Michael Gracie 

Daniel Mudd wanted the loans to “optimize the business“… Internal documents show that even late in the housing bubble, Fannie Mae was drawn to risky loans by a variety of temptations, including the desire to increase its market share and fulfill government quotas for the support of low-income borrowers. Hmm. Just a few weeks back, [...]

Tidbits are small, until they grow up Roubini on bank losses: “If people were not spending their rebate checks in June, what will happen when there are no more checks?” Yep…retail is next. Trout are unwelcome in South Africa. Check for whirling disease, and then send ‘em on over? You mean subprime lending wasn’t the [...]

Analysis courtesy of the Wall Street Journal (h/t to The Big Picture). The charts are telling.

I received a note this morning suggesting that while the actual effect the “teaser freezer” program may have on the foreclosure problem is still up in the air, at least now there’s some data coming out to work with. The numbers are preliminary, and highlights are as follows: There are 80 million homes, and approximately [...]

Some analysts were complaining that the Treasury Department/Hope Now Consortium plan to fix some mortgages at “teaser rates” – as a way to stall the foreclosure wave – was nothing more than delaying the pain. This may be true, and the fact that mortgage backed securities investors seemed to be missing during all the planning [...]

A proverbial “You ain’t seen nothing yet.” Two views of the “upcoming” mortgage crisis, via Barry Ritholtz and Paul Kedrosky. If you say the words “sub” and “prime” in tandem enough (like the media has), people might just begin to think it’s an isolated issue. But nobody can reject the fact that Alt-A, Jumbos, HELOCs, [...]

Understating the not so obvious.