Last week, I offered to wager a friend that, “In the next three years, Fannie Mae will be engaged in a variety of business activities which are market sensitive. …” Old Doom friend Bill Maloni often has unique insight, but this time he’s brought us something special. He’...

Bazllionaire Wilbur Ross, a man who's made a big play on mortgage servicing rights and who's waiting until the US government ":gets real" on the terms it offers to private investors before he jumps into the bailout of broken financial institutions, had some interesting opinions about the proposed bo...

Arguably, this process involves sales price fraud, a seller concession (in contrast to the claimed "charitable gift"), unlicensed lending, money laundering, and defrauding the Federal government (the FHA has no way of knowing which loans have "real" downpayments and which are bei...

… there is still sturdy demand for Treasuries from abroad; foreigners refused to dump them even when they lost confidence in mortgage-backed debt last year . But America cannot take things for granted. [1] The full Economist article has a lot more nuance, but the underlying message is clear. S...

Freddie and Fannie aren't the only big loan investors who have been issuing massive loan "put backs" to their loan sellers. They've recently been joined by GMAC's Residential Funding Co., which, according to the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal, "has nearly tripled the number of lawsuits it’s...

It seems that Bank of America didn't really appreciate that unexpected $15.4 billion dollar 4th quarter loss by Merrill Lynch — because its former CEO, John Thain has been shown the door. From Bloomberg: Thain, who in September negotiated the sale of Merrill with Bank of America CEO Kenneth Le...

The Wall Street Journal broke a story today that, thus far, has been ignored by most of the rest of the main stream media. It's Friday and Bank of America's and Citigroup's woes dominate the banking stories. Yet, this one's a little gem for those of us who appreciate irony. Beal Bank, headquartered ...

To no one's surprise, (certainly not ours), first lien residential mortgage loan cramdowns will soon be coming to a bankruptcy court near you. Although we haven't seen the bill yet, Dick Durbin's office announced today that he, Chuck ("Bank Run") Schumer and Chris ("I Boinked Princess Leia") Dodd, h...

The collapsing British housing market was dealt a further blow yesterday after the Bank of Ireland said it was dramatically scaling back its UK mortgage operation, with the loss of at least 600 jobs. The bank, which has more than £29bn invested in British mortgages, also said it was closing do...

Shortly before New Years Day, Housing Wire broke the story that the FDIC's negotiations to sell most of IndyMac to a consortium of Wall Street sharks private equity funds was being held up by mortgage loan buyback demands made by Fannie Mae. While one source stated that Fannie Mae often had a hard t...