MBS- FNMA 4.5 price: 100-14
10-yr Treasury Yield: 3.73%
From The Huffington Post:
New Mexico’s House of Representatives voted (65-0) Monday to pass a bill that allows the state to move $2 billion – $5 billion of state funds to credit unions and small banks. Link to article…
MBS- FNMA 4.5 price: 100-23
10-yr Treasury Yield: 3.64%
From OpenSecrets.org:
Finance, Insurance and Real Estate concerns contributed $476 million towards influencing the 2008 election:
From The Washington Post:
Even the pros are taking a beating. The Mortgage Bankers Association, its membership expert in real estate, sold its $90 million headquarters in downtown Washington on Friday for $41 million.
The three-year-old, 10-story building at 1331 L St. NW — built just before the office market soured — was bought by the CoStar Group, a commercial real estate information firm that plans to move its headquarters from Bethesda to the District. The city, which has been negotiating with CoStar for several months, offered the company a $6 million break on its property taxes to lure it from Maryland.
“We have a huge demand for space for our headquarters. This was too great an opportunity to pass up,” said Andrew Florance, chief executive of CoStar Group. “It’s a quality building at a rock-bottom price,” he added. “We think we’ll save tens of millions of dollars over the next decade.”
The sale comes as commercial real estate troubles are rapidly multiplying in the Washington area. At least 20 percent of commercial properties in the region are worth less than their mortgages, experts say, compared with less than 1 percent before the recession. Link to article…
From the Huffington Post:
Bailout watchdog and middle-class advocate Elizabeth Warren is accusing Wall Street CEOs of abusing the public’s trust and is challenging them to step up and support financial reform — for the nation’s benefit as well as their own.
In an opinion piece in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal, Warren writes that the lack of strong consumer rules has set off a competition to see which firms can make the most profits by tricking the most consumers.
For years, Wall Street CEOs have thrown away customer trust like so much worthless trash.
Banks and brokers have sold deceptive mortgages for more than a decade. Financial wizards made billions by packaging and repackaging those loans into securities. And federal regulators played the role of lookout at a bank robbery, holding back anyone who tried to stop the massive looting from middle-class families. When they weren’t selling deceptive mortgages, Wall Street invented new credit card tricks and clever overdraft fees. Link to article…
MBS- FNMA 4.5 price: 101-09
10-yr Treasury Yield: 3.58%
MBS- FNMA 4.5 price: 101-10
10-yr Treasury Yield: 3.59%
MBS- FNMA 4.5 price: 101-11
10-yr Treasury Yield: 3.57%
Week 1, February 2010
In my continuing effort to keep you informed it’s my goal today to frame some of my support for the financial reform bill H.R. 4173 that passed the House in December— and is currently stalled in the Senate— which is intended to reinstate the bulk of the provisions from the 1930s-era Glass-Steagall Act that prohibited federally-insured banking entities from engaging in securities trading. More than a year into the Obama administration now, since financial regulation has not been passed, we continue to face the same perils in the financial industry that have been present since President Clinton repealed Glass-Steagall in 1999. This excerpt regarding the Glass-Steagall separation in banking from the article link below sums it up well:
“This setup worked splendidly for more than six decades, until the rules were changed to permit the merger of the two types of banking activity, which never would have happened had President Ronald Reagan renamed Volcker as head of the Fed back in 1987. To reappoint Volcker would have been the logical move given his spectacular record in taming inflation, which he brought down to 3.6 percent after it had risen to 11.3 percent thanks to the energy crisis of 1979. Reagan went with Alan Greenspan instead because of their shared ideological fervor for unfettered free markets. But the repeal of Glass-Steagall required bipartisan support, and that eventually came with the presidency of Bill Clinton, who reappointed Greenspan and his fellow free-market ideologues Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers to head the Treasury Department. They joined forces with the Wall Street lobby, and as a result Glass-Steagall was repealed in 1999 when Clinton signed the law eliminating it.” Link to article…
Please note that in October of 2008, when questioned by the Oversight Committee of the House of Representatives, Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan candidly admitted that his approach to deregulating markets was fundamentally flawed. Please see this transcript of the exchange with the committee chairman Rep. Henry Waxman:
REP. HENRY WAXMAN: Dr. Greenspan, you had an ideology, you had a belief, that free, competitive—and this is your statement: “I do have an ideology. My judgment is that free, competitive markets are by far the unrivaled way to organize economies. We’ve tried regulation. None meaningfully worked.” That was your quote.
You had the authority to prevent irresponsible lending practices that led to the subprime mortgage crisis. You were advised to do so by many others. And now our whole economy is paying its price. Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?
