Category: Regulation and Reform

The LIHTC crisis and states: Part 1, an investment in knowledge

5 January, 2009 (10:54) | Capital markets, Developers, LIHTC, Markets, Massachusetts, Policy, Regulation and Reform, US News | No comments

“If we do not hang together, assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
– Benjamin Franklin, who was born and raised in Massachusetts
 

An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.
 
In late December, at the request of the Massachusetts Housing Partnership (MHP, www.mhp.net), my for-profit Recap Advisors released a white paper (available in .pdf here as [...]

“It’s worth what I say it’s worth”: Part 2, done on paper

24 June, 2008 (07:49) | Capital markets, Finance, Regulation and Reform, Securitization, Subprime, US News | No comments

[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”: Part 1, neither more nor less

23 June, 2008 (09:15) | Capital markets, Finance, Regulation and Reform, Securitization, Subprime, US News | No comments

“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 [...]

Capital, almost as good as money

12 June, 2008 (07:54) | Capital markets, GSEs, Regulation and Reform, Subprime | 2 comments

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, [...]

Reform step 1: license the brokers

29 May, 2008 (08:53) | Capital markets, Finance, Legislation and policy, Regulation and Reform, Subprime | No comments

          
“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 [...]