Merrill Lynch/Banc of America sent out a list of recent REIT filings, which continue at a record pace. Last week I was on a panel at a conference in California focused on the future of jumbo lending, and residential mortgage REIT’s may figure prominently in that. REIT’s clearly have become, with their leverage of 5×1, [...]

Bank of America spent $1.5 billion on legal fees in the last three months of 2010. Sometimes we have trouble imagining big numbers. In the US, our median household pretax income is about $50,000. If a household were to work for 300,000 years, it would earn $1.5 billion dollars. More on BofA writedowns is in [...]

Future of Fannie & Freddie January is scheduled to be a big month for Freddie and Fannie, in that the Treasury is expected to release plans for their future. Merrill Lynch released some conjecture about upcoming news, which will probably come out after the State of the Union address on 1/25. Merrill reminds us that [...]

Last week BusinessInsider editor in chief Henry Blodget wrote a Twitter Manifesto, or Tweetifesto as he called it, about his position on investigative journalism that can best be summarized like this: Blodget likes hard journalism but it’s not profitable enough. It’s been 9 days so most have missed or forgotten the 30 tweets (below) comprising [...]

State of Mortgage Industry Let’s start off with two basic premises. First, there has always been a range of borrowers (credit & risk-wise) that need home loans at rates that match the risk. Second, there have always been investors out there with varying degrees of appetite for risk, and demand more return for higher risk. [...]

Six More Bank Failures & Other FDIC Actions A high school fencing teacher had an affair with one of his female students. The whole situation was very sworded. I don’t know if anyone likes to think of their mortgage company engaging in sordid affairs, but I pity anyone who finds their company on this FDIC [...]

Former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson gave his testimony on the BofA/Merrill deal to the House Committee on Oversight & Government Reform this morning, and he’s still being cross-examined now, a couple of hours later. Watching it, the only thing that comes to mind is a little lesson from the movie Clear & Present Danger. In [...]

After it was revealed that Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain paid $1.2m to fix up his office in the midst of this crisis, he was dismissed from Bank of America. Now he says he will repay the fees to Bank of America.

John Thain, former Merrill Lynch CEO until his firm was taken over by Bank of America in September, was ousted from BofA after it was revealed that he advanced bonuses to top execs knowing that BofA was taking them over and may even be using government funds to do it. It was also revealed that, [...]

Here is a job listing just in time for all those great folks at Chase wholesale. The Fate of Mortgage Broker Business Chase’s exit from wholesale left brokers searching the rate sheets in their fax machines, wondering which major banks are left buying loans in that channel. It also caused those remaining wholesale investors to [...]