ALAN GREENSPAN: Well, remember that what an ideology is is a conceptual framework with the way people deal with reality. Everyone has one. You have to. To exist, you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not. And what I’m saying to you is, yes, I’ve found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is, but I’ve been very distressed by that fact.
But if I may, may I just finish an answer to the question previously posed?
REP. HENRY WAXMAN: You found a flaw in the reality—
ALAN GREENSPAN: Flaw in the model that I perceived as the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works, so to speak.
REP. HENRY WAXMAN: In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right. It was not working.
ALAN GREENSPAN: That it had a—precisely. No, that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I’ve been going for forty years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.
As I stated at the top, it’s my intention to keep you informed. As we stand at press time, our financial system continues to operate with the same lack of regulation that led to where we have arrived today where consumer banking and securities trading are comingled, where a derivatives market worth HUNDREDS OF TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS is completely unregulated, and where we all are held hostage by a system that enables massive lobbying of Washington politicians to persistently effect stalls on meaningful legislation to address these well-known financial market flaws. It affects us all, and it’s very important that we all become informed and involved in the process of changing it. Thanks for reading and thanks for being informed and involved.
See here for more about the arguments in favor of financial reform.
To contact me about financing your dream-home click here.
Weekend Wanderer’s Events
…finding the treasures in your town and beyond.
Two for This Weekend:
Independent Film Fest at the Roxie in SF: “Rasta prophets, slacker romantics, Iranian rockers, shakespearian vampires, escaped princesses, dysfunctional crime families, superman’s secrets, and Hitchcock remixes to your liking? All these and many more will be playing February 4-18 at the world-famous Roxie Theater on 16th between Valencia and Guerrero.” Just over a block from the 16th St BART station.
Alexander/Alexandria: The Flowering of Hellenistic Culture: ”Humanities West presents Alexander/Alexandria: The Flowering of Hellenistic Culture, a 2-day program of lectures, discussions, and presentations of art & poetry exploring the interplay of Greek learning, literature, & art with Egyptian, Persian, & Hebrew cultures that emerged in Alexandria following the death of Alexander the Great.”
Help Your Fellow Living Beings:
Cooking for a Cause – Room to Read Fundraiser with Parties That Cook:”Join Parties That Cook® and Crushpad Winery for an evening of delicious food and wine at Cooking For a Cause, an evening benefitting Room to Read. Room to Read is an international education non-profit organization dedicated to bringing the life-long gift of education to millions of children across the developing world.”
Two Weekends from Now:
G. Love and Special Sauce at the Fillmore: If you can imagine the genres of jazz, country, rock n’ roll, and hip-hop all mixed together, there you will find G. Love and Special Sauce. Here is a video link of one of their most recent popular songs. This is next Thursday night at the historic Fillmore in San Francisco. Looks like a great show for a fun time!
Pic of the Week… from my phone camera:
“Rock, Wire, Sunset” in Loma Rica
From CNNMoney.com:
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Bank of America spent $4.4 billion last year on its Wall Street bankers , according to a person familiar with the matter.
The nation’s largest bank used 19% of the $23 billion in revenues it generated in 2009 within its markets and investment banking businesses to pay workers’ salaries benefits as well as year-end bonuses.
That works out to an average of about $440,000 per employee. The bank has roughly 10,000 workers in its markets and investment banking units.
Bob Stickler, a spokesman for Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500), would not confirm the figures, although he said that the company tried to walk a fine line when it structured worker pay this year.
“We are trying to balance the need to pay competitively and to respond to concerns about the level of compensation on Wall Street,” said Stickler. Link to article…
MBS- FNMA 4.5 price: 100-30
10-yr Treasury Yield: 3.67%
From CNNMoney.com:
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — President Obama will call on Congress Tuesday to recycle $30 billion of the remaining Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds into a new government lending program offering super-cheap capital to community banks that boost their small business lending this year. Link to article…
From McClatchy.com:
A five-month McClatchy investigation reveals how Wall Street colossus Goldman Sachs peddled billions of dollars in shaky securities tied to subprime mortgages on unsuspecting pension funds, insurance companies and other investors when it concluded that the housing bubble would burst. Link to article…
From The Baseline Scenario:
The White House is floating, ever so gently, the notion that they are open to nominations for the position of “Tim Geithner’s Successor.”
It’s not clear if they mean this job is likely to be advertised formally sometime in 2012 or 20 minutes after the November midterms. Nor is it obvious if this is a real request for proposals – it could be just an effort to make critics “put up or shut up.”
Fortunately, there is an entirely plausible successor already in waiting, ready now or whenever the president finally realizes the need to fundamentally change banking policy. Link to article…