Affordable Housing Institute : US

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]
 
Yesterday, using a New York Times article as a springboard, we examined Humpty Dumpty’s question of value: what does value mean, and who decides that it means that? 
 

“Everything’s coming up roses”
 
For reasons I listed yesterday, the assets are often valued by people who have a vast vested interest in seeing them […]

“It’s worth what I say it’s worth.”
 

The louder I shout it, the truer it must be!
 
That, more or less, is the defense offer by Bear Stearns as to the value of enormous pools of highly structured complex instruments on their books, a declaration so patently self-serving and self-interested that, with Bear now absorbed into JPMorgan […]

The great Yogi Berra, whom I’m fond of quoting, upon being asked why he endorsed a product, replied:
 

“Don’t make that check out to ‘bearer’”
 
Because they paid me in cash, which is almost as good as money.
 

 
For financial institutions, capital is just as good as money, even if it’s not cash – and this matters enormously, […]

          
“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
Henry VI, Part 2: Act iv, scene ii.

Of whose state, so many had the managingThat they lost France, and made his England bleed
 
While the total scale of the global credit compression hasn’t been fully measured, most of that disruptive wave is behind us, as demonstrated […]

When most people threaten to sue, it’s simply a yawn-inducing tactic. 
 

Somebody’s suing me?
 
When a state attorney general does it, the tactic has more effect. 
 
Litigators!  Litigators!
 
Of such threat vaporware is New York state attorney general Andrew Cuomo a past master, as he recently demonstrated by parlaying his face-down cards into an important settlement action.  […]