Federal Government // Current

Feds to investigate post-Katrina bridge shootings

Federal officials will investigate the New Orleans police officers involved in fatal shootings that happened on a city bridge... more

Apocalipstick
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1 month ago

Washington prepares the mother of all bailouts

Even after committing $285 billion over the past couple of weeks to bail out mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and insurer AIG, the Federal Government is now looking to fork over more — much more.

The Treasury Department and Federal Reserve now are making plans to buy troubled mortgage securities en masse from banks and other financial firms. This would amount to moving from ad hoc loans and bailouts to a more systematic approach to resolving the bad-debt problems at the heart of the current financial crisis. Systematic apparently sounds good — the Dow jumped 400 points after CNBC first reported Thursday that such an effort was in the works, and on Friday, markets around the world opened sharply higher. But the price tag could be steep. "We're talking hundreds of billions," Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson said at a press conference Friday morning. "This needs to be big enough to make a real difference and get at the heart of the problem." The more alarmist economists are saying the cost of resolving the current crisis will exceed $1 trillion. To put that in context, total U.S. government spending in 2007 was $2.7 trillion.

The closest historical parallel to this effort is the Resolution Trust Corporation, which was formed by Congress in 1989 to buy up and dispose of the assets of failed savings and loans. The difference is that while the RTC took over the assets of corporate corpses already in government hands, the assets everybody's worried about now are on the books of still alive banks, investment banks and other firms. The idea would be to get them off the books of these institutions, hold on to them for a few years and possibly try to renegotiate their terms to slow foreclosures. The big challenge will be coming up with a way to do this that avoids bestowing a wholly unearned windfall on the shareholders of the companies ditching the toxic securities.

There's also the question of whether Congress, which was planning to adjourn at the end of next week so its members could go home to campaign for re-election, could create such an entity on short notice. On Wednesday the answer from several key lawmakers was no, but on Thursday House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told President Bush she'd keep the chamber in session longer if needed. It's also possible that the Treasury and the Fed could come up with an improvised solution that doesn't need congressional approval. Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke visited Capitol Hill Thursday night to talk over the possibilities, and Paulson said Friday that he would "spend the weekend working with members of Congress of both parties" to come up with legislation that he hoped to pass "over the next week." In the meantime, Treasury on Friday announced a $50 billion guarantee program meant to calm mounting fears about the safety of money-market mutual funds.

Why should government (and by extension taxpayers) even be contemplating such action? The clearest explanation is probably that of Paul McCulley, a managing director of the money-management firm PIMCo, who wrote an essay last summer on "The Paradox of Deleveraging" that continues to resonate in financial and economic circles. When a debt-fueled investment bubble bursts, financial institutions that make their living off borrowed money (banks, investment banks, hedge funds) tend to want to reduce their leverage — their ratio of debt to equity. That's perfectly rational. But when everybody does it at the same time, big trouble ensues. "[N]ot all leveraged lenders can shed assets and the associated debt at the same time without driving down asset prices, which has the paradoxical impact of increasing leverage by driving down lenders' net worth." Basically, if all lenders de-leverage at once, the financial system implodes — and everybody, not just the bankers, suffers.

---More at Link---Even after committing $285 billion over the past couple of weeks to bail out mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and... more

kaecvtionr
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1 month ago

Feds Looking to Buy Up Bad Assets

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke are crafting a plan, which they plan to soon deliver to... more

ebindelglass
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2 months ago

Feds Bail Out AIG

The U.S. government stepped in Tuesday to rescue American International Group Inc., one of the world's largest insurers, with... more

ebindelglass
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2 months ago

Oil Spill Into Gulf of Mexico

--CNN's Ali Velshi falsely claimed "no oil shed into the Gulf of Mexico" from Hurricane Katrina during discussion... more

julesrs007
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11 responses

2 months ago

The American secessionist streak

In a recent poll, one in five agreed that states have the right to peacefully secede from the Union. After centuries of Unionist... more

Libertas
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16 responses

2 months ago

Federal Government Takes Over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

Uncle Sam has just become the 800 pound gorilla in the U.S. mortgage market.

ebindelglass
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1 response

2 months ago

In one week it will be 9/11, Be Awake This Time

UC TV had an interview with Coleen Rowley of the FBI, she wrote the memo that eventually came out proving that the FBI, CIA and... more

olderorwiser
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3 months ago

"Government owes Native Americans $456 million"

After 12 years of litigation, a federal judge rejected claims that the government owed American Indians $47 billion for... more

GrandKnow2
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56 responses

3 months ago

Analysts Say More Banks Will Fail

As home prices continue to decline and loan defaults mount, federal regulators are bracing for dozens of American banks to fail over the next year.
But after a large mortgage lender in California collapsed late Friday, Wall Street analysts began posing two crucial questions: Just how many banks might falter? And, more urgently, which one could be next?

The nation’s banks are in far less danger than they were in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when more than 1,000 federally insured institutions went under during the savings-and-loan crisis. The debacle, the greatest collapse of American financial institutions since the Depression, prompted a government bailout that cost taxpayers about $125 billion.

But the troubles are growing so rapidly at some small and midsize banks that as many as 150 out of the 7,500 banks nationwide could fail over the next 12 to 18 months, analysts say. Other lenders are likely to shut branches or seek mergers.

“Everybody is drawing up lists, trying to figure out who the next bank is, No. 1, and No. 2, how many of them are there,” said Richard X. Bove, the banking analyst with Ladenburg Thalmann, who released a list of troubled banks over the weekend. “And No. 3, from the standpoint of Washington, how badly is it going to affect the economy?”

Many investors are on edge after federal regulators seized the California lender, IndyMac Bank, one of the nation’s largest savings and loans, last week. With $32 billion in assets, IndyMac, a spinoff of the Countrywide Financial Corporation, was the biggest American lender to fail in more than two decades.
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The F.D.I.C. has $53 billion set aside to reimburse consumers for deposits lost at failed banks. IndyMac will eat up $4 billion to $8 billion of that fund, the agency estimates, and that could force it to raise more money from the banks that it insures.

The agency does not disclose which banks it thinks are troubled. But analysts are circulating their own lists, and short sellers — investors who bet against stocks — are piling on. In recent weeks, the share prices of some regional banks, like the BankUnited Financial Corporation, in Florida, and the Downey Financial Corporation, in California, have stumbled hard amid concern about their financial health. A BankUnited spokeswoman said the lender had largely avoided risky subprime loans.

In his “Who Is Next?” report over the weekend, Mr. Bove listed the fraction of loans at banks that are nonperforming, meaning, for example, that the assets have been foreclosed on or that payments are 90 days past due. He came up with what he called a danger zone, which was a percentage above 5 percent. Seven banks fell in this category.

An important issue for the regional and community banks will be whether they have managed to sell their riskiest loans to Wall Street firms.

And the government may have fewer failures than in the past because private investment funds might buy some troubled lenders. Regulators are considering rule changes that would allow private equity firms to buy larger shares of banks, and several prominent investors, like Wilbur Ross, have raised funds to leap in.

As home prices continue to decline and loan defaults mount, federal regulators are bracing for dozens of American banks to fail... more