JohnDenver wrote:JPL wrote:We have passed Hubbard's Peak.
Hubbard's Peak. Oh my god. You mean the end of the world due to depletion of dog bones in the cupboard?
You? Thought you were officially "burned out," presumably from drinking billions of barrels of Kool Aid.
Here Comes The Option ARM ExplosionThese are the ultimate in 'exploding mortgages.' The number of these recasts is relatively small right now -- at about $1 billion per month -- but that number is set to grow dramatically over the next few years, exceeding $8 billion per month in the fall of 2011. If the equity in your house is gone and your monthly mortgage payment suddenly jumps from $2000 per month to over $3000 per month, what do you think is going to happen? How about if one or both of the people in the household has been laid off?
This is going to be a huge problem, particularly for Wells Fargo (WFC). The biggest writer of these abominations of housing finance vehicles was Golden West, which was bought by Wachovia, which was then absorbed into WFC. Unlike sub-prime mortgages, these were for the most part targeted at more upscale homeowners. The next wave of foreclosures will be in gated communities, not on the 'wrong side of the tracks.'
Commercial Loans to Bear Brunt of Future US Bank Losses“Since US banks hold about half of US-originated debt, the US banking and securities industry will incur about $750 billion to $1 trillion of the remaining $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion of projected losses on this debt, which includes residential mortgages, commercial mortgages, credit card losses, and high-yield/leveraged debt, McKinsey says. These numbers are in the same range as those of the US government, which calculated a $600 billion high-end estimate of credit losses for the 19 largest institutions.” Since the middle of 2007, the US banking and securities industry has absorbed some $490 billion of losses, or $80 billion per quarter.
If the industry incurs additional losses of $1 trillion in 2009 and 2010, the losses will be about $125 billion a quarter … these losses will be concentrated in commercial-banking loans. Importantly, many of these losses will be concentrated in the banks that the stress tests revealed to be undercapitalized, McKinsey says. The five most undercapitalized major banks under the stress tests were Bank of America Corp., Wells Fargo & Co., GMAC LLC, Citigroup Inc. and Morgan Stanley.
Blah blah blah
May 12:
Was It a Sucker's Rally ? - WSJ.comA rising market means that banks are able to raise much-needed equity from private money funds instead of from the feds. And last Thursday, accompanying this flood of new money, came the reassuring results of the bank stress tests.
The next day Morgan Stanley raised $4 billion by selling stock at $24 in an oversubscribed deal. Wells Fargo also raised $8.6 billion that day by selling stock at $22 a share, up from $8 two months ago. And Bank of America registered 1.25 billion shares to sell this week. Citi is next. It's almost as if someone engineered a stock-market rally to entice private investors to fund the banks rather than taxpayers.
Can you see why I believe this is a sucker's rally?
The stock market still has big hurdles to clear. You can have a jobless recovery, but you can't have a profitless recovery. Consider: Earnings are subpar, Treasury's last auction was a bust because of weak demand, the dollar is suspect, the stimulus is pork, the latest budget projects a $1.84 trillion deficit, the administration is berating investment firms and hedge funds saying "I don't stand with them," California is dead broke, health care may be nationalized, cap and trade will bump electric bills by 30% . . . Shall I go on?
Of course that's
just the US.
