Affordable Housing Institute : US

Which is cause, and which effect?
 
For every effect, there must be at least one cause.  For there to have been a massive runup in the prices of financial assets, aside from a massive compression in risk spreads, there must have been a glut of money – specifically dollars – to buy them. 
 
Where those dollars […]

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]
 

Sometimes it takes one catastrophic collapse to illustrate the larger dangers. 
 

There goes my collateral
 
Had Lehman been saved, then nobody would have failed up to now.  Joe and Jane Public – and their elected representatives – might not have swallowed hard and enacted TARP.  (Humans have a great capacity to doubt […]

That for your portfolio!
 
Billed ‘We’re All Hosed’: A Wall Street Insider on the Economic Crisis, this Yahoo Finance interview with “a veteran banker at a major Wall Street investment firm,” though anonymous, rings true – and is worth hearing as an Oh-my-God retrospective on the credit fiasco, as from the confessional: Bless us, Father, for […]

Now that the US government de facto owns the GSEs, what’s it going to do with them?  I had no idea until I saw a headline in Bloomberg so remarkable I checked it directly with my friends at each agency. 
Fannie, Freddie to Step Up Mortgage Bond Purchases
 
What? I thought.  This is what got them into […]

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]
 
Yesterday we recorded the Godfather-like meeting, described in the New York Times, held last week in Treasury’s offices, in which the financial rescue’s architects, headed by Secretary Paulson, made the big banks an offer they couldn’t refuse.
 

“Someday, and that day may never come, I’ll call upon you to do a service […]