THIS DAY IN HISTORY – Wells and Fargo start shipping and banking company – 1852

Via History.com

Wells Fargo in Mexico

Wells Fargo bank company vintage wooden Stagecoach Stock Photo - Alamy

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That was fast! Wells Fargo already ran out of money for small businesses

Guest Post by Simon Black

I think one of the funniest movies of the 1980s was Brewster’s Millions.

In the movie, Richard Pryor plays Monty Brewster, a minor league baseball player who finds out that he is in line to inherit a vast $300 million fortune.

In order to inherit the money, though, Brewster must spend $30 million over the next 30 days… and if he fails to do so, he forfeits the entire inheritance.

Part of the terms of his inheritance were that Brewster couldn’t buy assets. He couldn’t just acquire a bunch of real estate or expensive paintings. He had to spend the money, not invest it.

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Wells Fargo or the Federal Reserve: Who’s the Bigger Fraud?

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The Wells Fargo bank account scandal took center stage in the news last week and in all likelihood will continue to make headlines for many weeks to come. What Wells Fargo employees did in opening bank accounts without customers’ authorization was obviously wrong, but in true Washington fashion the scandal is being used to deflect attention away from larger, more enduring, and more important scandals.

What Wells Fargo employees who opened these accounts engaged in was nothing more than fraud and theft, and they should be punished accordingly. But how much larger is the fraud perpetrated by the Federal Reserve System and why does the Fed continue to go unpunished? For over 100 years the Federal Reserve System has been devaluing the dollar, siphoning money from the wallets of savers into the pockets of debtors. Where is the outrage? Where are the hearings? Why isn’t Congress up in arms about the Fed’s malfeasance? It reminds me of the story of the pirate confronting Alexander the Great. When accused by Alexander of piracy, he replies “Because I do it with a small boat, I am called a pirate and a thief. You, with a great navy, molest the world and are called an emperor.”

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Wells Fargo’s Problem Emerges: $17 Billion In Junk Energy Exposure

Tyler Durden's picture

When Wells Fargo reported its Q4 earnings last week, the one topic analysts and investors wanted much more clarity on, was the bank’s exposure to oil and gas loans, and much more color on its energy book over concerns that Wells, like most of its peers, was underestimating the severity of the upcoming shale default wave.

And while the company’s earnings call indeed reveals that things are deteriorating rapidly in Wells energy book, perhaps an even bigger concern for Wells investors, which just happens to be the largest US mortgage lender, should be what is going on with its mortgage book. The answer: nothing. In fact, at $64 billion in mortgage applications in the quarter, this was not only a major drop from Q3, but also the lowest since the first quarter of 2014.

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PIN MEET HOUSING BUBBLE 2.0

Housing bubble 2.0 just met Pin 2.0

The 30 Year U.S. Treasury bond yield hit 2.35% yesterday. That is the lowest rate in U.S. history for the 30 Year Treasury. During the deepest darkest depths of the recession in March 2009, after the stock market had fallen over 50%, the yield was 3.5%. One year ago it was yielding 4.0%. Long term interest rates are not controlled by Yellen. They reflect the economic prospects of the country. When they are rising it means the economy is doing well. When they are plummeting to all time lows, the economy is either in recession or headed into recession. Take your pick. No amount of government data manipulation, feel good propaganda spewed by the captured mainstream media, or Ivy League educated Wall Street economist doublespeak, can change the fact this economy is in the dumper and headed much lower. The Greater Depression is resuming its downward march toward inevitable war.

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  • KBH SEES 1Q BOTTOM LINE ABOUT BREAK-EVEN (against expectations of a 17c rise!)
  • KB HOME CFO SAYS FIRST-QUARTER MARGINS EXPECTED TO BE DOWN
  • KB HOME PULLED OUT OF `COUPLE’ HOUSTON LAND DEALS, CEO SAYS
  • LENNAR CFO SAYS MARGINS ARE POISED TO NARROW ON LESS PRICING POWER
  • LENNAR GROSS MARGIN DECLINED & SALES INCENTIVES GREW
  • LENNAR CEO SAYS “ACROSS THE BOARD, WE’RE SEEING INTENSIFIED COMPETITION AS BUILDERS GO OUT AND CHASE VOLUME”

KB Home had revenues of $2.4 billion in 2014. They are one of the largest home builders in the country. It’s stock has dropped 30% in the last few days. It’s down 40% from its February 2014 high. It’s down 85% from its 2005 high. It had $9 billion of revenues and delivered 60,000 homes in 2005. Then Pin 1.0 popped the first bubble. Revenues collapsed to $1.3 billion and they lost hundreds of millions from 2007 through 2012.

