Freddie Mac

Hundreds of banks will fail, Roubini tells Barron’s

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NEW YORK, Aug 3 (Reuters) – The United States is in the second inning of a recession that will last for at least 18 months and help kill off hundreds of banks, influential economist and New York University Professor Nouriel Roubini told Barron’s in Sunday’s edition.

Taxpayers will pay a big price for helping bail out the rest of the financial services industry as well, Roubini said — at least $1 trillion and more likely $2 trillion.

The banks will become insolvent because of mounting losses as a result of the housing bust and because they have only written down their subprime loans so far, he said. Still in front of them are their consumer-credit losses, for which they lack the reserves, Barron’s reported.

He also said there are hundreds of millions of dollars outstanding in home-equity loans that could be worth zero, too.

Read moreHundreds of banks will fail, Roubini tells Barron’s

Report: Obama, Potential Iran Attack, Financial Collapse

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Published for some of the information on the economy.


Added: August 02, 2008

Source: YouTube

Stressed banks borrow record amount from Fed

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NEW YORK (Reuters) – Banks borrowed a record amount of funds from the Federal Reserve in the latest week as the year old credit crisis took a persistent toll, while the commercial paper market continued to contract, signaling tough conditions for short term borrowers.

Banks’ primary credit borrowings averaged $17.45 billion per day in the latest week, the second straight week this had hit a record and up from $16.38 billion the previous week, Fed data showed on Thursday.

“It shows there’s a shortage of liquidity in the system,” said Christopher Low, chief economist at FTN Financial in New York.

Read moreStressed banks borrow record amount from Fed

The Last Hurrah for the Banking System

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The Bush administration will be mailing out another batch of “stimulus” checks in the very near future. There’s no way around it. The Fed is in a pickle and can’t lower interest rates for fear that food and energy prices will shoot to stratosphere. At the same time, the economy is shrinking faster than anyone thought possible with no sign of a rebound. That leaves stimulus checks as the only way to “prime the pump” and keep consumer spending chugging along. Otherwise business activity will slow to a crawl and the economy will tank. There’s no other choice.
The daily barrage of bad news is really starting to get on people’s nerves. Most of the TV chatterboxes have already cut-out the cheery stock market predictions and no one is praising the “impressive powers of the free market” anymore. They know things are bad, real bad. A pervasive sense of gloom has crept into the television studios just like it has into the stock exchanges and the luxury penthouses on Manhattan’s West End. That same sense of foreboding is creeping like a noxious cloud to every town and city across the country. Everyone is cutting back on non-essentials and trimming the fat from the family budget. The days of extravagant impulse-spending at the mall are over. So are the “big ticket” purchases and the “go-for-broke” trips to Europe. Consumer confidence is at historic lows, disposal income is a thing of the past, and all the credit cards are at their limit. The country is drowning in red ink.

Read moreThe Last Hurrah for the Banking System

Russia cuts exposure to US mortgage lenders

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MOSCOW, July 28 (Reuters) – Russia has approximately halved to less than $50 billion its exposure to U.S. mortgage lenders Fannie Mae (FNM.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and Freddie Mac (FRE.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), a senior central bank official told Reuters on Monday. “It’s now less than $50 billion,” central bank first deputy chairman Alexei Ulyukayev said, when asked about Russia’s investments in the agencies.

Russia held about $100 billion at the start of 2008. (Reporting by Yelena Fabrichnaya, writing by Robin Paxton)

Mon Jul 28, 2008

Source: Reuters

The Big Bailout: America as a Full-Spectrum Kleptocracy

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Its name somewhat anachronistically means “assembly of old men.” George Washington famously – and, it must now be admitted, with excessive optimism – characterized it as an institutional saucer intended to cool legislation passed in the intemperate heat of the moment. Its members demand, with entirely unwarranted self-approval, to be called, collectively, the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body.

Read moreThe Big Bailout: America as a Full-Spectrum Kleptocracy

Fannie Mae Unsold $5 Billion Homes Bring Peril to Shareholders

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July 23 (Bloomberg) — Fannie Mae, the largest U.S. mortgage finance company, couldn’t find a buyer who would pay $6,900 for the three-bedroom house at 1916 Prospect St. in Flint, Michigan. So broker Raymond Megie, who is handling the foreclosure sale, advised cutting the price to $5,000.

Megie still couldn’t sell it. “There’s oversupply,” he said. The home sold in 2005 for $110,000.

