It’s wrong to say only banks were bailed out and the public was ignored. Here’s how it all works.

ZeroHedge ran a post from OfTwoMinds today with eight steps to fix the economy. Among the recommendations are requiring all banks to mark MBS, real estate and all other assets to market daily/weekly and imposing massive fines for mark-to-market misrepresentations. Doing so would mean writing off at least $5.8 trillion of fantasy “value,” most of [...]

I finally saw HBO’s Too Big To Fail, a movie based on Andrew Ross Sorkin’s book of the same name. It was about Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s enactment of TARP during the darkest days of the financial crisis, and begins with Treasury taking over Fannie and Freddie on Sunday, September 7, 2008. That day, my [...]

Yesterday I summarized new Finreg rules requiring banks to retain at least 5% of loans they sell into secondary markets, and outlined which Qualified Residential Mortgage (QRM) loans will be exempt from this rule. The exemption debate rages, and here’s the Mortgage Bankers Association’s “profound concerns” on the matter. The QRM proposals are now open [...]

Buying Cheaper Than Renting In 72% Of U.S. Cities Recently Trulia compared the median list price with the median rent on two-bedroom apartments, condominiums, townhouses, lofts and co-ops listed on its website, and compared that to ownership costs including mortgage payments, property taxes and insurance. It determined that buying is cheaper than renting in 72% [...]

Economist vs. Market Participant Outlook Economists make their living off of forecasting the future or explaining why their earlier predictions were incorrect. But by then, many have forgotten the earlier prediction. Rarely do traders base decisions on what an economist will say but in the mortgage banking arena, predictions by the MBA, Freddie, and Fannie [...]

TARP Update Below is a Treasury chart of TARP payoffs from their 3Q2010 TARP update. Also the FT reports that according to Treasury officials, 122 TARP recipients have now repaid all or a portion of their government aid. The FT story also said: “Bank of America has told US regulators that it has sold enough [...]

What If All Mortgages Were 1% Lower? A Wall Street acquaintance of mine wrote to me about dropping trillions of dollars of mortgages by 1%. “I think that something like it may just happen. Many people I’ve talked to have said the same thing: ‘The money would go directly to the borrowers to help our [...]

Rates Benefit on Stock Weakness The drop in the equity markets yesterday, and possibly again today, certainly helped the flow of funds into “safer” investments – such as Treasuries and MBS’s. But we also had some economic news of note, the first being Pending Home Sales. The index was up 5.3% in March, with sales [...]

Rates dropped last Tuesday when S&P downgraded Greece and Portugal debt, which caused bond investors to reallocate to safer mortgage (and Treasury) bonds—when bond prices rise on buying, rates drop. This positive mortgage sentiment generally held throughout the week, and zero-point rates on loans up to $729k ended the week at record lows. GOOD JUMBO [...]