solarbird: (molly-kill-everyone-with-sticks)
[personal profile] solarbird
Haven't been posting econ stuff. I've been busy.

Morgan Stanley is warning its clients of potentially "catastrophic" events. Royal Bank Scotland "has advised clients to brace for a full-fledged crash in global stock and credit markets over the next three months." You're starting to see real desperation at some regional banks, including Fifth Third, National City, and KeyCorp. And the second wave of housing crisis is coming.

Check out the commercial property debt instruments. (Up is bad.) A bit of a recovery (those graphs aren't zero-based) and now all that is over. It's presumably related to MBIA and Ambac, the monoline insurers, losing their last fake AAA ratings. This destroys their business model, which is good, since they never had the money to pay off on their policies anyway. Two other, smaller insurers got cut to junk ratings, as well. Moody's also downgraded hundreds of tranches of Countrywide CDOs (no link there, sorry), prompting Bank of America to give the merger deal a vote of confidence, and baseball fans know what that traditionally means. Oh, S&P thinks it's still a bad idea, downgrading Bank of America to sell.

Mexico's imposing price controls on food. Philly Sheriff John Green is refusing to hold court-ordered foreclosure actions, but it's all crooked anyway; Swiss giant bank UBS has been helping wealthy Americans evade taxes - particularly real-estate developers - and in a separate investigation (holy crap, something got investigated?) hundreds of mortgage brokers have been indicted. I wonder who they pissed off?

Date: 2008-06-21 07:05 am (UTC)
ext_73044: Tinkerbell (Attempting)
From: [identity profile] lisa-marli.livejournal.com
"Hundreds of Mortgage Brokers" Unfortunately most of them are the Little People doing what their bosses told them to do "Sell, Sell, Sell More Loans". Lots of them just worked for commissions, not salaries and were the first laid off when this debacle started.
Only a few big ones were snagged to make it look like they are doing something.
The Big Fish will probably be given Medals of Freedom and Pardons by Bush before he leaves office.

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