Collapse - FORECLOSURE FRAUD

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REUTERS | WikiLeaks: As AIG crumbled, China stepped in as broker

REUTERS | WikiLeaks: As AIG crumbled, China stepped in as broker


NEW YORK | Fri Mar 11, 2011 1:32am EST

NEW YORK (Reuters) – U.S. officials believe China’s insurance regulator passed on proprietary information about AIG to its Chinese rivals during the American firm’s collapse in 2008, according to unpublished diplomatic cables.

The U.S. government bailout of American International Group Inc in 2008 sent shock waves around the world, and China seemed especially rattled.

The Chinese Insurance Regulatory Commission (CIRC) forced AIG’s local operations to open their books on a daily basis after the company’s September 2008 rescue, according to a series of U.S. diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks and provided to Reuters by a third party. The regulator then shared the confidential information with local competitors, in part to convince at least one of them to buy the troubled assets.

Continue reading … REUTERS

The American International Group (AIG) building is seen in New York’s financial district March 16, 2009.

Credit: Reuters/Brendan McDermid

© 2010-19 FORECLOSURE FRAUD | by DinSFLA. All rights reserved.



Posted in STOP FORECLOSURE FRAUDComments (0)

The Coming Collapse of Commercial Real Estate is Already Here, Says Davidowitz (VIDEO)

The Coming Collapse of Commercial Real Estate is Already Here, Says Davidowitz (VIDEO)


Posted Feb 01, 2011 10:19am EST by Stacy Curtin in Investing, Recession

The U.S. consumer may be on the mend as we head further into 2011, but the same story of resurgence does not apply to many of the U.S. big-box retailers.

From Wal-Mart to Sears to Target to Best Buy, if you look at what is happening in the retail space, “it looks pretty scary,” says retail expert Howard Davidowitz.

Wal-Mart — the world’s largest retailer – has seen six consecutive quarters of negative same-store sales and is now looking to put the majority of its investment capital towards emerging markets.

In the case of Target and Best Buy, they both recently missed major key earnings expectations. Making matters worse, Best Buy “tanked” even without the competition from the now defunct Circuit City, Davidowitz points out.

Tale of Two Stores


© 2010-19 FORECLOSURE FRAUD | by DinSFLA. All rights reserved.



Posted in STOP FORECLOSURE FRAUDComments (1)

Dual Role in Housing Deals Puts Spotlight on Deutsche

Dual Role in Housing Deals Puts Spotlight on Deutsche


By CARRICK MOLLENKAMP And SERENA NG

Federal probes of the collapsed mortgage-bond boom are shedding light on how Wall Street firms sometimes created securities and sold them to one set of investors, while advising others to bet against them.

One firm that was a major player in mortgage securities, Deutsche Bank AG, illustrates a pattern investigators are looking at. While creating and selling mortgage securities to some of its clients, the big German bank was not only advising other clients to bet the other way, but also sometimes doing so itself.

A Deutsche trader helped create an index that made it easy to bet against housing, and the bank itself then used the index to do just that.

After the collapse of mortgage securities led to a costly bailout of the firm that insured many such securities—American International Group Inc.—some of the federal cash that was sunk into AIG flowed to Deutsche, to cover bearish bets by its hedge-fund clients.

Deutsche’s actions are a vivid example of potential conflicts on Wall Street—the way big financial firms play both sides of the fence with investors. The issue became more extreme during the mortgage bubble and subsequent bust because of the size of the bets on Wall Street and subsequent losses on Main Street.

Regulators now are grappling with whether the business-as-usual conduct at financial firms merely looks bad in hindsight, or whether there were misrepresentations or other legal issues that need to be further investigated and guarded against in the future. “This is a gray area that we need more investigation into,” says Andrew Lo, a finance professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a hedge-fund manager.

Deutsche says that helping investors bet either way—either for or against an asset—is part of doing business for a securities firm.

“Some clients sought more exposure to the housing market, while others sought less,” a spokesman for Deutsche said. “We served clients whatever their investment objective, but only after being satisfied that they had arrived at their view after thorough consideration.”

Continue reading …The Wall Street Journal

© 2010-19 FORECLOSURE FRAUD | by DinSFLA. All rights reserved.



Posted in concealment, conspiracy, deutsche bank, investigation, mbs, mortgageComments (1)

MELTUP: The truth of our economy…Must watch video!

MELTUP: The truth of our economy…Must watch video!


