direction.

Both sides are right and both sides are wrong. I know that sounds like pox-on-both-their-houses pundit sophistry. But the point is that if you focus on one side and not the other, you miss the entire point. That’s why I get freaked out when I see an important story like this GSE thing come out, and have it be immediately accompanied by arguments that “market observers, rating agencies and investors were unaware of the number of subprime and Alt-A mortgages infecting the financial system,” as though the irresponsibility of the government agency precluded similar (and, I might add, intimately related) abuses on the private side.

I mean, really — market observers were unaware of the number of subprime mortgages infecting the system? Are we to understand that nobody caught on when outstanding mortgage debt grew by $3.7 trillion between 2003 and 2005, nearly equaling the entire value of all American real estate in the year 1990? They didn’t notice when subprime mortgages went from 3% of all mortgage lending in 1997 to 20% of the market in 2003? They didn’t notice when the volume of Alt-A loans and home equity loans surged through the early part of last decade?

Now I know that that’s not what Peter Wallison of the Journal is saying here; he’s saying that even if the market saw that increase in subprime loans, even those numbers were understated thanks to Fannie and Freddie’s deceptions. But the inference that the market was hoodwinked by the GSEs is absurd. It was plain to most everyone in the financial services industry that there was a bubble going on last decade, that something deeply fucked up was going on with the mortgage markets — just as it was plain to everyone in the late nineties that something was wrong with the stock markets, when companies like Theglobe.com with annual sales under $5 million could have a $5 billion stock valuation.

Everyone was involved in the mortgage scam. At the lender level the deceptions were myriad; liar’s loans, fraudulent income documentation, negative amortization loans, HELOCs, etc. The rush to get as many loans written as possible and then get those hot potatoes moved to the next sucker in the line was furious and extended from coast to coast, sinking one lender after another in Ponzoid debt and indictments.

Then there were the countless deceptions that emerged from the securitization process, the bad math that allowed banks like Goldman to do $474 million mortgage deals where the average equity in the home was just 0.71 percent, and sell 93% of that deal as investment grade paper.

Are we really to believe that the people who did those deals didn’t know what total crap they were selling? That the people who used CDO-squareds to magically turn BBB investments into AAA investments didn’t know how nuts that was?

There were the ratings agencies, who accepted all that bad math and slapped AAA ratings on crap mortgage-backed securities in exchange for the continued largess of the banks upon whom they were financially dependent — the same ratings agencies that later sputtered and coughed up bullshit my-dog-ate-my-homework excuses for mismarking mortgages, with the Moody’s revelation that a computer error caused them to misapply AAA ratings to billions’ worth of MBS being the comic low point.

Then further along in the chain you had crooks like the folks at AIG, who took advantage of the basic nonexistence of derivatives regulation to issue billions in guarantees for these mortgage investments that they had never had any intention of paying off, to say nothing of actually having the ability to do so. And of course underwriting the entire enterprise was the implicit guarantee of Alan Greenspan’s Fed, which made it known time and time again that its modus operandi was to refuse to recognize the existence of bubbles until after they blew up, at which point it would rush in and clean up the mess, bailing out all the chief actors out with easy money.

Everyone had a hand in the bubble, from the congressmen who killed regulatory initiatives to the regulators who snoozed at the wheel to the GSEs to the Fed to the banks to the ratings agencies to the lenders. I don’t think it’s really controversial to say that, but it does seem like there’s an argument brewing about what that across-the-board complicity means.

My own personal feeling is that our recent bubbles weren’t much different than pyramid scams and lotteries; they’re the handiwork of an essentially regressive and deeply cynical political organization that systematically hoovers up taxes and investment money mainly from middle-class suckers, where it eventually gets eaten in short-term cashouts and mostly blown on sports cars and tropical vacations and eye jobs for the trophy wives of Wall Street executives. Crackonomics: take literally all the spare money from four square city blocks and turn it into one tricked-out Escalade.

For me the basic dynamic of the mortgage bubble is some Ivy League dickwad hawking a billion dollars of securitized subprime mortgages to a pension fund, and then Hobie-sailing off into the sunset with a bonus after they all blow up. Of course my seeing it that way might have a lot to do with my own personal psychological prejudices, and I get that some other person with different hangups might choose to focus on Barney Frank deciding to “roll the dice on home ownership” with the GSEs.

But what I don’t see is how anybody can say that all of this happened because Fannie and Freddie rigged the game to get Mexicans in homes, and then the banks and the ratings agencies just reacted organically to the corrupted market and helped the bubble along through no fault of their own. That’s just another (albeit more convincing) version of the early attempt to pin the disaster on the Community Reinvestment Act, which in turn is just another way of playing the red-blue blame game, which in turn is missing the point.

This GSE story is a big one, but if it gets used as a path back to a “The Market Reacted Rationally” version of history, we’re screwed. It has to be looked at as an important part of a diabolical whole, a symbiotic scheme in which the banks and the state were irreversibly intertwined in an enterprise that on both sides was never about market economics, but crime. Because otherwise… the diversionary notion that one side or the other is wholly to blame is part of what makes the whole scam possible.

p.s. Just to get this out of the way, I love Zero Hedge, and Marla Singer has been really nice to me personally. I just don’t completely agree with this particular thing. I don’t see any reason why focusing blame on the banks and the ratings agencies and AIG was “fundamentally flawed,” because, well, shit, they were to blame. The fact that Fannie and Freddie now get to jump in the pigpen with them doesn’t change that for me.

I think in the end what we’re going to find is that all the relevant actors had their own motivations for getting involved in the bubble. Two and now three presidential administrations let the Fed overheat the economy for political reasons that should be obvious. Alan Greenspan, hell, he did it because he loves seeing himself on magazine covers and wanted to keep getting invited to the right Manhattan parties. There were congressmen that converted the expansion of cheap credit into low-income votes. The bankers and lenders went along because the system of compensation on Wall Street is fucked and rewards short-term thinking while ignoring long-term consequences.

To me all of these people were equally guilty of making bad decisions to benefit themselves in the here and now at the expense of the whole in the future. When it comes to bubbles, It Takes a Village, and blaming the whole mess on the “socialist” aims of a pair of government agencies seems off base — particularly since the Randian protocapitalists running the banks benefited every bit as much from this socialism as actual homeowners, and perhaps even more, when one considers that homeowners get foreclosed upon, while bonuses are forever.

FHA Picks up Where Subprime Lenders Left Off

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Love this from Pragmatic Capitalist: David Rosenberg has some concise thoughts on a topic we’ve been banging the drum on for a long time – you can’t solve a debt crisis with more debt:

No wonder we are seeing a housing recovery, and it’s not just about the $8,000 tax credit for first-time buyers. How does the White House possibly allow this extra goodie to expire in November? The FHA is picking up where subprime lenders left off: the agency has seen its mortgage business jump 70% in the past year (!) and its market share in just three years has gone from 3.0% to 23% — it is allowing borrowers to finance up to 96.5% of homes priced all the way up to $729,750. Guess what, the default rate has risen to nearly 7% from 5½% a year ago. And, it is the taxpayer that is going to be picking up this tab … again! So, the policy formula here is that after excessive leverage got us into this mess, is to encouraging even more debt and come to think of it, Cash-for-Clunkers did the exact same thing — enticing people who were probably quite content with their jalopy to take on more than $10 billion of new debt. Amazing. It’s like giving another bottle of scotch to the drunken sailor, but hey — we can’t have the economy weak going into a mid-term election year now, can we?