Read moreFannie Mae Unsold $5 Billion Homes Bring Peril to Shareholders

Senate OKs bill providing mortgage assistance

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And the taxpayer will have to pay for all of this and…

“If we’re lucky enough to help 400,000 households,” said Jared Bernstein, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, “I’m afraid it’s a drop in the bucket.”
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Bush pledges to sign legislation to help Fannie, Freddie

Congress completed work Saturday on the government’s most sweeping response yet to the nation’s housing crisis, sending to President Bush a bill designed to help homeowners avoid foreclosure, spur home buying and prop up struggling mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Read moreSenate OKs bill providing mortgage assistance

Investors are betting more than $1 trillion on a collapse in stock prices

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July 21 (Bloomberg) — Investors worldwide are betting more than $1 trillion on a collapse in stock prices.

Never Have So Many Short Sellers Made So Much Money

Read moreInvestors are betting more than $1 trillion on a collapse in stock prices

The U.S. Enters into an Ever-Worsening Cycle

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We are a year into the financial pain and virtually no systemic problem has been solved. Markets have entered into a new unsustainable cycle. The new dance is a two-step. Home prices slide, delinquencies rise, defaults rise. This puts additional pressure on housing going forward. Financial firms announce greater write-offs. Retailers slump and contagion goes global. Selling grips the markets, the good and the bad are sold off indiscriminately. Commodities rise, fear escalates and reaches a crescendo as at least one major institution nears or reaches insolvency. Forecasts of impossible return to the good old days are debated and rebound timetables are pushed back. In the depths of the swoon, the Fed opens the discount window to some new and previously barred set of institutions. Bail-outs are readied, Treasury checks are cut and we rebound off the lows. Bad news becomes good, commodities sell-off and financials soar.

Read moreThe U.S. Enters into an Ever-Worsening Cycle

Housing bailout bill – another $800 billion gift from the taxpayer to Wall Street

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This bill will probably pass in Senate tomorrow. You, your children and generations to come will pay for this. All taxes will be spent servicing this debt.

Cost of 5 years of Iraq war: $560 billion
Cost of this bill: $800 billion

It will be spent bailing out the same fraudsters who got us into this mess. Call your senator now and demand they vote against this! If you don’t, it will probably pass. If you care for your country and your children’s future, vote this video up.


Video: Current.com

Ron Paul on the Housing Bill 7/23/08

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“The Mother of All Bailouts”


Ron Paul talks about the bailout out of the housing industry and how it really just destroys the dollar and adds enormously to the debt.

Also, slipped into the bill, was the stipulation that ALL credit card transactions must now be reported to the IRS.


Added: July 23, 2008

Source: YouTube

Government index shows record 4.8 percent decline in US home prices in May from a year ago

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WASHINGTON: A government report says U.S. home prices fell a record 4.8 percent in May from the same month last year.

The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight also says prices, on a seasonally adjusted basis, fell 0.3 percent from April to May. The index is down almost 5 percent from its peak in April of last year.

OFHEO oversees the government-sponsored mortgage-finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Read moreGovernment index shows record 4.8 percent decline in US home prices in May from a year ago

Is America too big to fail?

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NEW YORK: In the narrative that has governed American commercial life for the last quarter-century, saving companies from their own mistakes was not supposed to be part of the government’s job description. Economic policymakers in the United States took swaggering pride in the cutthroat but lucrative form of capitalism that was supposedly indigenous to their frontier nation.

Read moreIs America too big to fail?

Bernanke, Paulson Pressed to Seek Big-Government Bank Bailout

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July 21 (Bloomberg) — Ben S. Bernanke and Henry Paulson are under pressure to embrace the big-government policies of America in the 1930s, or Sweden in the 1990s, to contain the conflagration engulfing the U.S. housing and financial markets.

Among the ideas: Using taxpayer money to shore up the capital of loss-ridden Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, setting up new agencies to buy and refinance mortgages in default, even taking over failing financial institutions.

The government’s current “fire-brigade approach to dealing with the fallout from the extremely weak domestic economy is eroding general confidence in the U.S. financial system,” says Brian Bethune, chief U.S. financial economist at Lexington, Massachusetts-based Global Insight. “Bold, creative, aggressive policy action is needed.”

Read moreBernanke, Paulson Pressed to Seek Big-Government Bank Bailout

8,500 U.S. banks; many will die soon

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I called the death of Indymac Bancorp on Monday, July 7th. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation seized Indymac on Friday, July 11th.