Lennar had revenues of $7.0 billion in 2014. They are the largest home builder in the country. It’s stock has dropped 9% this week. It had been trading at a seven year high, but is still trading 33% below its 2005 bubble high. It had $14 billion of revenues and delivered 42,000 homes in 2005. Then Pin 1.0 popped their bubble. Revenues imploded to $3 billion and they also lost hundreds of millions from 2007 through 2012.

Their admissions earlier this week are proof Bubble 2.0 has met Pin 2.0. KB Home’s 85% increase in revenue and Lennar’s 130% increase in revenue since 2011 have been nothing but a Federal Reserve/Wall Street/U.S. Treasury engineered scheme to repair the balance sheets of the insolvent Too Big To Trust Wall Street banks. The financial industry oligarchs and their servile lackey puppet politicians decided an easy money, Wall Street created scheme to boost home prices would benefit the .1% and restore some of their fraudulently acquired wealth. It isn’t a coincidence home prices rose in parallel with the Fed’s QE programs. And it isn’t a coincidence the bubble is rapidly deflating now that QE3 is over.

The fraudulent nature of the supposed housing recovery can be deciphered by analyzing a few pertinent data points. 30 year mortgage rates were in the 5% to 6% range during the first bubble. Mortgage rates have been consistently below 4% for the last three years. In a healthy market driven economy, these low rates should have brought in first time home buyers and led to a sustainable long-term recovery.

Instead, the number of homes bought by first time buyers has languished at record low levels. The majority of homes sold in 2011 and 2012 were distressed foreclosures and short sales, and the vast majority of sales in the last two years have been to Federal Reserve financed Wall Street investors, Chinese billionaires and fast buck flippers. New home sales of just above 400,000 five years into an economic recovery are at previous recession lows, despite record low mortgage rates. They languish 65% below 2005 levels, when KB Home and Lennar were minting money. Existing home sales of 5 million are back at 1999 levels and 30% below the 2005 highs. This pitiful result is after $3.5 trillion of QE, extremely low mortgage rates, and tremendous hype from the NAR and the corporate MSM (It’s always the best time to buy).

The falsity of the housing recovery storyline can be seen in the fact that mortgage applications linger at 1995 levels, even though mortgage rates are 400 basis points lower than they were in 1995. A critical thinking individual might ask how home prices could rise by 20% since 2012 even though mortgage purchase applications are 20% lower than they were in 2012 and 65% below 2005 levels. The answer is they couldn’t have risen by 20% without massive monetary manipulation and insider deals between Wall Street banks, Wall Street hedge funds, FNMA, Freddie Mac, The Fed, and the U.S. Treasury.

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You see, average Americans buy houses not as an investment, but as a place to live. They save enough for a down payment by spending less than they earn, and then make monthly payments for 30 years from their rising household income. Of course, that was the old days. Real median household income is exactly where it was in 1995. It is currently below the level of 1989. Average Americans have made no headway in 20 years. The median price of a home in 1995, according to the Census Bureau, was $128,000. The median price of a home today is $281,000. When prices go up 120% and your real income remains stagnant, even record low mortgage rates is just pushing on a string. With real wages continuing to fall, young people saddled with a trillion dollars of student loan debt, the full impact of the Obamacare neutron bomb (kills small business, doctors and jobs, but not insurance conglomerates or government bureaucracy) just detonating, and an economy clearly going into the tank, there is absolutely no possibility of a real housing recovery in the foreseeable future.