The beginning of a U.S. currency crisis and hyperinflation. Become a member of NIA for free at http://inflation.us

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eb1n1X0Oqdw]

Posted in concealment, conspiracy, corruption, FED FRAUD, federal reserve boardComments (0)

HARVARD LAW AND ECONOMIC ISSUES IN SUBPRIME LITIGATION 2008

HARVARD LAW AND ECONOMIC ISSUES IN SUBPRIME LITIGATION 2008


This in combination with A.K. Barnett-Hart’s Thesis make’s one hell of a Discovery.

 
LEGAL AND ECONOMIC ISSUES IN
SUBPRIME LITIGATION
Jennifer E. Bethel*
Allen Ferrell**
Gang Hu***
 

Discussion Paper No. 612

03/2008

Harvard Law School Cambridge, MA 02138

 

 ABSTRACT

This paper explores the economic and legal causes and consequences of recent difficulties in the subprime mortgage market. We provide basic descriptive statistics and institutional details on the mortgage origination process, mortgage-backed securities (MBS), and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). We examine a number of aspects of these markets, including the identity of MBS and CDO sponsors, CDO trustees, CDO liquidations, MBS insured and registered amounts, the evolution of MBS tranche structure over time, mortgage originations, underwriting quality of mortgage originations, and write-downs of investment banks. In light of this discussion, the paper then addresses questions as to how these difficulties might have not been foreseen, and some of the main legal issues that will play an important role in the extensive subprime litigation (summarized in the paper) that is underway, including the Rule 10b-5 class actions that have already been filed against the investment banks, pending ERISA litigation, the causes-of-action available to MBS and CDO purchasers, and litigation against the rating agencies. In the course of this discussion, the paper highlights three distinctions that will likely prove central in the resolution of this litigation: The distinction between reasonable ex ante expectations and the occurrence of ex post losses; the distinction between the transparency of the quality of the underlying assets being securitized and the transparency as to which market participants are exposed to subprime losses; and, finally, the distinction between what investors and market participants knew versus what individual entities in the structured finance process knew, particularly as to macroeconomic issues such as the state of the national housing market. ex ante expectations and the occurrence of ex post losses; the distinction between the transparency of the quality of the underlying assets being securitized and the transparency as to which market participants are exposed to subprime losses; and, finally, the distinction between what investors and market participants knew versus what individual entities in the structured finance process knew, particularly as to macroeconomic issues such as the state of the national housing market. 

 continue reading the paper harvard-paper-diagrams

 
 

 

Posted in bank of america, bear stearns, bernanke, chase, citi, concealment, conspiracy, corruption, credit score, Dick Fuld, FED FRAUD, G. Edward Griffin, geithner, indymac, jpmorgan chase, lehman brothers, mozillo, naked short selling, nina, note, scam, siva, tila, wachovia, washington mutual, wells fargoComments (1)

Michael Lewis’s ‘The Big Short’? Read the Harvard Thesis Instead! “The Story of the CDO Market Meltdown: An Empirical Analysis.”

Michael Lewis’s ‘The Big Short’? Read the Harvard Thesis Instead! “The Story of the CDO Market Meltdown: An Empirical Analysis.”


March 15, 2010, 4:59 PM ET

Michael Lewis’s ‘The Big Short’? Read the Harvard Thesis Instead!

By Peter Lattman

Deal Journal has yet to read “The Big Short,” Michael Lewis’s yarn on the financial crisis that hit stores today. We did, however, read his acknowledgments, where Lewis praises “A.K. Barnett-Hart, a Harvard undergraduate who had just  written a thesis about the market for subprime mortgage-backed CDOs that remains more interesting than any single piece of Wall Street research on the subject.”

A.K. Barnett-Hart

While unsure if we can stomach yet another book on the crisis, a killer thesis on the topic? Now that piqued our curiosity. We tracked down Barnett-Hart, a 24-year-old financial analyst at a large New York investment bank. She met us for coffee last week to discuss her thesis, “The Story of the CDO Market Meltdown: An Empirical Analysis.” Handed in a year ago this week at the depths of the market collapse, the paper was awarded summa cum laude and won virtually every thesis honor, including the Harvard Hoopes Prize for outstanding scholarly work.

Last October, Barnett-Hart, already pulling all-nighters at the bank (we agreed to not name her employer), received a call from Lewis, who had heard about her thesis from a Harvard doctoral student. Lewis was blown away.

