Mortgage Meltdown: Get Out of Jail Free Card from Paulson

Mortgage Meltdown: Get Out of Jail Free Card from Paulson

In the usual way of floating trial balloons before committing to anything, and without the whole hearted support from any of the many entities and people who have a dog in this fight, Paulson is “outlining” the proposal for “subprime relief.”

All information points to another intentional diversion from dealing with and getting disgorgement of money from hundreds, perhaps thousands of investment bankers, mortgage brokers, lenders, “retailers” and institutional sellers who converted assets to fees in a very simple scheme — churning, covered over by the complexity of “creative” derivative securities. 

Anyone can sell something if the cost is zero and the buyer actually thinks he is getting value. In fact, the sky is the limit because at no time is the market saturated with such a product. That is precisely why the “subprime mess” got so out of hand. And as Krugman points out today in the New York Times, we don’t know where or how how much toxic waste is buried. 

Paulson’s outline presents a plan that does little for the borrowers. It creates the illusion of a bailout when the investment world will not accept our word for anything (and so the illusion is doomed to failure). And the new wrinkle is that it puts the burden on the states and cities to do something about it, which in classical Washington political terms meaning that they are creating someone else to blame. 

Cities and states, already struggling are going to see significant declines in tax revenues and investment income, the value of investment funds and their assets specifically as a result of this mess. And it isn’t just a “subprime mess.” It is about the whole credit market. “Innovation” is just a code word for saying that we are going to create the illusion of money, everyone is going to buy into it because it looks free, and we will collect real fees while everyone else goes into the toilet.

And while we are all sleeping, CDOs and similar securities have been sold for 20 years based upon mortgages, credit card debt and dozens of other exotic theories of risk, none of which have any Triple-A merit but all of which have mysteriously been given the extremely high ratings as risk instruments. They have converted junk bonds to Triple A bonds with a stroke of the ratings pen. 

Meanwhile the co-conspirators, the U.S. Government and Wall Street innovators together with lenders with plausible deniability, and retailers of derivative securities that were sold not just deceptively but with outright lies and fraudulent ratings — they all get a free pass.

The sad truth is that investors are beginning to suspect that most of our market indexes are a hoax. They are probably mostly right. Vapor has been sold with the clothing of kings and queens. Unsuspecting people, government finance officers, financial institutions, fund managers, have been misled into destroying the value of what were real assets until they were invested into these exotic derivative securities, with the fraudulent ratings. 

The economy has been driven by consumer spending. Without liquidity offered by these exotic plans to lend money on credit cards and other consumer debt, whether securitized or not, the economy can’t run. Liquidity is drying up. Pumping more “money” into the system is not a long-term solution, it is a suicide pact for the dollar and for inflation. 

If we REALLY want to save our economy and its place in the world, we need to do something real, own up to the mistakes, hold the people who did it accountable, and make amends to the world as best we can. 

Tags: consumer, debt, Krugman, meltdown, Mortgage, Paulson, subprime
Posted in Corruption, securities fraud |