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The Too Big To Trust banks have consistently accounted for 35% to 55% of all mortgage originations in the U.S. over the last four years. Wells Fargo is the undisputed leader. All of these banks have reported dreadful financial results this week, with plunging revenues and profits, even with accounting shenanigans like relieving loan loss reserves and marking their balance sheets to fantasy rather than true market values. In the midst of a supposed housing recovery, with mortgage rates at historic lows, the largest mortgage originator in the world, saw their mortgage originations FALL by 12% over last year. They are down 65% from two years ago. JP Morgan and Citigroup also saw their mortgage businesses contracting. These banks have been firing thousands of people in their mortgage divisions. This is surely a sign of a healthy growing housing market. Right?

Essentially, the entire housing recovery storyline has revolved around the Federal Reserve providing free money to Wall Street banks, who then withheld foreclosures from the market, sold them in bulk at inflated prices to Wall Street hedge funds like Blackstone, who then created a nationwide rental business, driving prices higher. FNMA and Freddie Mac did their part by selling their bulk foreclosures to the same connected hedge funds. The average person had no opportunity to bid on foreclosed homes and reap the benefits of lower prices. Blackstone has since created a new derivative, by packaging their rental income streams into an “investment” to sell to muppets. Their rental properties are concentrated in the previous bubble markets of Arizona, California, Florida, and Nevada. What a beautiful business concept. Free money from their Federal Reserve sugar daddy, kicking people out of their homes and then renting their houses back to them, driving prices higher by restricting supply and stopping new household formations, double dipping by creating a new exotic subprime investment opportunity, and then exiting stage left before it all blows sky high again.

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WALL STREET’S SUBPRIME REDUX

The Wall Street shysters have no morality, conscience or humanity. They are nothing but blood sucking parasites. Their sole purpose is to enrich themselves, while impoverishing their hosts (clients & customers). They destroyed the lives of millions with their fraudulent subprime housing scheme and were bailed out by the very people they screwed. Their hubris and arrogance knows no bounds. With encouragement from their captured central bank and the Obama administration, they are resorting to subprime fraud again in an effort to revive our dead economy. It worked so well the first time with houses, it will surely work a second time with automobiles. They prey upon the ignorant, stupid, and math challenged masses.

The entire engineered auto “recovery” is nothing but an easy money debt financed fraud. It will end in tears for millions and the government will insist you bail out the bankers again.

Via the NYT 

In a Subprime Bubble for Used Cars, Borrowers Pay Sky-High Rates

Rodney Durham stopped working in 1991, declared bankruptcy and lives on Social Security. Nonetheless, Wells Fargo lent him $15,197 to buy a used Mitsubishi sedan.

“I am not sure how I got the loan,” Mr. Durham, age 60, said.

Mr. Durham’s application said that he made $35,000 as a technician at Lourdes Hospital in Binghamton, N.Y., according to a copy of the loan document. But he says he told the dealer he hadn’t worked at the hospital for more than three decades. Now, after months of Wells Fargo pressing him over missed payments, the bank has repossessed his car.

This is the face of the new subprime boom. Mr. Durham is one of millions of Americans with shoddy credit who are easily obtaining auto loans from used-car dealers, including some who fabricate or ignore borrowers’ abilities to repay. The loans often come with terms that take advantage of the most desperate, least financially sophisticated customers. The surge in lending and the lack of caution resemble the frenzied subprime mortgage market before its implosion set off the 2008 financial crisis.

Auto loans to people with tarnished credit have risen more than 130 percent in the five years since the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis, with roughly one in four new auto loans last year going to borrowers considered subprime — people with credit scores at or below 640.

The explosive growth is being driven by some of the same dynamics that were at work in subprime mortgages. A wave of money is pouring into subprime autos, as the high rates and steady profits of the loans attract investors. Just as Wall Street stoked the boom in mortgages, some of the nation’s biggest banks and private equity firms are feeding the growth in subprime auto loans by investing in lenders and making money available for loans.

And, like subprime mortgages before the financial crisis, many subprime auto loans are bundled into complex bonds and sold as securities by banks to insurance companies, mutual funds and public pension funds — a process that creates ever-greater demand for loans.

The New York Times examined more than 100 bankruptcy court cases, dozens of civil lawsuits against lenders and hundreds of loan documents and found that subprime auto loans can come with interest rates that can exceed 23 percent. The loans were typically at least twice the size of the value of the used cars purchased, including dozens of battered vehicles with mechanical defects hidden from borrowers. Such loans can thrust already vulnerable borrowers further into debt, even propelling some into bankruptcy, according to the court records, as well as interviews with borrowers and lawyers in 19 states.