“It was a classic example of the innocent going to Wall Street and asking the right questions,” said Mr. Lewis, who in his 20s wrote “Liar’s Poker,” considered a defining book on Wall Street culture. “Her thesis shows there were ways to discover things that everyone should have wanted to know. That it took a 22-year-old Harvard student to find them out is just outrageous.”

Barnett-Hart says she wasn’t the most obvious candidate to produce such scholarship. She grew up in Boulder, Colo., the daughter of a physics professor and full-time homemaker. A gifted violinist, Barnett-Hart deferred admission at Harvard to attend Juilliard, where she was accepted into a program studying the violin under Itzhak Perlman. After a year, she headed to Cambridge, Mass., for a broader education. There, with vague designs on being pre-Med, she randomly took “Ec 10,” the legendary introductory economics course taught by Martin Feldstein.

“I thought maybe this would help me, like, learn to manage my money or something,” said Barnett-Hart, digging into a granola parfait at Le Pain Quotidien. She enjoyed how the subject mixed current events with history, got an A (natch) and declared economics her concentration.

Barnett-Hart’s interest in CDOs stemmed from a summer job at an investment bank in the summer of 2008 between junior and senior years. During a rotation on the mortgage securitization desk, she noticed everyone was in a complete panic. “These CDOs had contaminated everything,” she said. “The stock market was collapsing and these securities were affecting the broader economy. At that moment I became obsessed and decided I wanted to write about the financial crisis.”

Back at Harvard, against the backdrop of the financial system’s near-total collapse, Barnett-Hart approached professors with an idea of writing a thesis about CDOs and their role in the crisis. “Everyone discouraged me because they said I’d never be able to find the data,” she said. “I was urged to do something more narrow, more focused, more knowable. That made me more determined.”

She emailed scores of Harvard alumni. One pointed her toward LehmanLive, a comprehensive database on CDOs. She received scores of other data leads. She began putting together charts and visuals, holding off on analysis until she began to see patterns–how Merrill Lynch and Citigroup were the top originators, how collateral became heavily concentrated in subprime mortgages and other CDOs, how the credit ratings procedures were flawed, etc.

“If you just randomly start regressing everything, you can end up doing an unlimited amount of regressions,” she said, rolling her eyes. She says nearly all the work was in the research; once completed,  she jammed out the paper in a couple of weeks.

“It’s an incredibly impressive piece of work,” said Jeremy Stein, a Harvard economics professor who included the thesis on a reading list for a course he’s teaching this semester on the financial crisis. “She pulled together an enormous amount of information in a way that’s both intelligent and accessible.”

Barnett-Hart’s thesis is highly critical of Wall Street and “their irresponsible underwriting practices.” So how is it that she can work for the very institutions that helped create the notorious CDOs she wrote about?

“After writing my thesis, it became clear to me that the culture at these investment banks needed to change and that incentives needed to be realigned to reward more than just short-term profit seeking,” she wrote in an email. “And how would Wall Street ever change, I thought, if the people that work there do not change? What these banks needed is for outsiders to come in with a fresh perspective, question the way business was done, and bring a new appreciation for the true purpose of an investment bank – providing necessary financial services, not creating unnecessary products to bolster their own profits.”

Ah, the innocence of youth.

Here is a copy of the thesis: 2009-CDOmeltdown

Posted in foreclosure fraudComments (1)

Michael Lewis: How a Few Wall Street Outsiders Scored Shorting Real Estate Before the Collapse

Michael Lewis: How a Few Wall Street Outsiders Scored Shorting Real Estate Before the Collapse


This is worth the time to read and watch

By Damien Hoffman The Wall St. Cheat

Posted on March 14 2010

Michael Lewis’s new book, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine,is already #1 at Amazon. Tonight he had some very cool interviews on 60 Minutes discussing how a few Wall Street outsiders made billions shorting real estate, his thoughts on Wall Street bonuses, and more. These videos are highly recommended now that the NCAA brackets are out and the tournaments are over until Thursday:

Go HERE for the powerful videos

Posted in bank of america, bear stearns, bernanke, chase, citi, concealment, conspiracy, corruption, FED FRAUD, foreclosure fraud, forensic mortgage investigation audit, G. Edward Griffin, geithner, george soros, hank paulson, indymac, jpmorgan chase, lehman brothers, michael dell, mozillo, naked short selling, nina, note, onewest, RON PAUL, scam, siva, steven mnuchin, tila, wachovia, washington mutual, wells fargoComments (0)


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