wall street: White House solicits ideas for mortgage finance reform - Let's give them some - 04/16/10 01:27 PM
The home loan market has evolved over the decades into a colossal and thoroughly complicated system that is so hard to get one's arms around with any authority. One of the latest additions to it were the otherworldly subprime mortgages and their subsequent securitization that eventually grew so tricky that few, if anyone for that matter, can today decipher what they actually look like. A fair part of the blame for the current real estate collapse can be squarely allocated to this out-of-control creativity.
The White House put forth seven questions for public comment in its quest to overhaul the mortgage … (13 comments)
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wall street: MBS, or mortgage-backed securities, rating agencies under renewed squeeze - 11/28/09 01:35 PM
The unprecedented real estate bubble the nation just experienced was partly created by the credit rating shops that were tasked to value mortgage-backed securities, or MBS. The three large agencies doing that are Fitch Ratings, Moody's Investors Service and Standard & Poor's. The ratings the three arrived at were then attached to MBS issued by Wall Street firms and subsequently offered to investors who were seeking to invest money based on their own risk preferences. Obviously what the large investors world over were seeing made them confident that MBS were sound and worth acquiring, so they bought boatloads of them, stoking … (50 comments)
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wall street: Mortgage securities rating agency Moody's and the whole system under fire - 10/19/09 09:26 PM
Mortgage-backed securities, or MBS, played a pivotal part in the recent galloping real estate market and in its eventual and memorable collapse. These bonds get rated based on risk before they are offered for sale so that potential investors - pension funds, university endowments, international investors, among others - know what they are fiddling with. Moody's is one of the top three in U.S. to do that, the others being Fitch Ratings and Standard & Poor's.
When Moody's was spun off from Dun & Bradstreet early in the decade, the long-time corporate philosophy of honest and quality ratings was supplanted with … (4 comments)
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wall street: MBA, NAR and NAHB push hard for tax credit expansion, yes expansion - 10/13/09 04:56 PM
Affordable mortgage money and in many areas really mouth-watering prices are helping the real estate market out, but it needs much more than that in this frustrating economic environment. The famous up to $8,000 tax credit, it is due to expire at the end of November, for first-time home buyers did boost sales a degree or two. Still, the housing sector keeps on drifting along without too much purpose.
Mortgage Bankers Association, or MBA, National Association of Realtors, or NAR, and National Home Builders Association, or NAHB, are the heavy hitters on the real estate scene who now are twisting … (9 comments)
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wall street: Mortgage securities gaining acceptance again? - 08/17/09 07:50 PM
Mortgage-backed securities were some of the most-sought-after paper on Wall Street not so long ago, when the residential real estate market was still cruising along smoothly. The yields were solid and risk was seemingly minimal. Everybody and his nephew wanted at least some of them in their portfolios.
Then the mortgage securities business rolled right over the cliff, shoved there by the rapidly-deteriorating housing market. And the deep hurt was on, felt all across the industry. Now even well-qualified borrowers find it challenging to obtain a home loan, for refinance or purchase, as requirements have tightened considerably. The government had to … (36 comments)
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wall street: Mortgage industry reform plans skirting the real issues - 04/07/09 08:24 PM
There is no question that the home loan industry needs a fresh look and some adjustments have to be made to prevent in the future what just happened to it. Easy underwriting requirements were part of the reason the real estate market ultimately tanked and dragged the entire economy into a filthy gutter. But those, the underwriting criteria, really were poor business decisions and can't be regulated.
Anyway, Congress is working on all sorts of angles now to find the right reform solutions. The House just introduced an act that has a long name and lots of ideas, some reasonable and … (25 comments)
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wall street: Las Vegas keeps on attracting new nicknames - 01/06/09 10:27 PM
Oh no, not another one. Through decades the city has been called a decent selection of names, all as a rule relating to the main industry here, entertainment. That's easy because the town grew around it, from a dusty desert enclave to a glittering world-class resort heaven. The Entertainment Capital of the World has a grand flavor to it. Sin City has been around a while, often evoking feelings of what goes on here at night, on or off the Strip. The Gambling Mecca is pretty much what it says it is, although nowadays it does have increased competition from a … (12 comments)
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