In another echo of the mortgage boom, The Times investigation also found dozens of loans that included incorrect information about borrowers’ income and employment, leading people who had lost their jobs, were in bankruptcy or were living on Social Security to qualify for loans that they could never afford.

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Credit

Many subprime auto lenders are loosening credit standards and focusing on the riskiest borrowers, according to the examination of documents and interviews with current and former executives from five large subprime auto lenders. The lending practices in the subprime auto market, recounted in interviews with the executives and in court records, demonstrate that Wall Street is again taking on very risky investments just six years after the financial crisis.

The size of the subprime auto loan market is a tiny fraction of what the subprime mortgage market was at its peak, and its implosion would not have the same far-reaching consequences. Yet some banking analysts and even credit ratings agencies that have blessed subprime auto securities have sounded warnings about potential risks to investors and to the financial system if borrowers fall behind on their bills.

Pointing to higher auto loan balances and longer repayment periods, the ratings agency Standard & Poor’s recently issued a report cautioning investors to expect “higher losses.” And a high-ranking official at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which regulates some of the nation’s largest banks, has also privately expressed concerns that the banks are amassing too many risky auto loans, according to two people briefed on the matter. In a June report, the agency noted that “these early signs of easing terms and increasing risk are noteworthy.”

Despite such warnings, the volume of total subprime auto loans increased roughly 15 percent, to $145.6 billion, in the first three months of this year from a year earlier, according to Experian, a credit rating firm.

“It appears that investors have not learned the lessons of Lehman Brothers and continue to chase risky subprime-backed bonds,” said Mark T. Williams, a former bank examiner with the Federal Reserve.

In their defense, financial firms say subprime lending meets an important need: allowing borrowers with tarnished credits to buy cars vital to their livelihood.

Lenders contend that the risks are not great, saying that they have indeed heeded the lessons from the mortgage crisis. Losses on securities made up of auto loans, they add, have historically been low, even during the crisis.

Autos, of course, are very different than houses. While a foreclosure of a home can wend its way through the courts for years, a car can be quickly repossessed. And a growing number of lenders are using new technologies that can remotely disable the ignition of a car within minutes of the borrower missing a payment. Such technologies allow lenders to seize collateral and minimize losses without the cost of chasing down delinquent borrowers.

That ability to contain risk while charging fees and high interest rates has generated rich profits for the lenders and those who buy the debt. But it often comes at the expense of low-income Americans who are still trying to dig out from the depths of the recession, according to the interviews with legal aid lawyers and officials from the Federal Trade Commission and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as well as state prosecutors.

While the pain from an imploding subprime auto loan market would be much less than what ensued from the housing crisis, the economy is still on relatively fragile footing, and losses could ultimately stall the broader recovery for millions of Americans.

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Rodney Durham, 60, of Binghamton, N.Y., had his car repossessed.
Rodney Durham, 60, of Binghamton, N.Y., had his car repossessed.Credit Heather Ainsworth for The New York Times

The pain is far more immediate for borrowers like Mr. Durham, the unemployed car buyer from Binghamton, N.Y., who stopped making his loan payments in March, only five months after buying the 2010 Mitsubishi Galant. A spokeswoman for Wells Fargo, which declined to comment on Mr. Durham citing a confidentiality policy, emphasized that the bank’s underwriting is rigorous, adding that “we have controls in place to help identify potential fraud and take appropriate action.”

The Mitsubishi was repossessed last month, leaving Mr. Durham without a car. But his debt ordeal may not be over.

Some lenders go after borrowers like Mr. Durham for the debt that still remains after a repossessed car is sold, according to court filings. Few repossessed cars fetch enough when they are resold to cover the total loan, the court documents show. To get the remainder, some lenders pursue the borrowers, which can leave them shouldering debts for years after their cars are gone.

But for now, Mr. Durham, who is disabled, has a more immediate problem.

“I just can’t get around without my car,” he said.