I called the implosion of the two Government Sponsored Entities in the mortgage business, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on Wednesday, July 9th. Sunday, July 13th the White House announced a bailout for them.

Related article: Fed: No more bailouts, except Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

Want to know what happens next? It’s ape ass ugly and it’s going to happen to you, so don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Read more8,500 U.S. banks; many will die soon

U.S. Financial Breaking Point Soon

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Something is going to break, and soon. Banks are insolvent and failing by the hundreds if not thousands. Hedge funds are on the edge of oblivion. Only a tiny percentage of toxic waste losses in real estate and other asset classes of collateral, which will eventually amount to over $1.4 trillion in the US alone, has to date been recognized by the lying bankster fraudsters. Bonds are producing negative rates of return even based on ludicrously understated official rates of inflation (until this month, when we finally got some data bordering on the truth).

Read moreU.S. Financial Breaking Point Soon

As faith in bank bailouts dims, losses set to deepen

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NEW YORK (Reuters) – The nightmare scenario for U.S. economic authorities is here: confidence in their ability to rescue the country from a housing-led financial panic is now at its lowest level since the crisis began.

This means losses for investors, already totaling nearly half a trillion dollars, could mount even further over the next few months, with implications for business investment and the overall health of the economy.

“You see a massive potential for financial meltdown on a global scale,” said T.J. Marta, fixed-income strategist at RBC Capital Markets.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, testified before Congress this week on the country’s precarious financial state. They were met with unusually fierce questions from lawmakers on the feasibility of a plan to provide extra funding for mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae (FNM.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and Freddie Mac (FRE.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz).

Read moreAs faith in bank bailouts dims, losses set to deepen

FREDDIE & FANNIE UNCONSTITUTIONAL BAIL OUT USING WHAT?

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“As I write this column, Congress has run this country into a $9,498,511,404,143.63 debt. That’s just under $9.5 TRILLION “dollars.””

I really hope that you will find time to read this article. 🙂
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Arthur Henning of the Chicago Tribune said back in 1935, “The New Deal will bring the Communist Party within striking distance of overthrow of the American form of government…” Mark Sullivan of the Buffalo Evening News also expressed alarm in 1935: “The New Deal is to America what the early phase of Nazism was to Germany…”

The nation is awash in fear because they are coming to realize that while they’ve been buying all the hype from the cabal of gangsters in Washington for decades, reality is now setting in as poverty is slamming millions who used to belong to the middle class. From dangerous lending practices to the derivatives time bomb waiting to go off and inflation getting ready to launch into hyper inflation, the situation is more grim by the week. A financial catastrophe so many have been warning about for decades, it’s all coming home to roost. The “perfect storm” as it’s being called. The beast is now devouring itself and we the people are caught in their cross fire.

Unfortunately, most Americans haven’t been listening. They’re either addicted to sports, shopping, porn, drugs or yaking on their cell phones while the world has been heading for financial Armageddon.

Read moreFREDDIE & FANNIE UNCONSTITUTIONAL BAIL OUT USING WHAT?

Amber light flashing on U.S. dollar intervention

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So Inflation is really the greatest export of the US.
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LONDON (Reuters) – Three days before the last bout of coordinated central bank intervention to calm world currency markets, the International Monetary Fund’s top economist opined: “If not now, when?” Many experts are now asking the same.

Read moreAmber light flashing on U.S. dollar intervention

Status Report on the Collapse of the U.S. Economy

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“But, realistically, all ordinary people can do today is try to survive, perhaps by working with friends and neighbors in planting food and living within the underground economy. At least people might not then have to starve to death, because hard as it is to believe that “it could happen here,” widespread famine in the U.S. seems a real possibility over the next several years. Nations take such risks when they allow capitalist agribusiness to destroy local agriculture.”

With the economic news of the week of July 14-the continuing crisis among mortgage lenders, the onset of bank failures, the announced downsizing of General Motors, the slide of the Dow-Jones below 11,000-we are seeing the ongoing collapse of the U.S. economy.

Even the super-rich are becoming nervous as cries for an emergency suspension of short selling ring out.

What is really taking place, however, is that the producing economy of working men and women is being crushed by the overall debt burden on households, businesses, and governments that could reach $70 trillion by 2010. The financial system, including mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, is bankrupt, as the debts it is based on cannot be repaid.

Read moreStatus Report on the Collapse of the U.S. Economy

US faces global funding crisis, warns Merrill Lynch

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Merrill Lynch has warned that the United States could face a foreign “financing crisis” within months as the full consequences of the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage debacle spread through the world.


Draining away: The US may struggle to plug its capital gap

The country depends on Asian, Russian and Middle Eastern investors to fund much of its $700bn (£350bn) current account deficit, leaving it far more vulnerable to a collapse of confidence than Japan in the early 1990s after the Nikkei bubble burst. Britain and other Anglo-Saxon deficit states could face a similar retreat by foreign investors.

Read moreUS faces global funding crisis, warns Merrill Lynch

The Wall Street Journal Senses Something is Wrong

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A subscription to the Wall Street Journal costs several hundred dollars a year, so most people out there don’t get it and DollarCollapse.com rarely posts links to its articles. But everybody should see today’s edition, which probably sets the modern-day record for disturbing headlines. Here’s a sampling of what subscribers read this morning:

Read moreThe Wall Street Journal Senses Something is Wrong

Jim Rogers: Fannie Plan a `Disaster’; Goldman Says Sell

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The U.S. economy is in a recession, possibly the worst since World War II, Rogers said.

“They’re ruining what has been one of the greatest economies in the world,” Rogers said. Bernanke and Paulson “are bailing out their friends on Wall Street but there are 300 million Americans that are going to have to pay for this.”

July 14 (Bloomberg) — The U.S. Treasury Department’s plan to shore up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is an “unmitigated disaster” and the largest U.S. mortgage lenders are “basically insolvent,” according to investor Jim Rogers.

Taxpayers will be saddled with debt if Congress approves U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson‘s request for the authority to buy unlimited stakes in and lend to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Rogers said in a Bloomberg Television interview. Rogers is betting that Fannie Mae shares will keep tumbling.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. analyst Daniel Zimmerman said the mortgage finance companies’ shares may fall another 35 percent and lowered his share-price estimate for Fannie Mae to $7 from $18 and for Freddie Mac to $5 from $17. Freddie Mac fell 64 cents, or 8.3 percent, to $7.11 in New York Stock Exchange trading, while Fannie Mae fell 52 cents, or 5.1 percent, to $9.73.

“I don’t know where these guys get the audacity to take our money, taxpayer money, and buy stock in Fannie Mae,” Rogers, 65, said in an interview from Singapore. “So we’re going to bail out everybody else in the world. And it ruins the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet and it makes the dollar more vulnerable and it increases inflation.”

The chairman of Rogers Holdings, who in April 2006 correctly predicted oil would reach $100 a barrel and gold $1,000 an ounce, also said the commodities bull market has a “long way to go” and advised buying agricultural commodities.

`Solvency Crisis’

Read moreJim Rogers: Fannie Plan a `Disaster’; Goldman Says Sell

Citigroup’s $1.1 Trillion in Mysterious Shadow Assets

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July 14 (Bloomberg) — At an investor presentation in May, Citigroup Inc. Chief Executive Officer Vikram Pandit said shrinking the bank’s $2.2 trillion balance sheet, the biggest in the U.S., was a cornerstone of his turnaround plan.

Nowhere mentioned in the accompanying 66-page handout were the additional $1.1 trillion of assets that New York-based Citigroup keeps off its books: trusts to sell mortgage-backed securities, financing vehicles to issue short-term debt and collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs, to repackage bonds.

Now, as Citigroup prepares to announce second-quarter results July 18, those off-balance-sheet assets, used by U.S. banks to expand lending without tying up capital, are casting a shadow over earnings. Since last September, at least $100 billion of assets have flooded back onto Citigroup’s balance sheet, accompanied by more than $7 billion of losses.

“If you start adding up all the potential exposures, it’s a huge number,” said Sam Golden, a former ombudsman for the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency who now heads the financial-industry practice for restructuring adviser Alvarez & Marsal in Houston. “The banks will say that it was disclosed. Investors are saying, `Yeah, but it was cryptic. We really didn’t know what you were telling us.”’

U.S. banks already are reeling from more than $165 billion of writedowns and credit losses, so shareholders are wary of unknown obligations that might force them to take responsibility for additional troubled assets. The risks have become so obvious that accounting officials are proposing new rules — some of which Citigroup opposes — that would force many assets back onto balance sheets.

Read moreCitigroup’s $1.1 Trillion in Mysterious Shadow Assets