The Brokers

Outside, the banner proclaimed: “No Credit. Bad Credit. All Credit. 100 percent approval.” Inside the used-car dealership in Queens, N.Y., Julio Estrada perfected his sales pitches for the borrowers, including some immigrants who spoke little English.

Sure, the double-digit interest rates might seem steep, Mr. Estrada told potential customers, but with regular payments, they would quickly fall. Mr. Estrada, who sometimes went by John, and sometimes by Jay, promised others cash rebates.

If the soft sell did not work, he played hardball, threatening to keep the down payments of buyers who backed out, according to court documents and interviews with customers.

The salesman was ultimately indicted by the Queens district attorney on grand larceny charges that he defrauded more than 23 car buyers with refinancing schemes.

Relatively few used-car dealers are charged with fraud. Yet the extreme example of Mr. Estrada comes as some used-car dealers — a business that has long had a reputation for aggressive pitches — are pushing sales tactics too far, according to state prosecutors and federal regulators.

And these are among the thousands of used-car dealers who are working hand-in-hand with Wall Street to sell cars. Court records show that Capital One and Santander Consumer USA all bought loans arranged by Mr. Estrada, who pleaded guilty last year. Since then, Mr. Estrada was indicted on separate fraud charges in March by Richard A. Brown, the Queens district attorney. That case is still pending.

To guard against fraud, the banks say, they vet their dealer partners and routinely investigate complaints. Capital One has “rigorous controls in place to identify any potential issues,” said Tatiana Stead, a bank spokeswoman, adding that last year “we terminated our relationship with the dealership” where Mr. Estrada worked. Dawn Martin Harp, head of Wells Fargo Dealer Services, said that “it’s important to note that not all claims of dealer fraud turn out to be fraud.”

James Kousouros, Mr. Estrada’s lawyer, said that “for those individuals for whom Mr. Estrada bore responsibility, he accepted this and is committed to the restitution agreed to.” Some civil lawsuits filed by borrowers were found to be without merit, he said.

For their part, car dealers note that like any industry they sometimes have rogue employees, but add that customers are overwhelmingly treated fairly.

“There is no place for fraud or any other nefarious activities in the industry, especially tactics that seek to take advantage of vulnerable consumers,” said Steve Jordan, executive vice president of the National Independent Automobile Dealers Association.

In their role as matchmaker between borrowers and lenders, used-car dealers wield tremendous power. They make the pitch to customers, including many troubled borrowers who often believe that their options are limited. And the dealers outline the terms and rates of the loans.

In interviews, more than 40 low-income borrowers described how they were worn down by used car dealers who kept them in suspense for hours before disclosing whether they even qualified for a loan. The seemingly interminable wait, the borrowers said, left them with the impression that the loan — no matter how onerous the terms — was their only chance.

The loans also came with other costs, according to interviews and an examination of the loan documents, including add-on products like unusual insurance policies. In many cases, the examination by The Times found, borrowers ended up shouldering loans that far exceeded the resale value of the car. A reason for that disparity is that some borrowers still owe money on cars that they are trading in when they purchase a new one. That debt is then rolled over into the new loan.

“By the end, they are paying $600 a month for a piece of junk,” said Charles Juntikka, a bankruptcy lawyer in Manhattan.

The dealers have an incentive to increase both the size and the interest rate of the loans.

The arithmetic is simple. The bigger size and rate of the loan, the bigger the dealers’ profit, or so-called markup — the difference between the rate charged by the lenders and the one ultimately offered to the borrowers. Under federal law, dealers do not have to disclose the size of the markup.

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Dolores Blaylock, 51, of Austin, Tex., and her father, Fidencio Muñiz, 84. Like many buyers, she found she had unwittingly purchased an add-on — in her case, a life insurance policy.
Dolores Blaylock, 51, of Austin, Tex., and her father, Fidencio Muñiz, 84. Like many buyers, she found she had unwittingly purchased an add-on — in her case, a life insurance policy.Credit Erich Schlegel for The New York Times

To buy her 2004 Mazda van, Dolores Blaylock, 51, a home health care aide in Austin, Tex., said she unwittingly paid for a life insurance policy that would cover her loan payments if she died.

Her loan totaled $13,778 — nearly three times the value of the van that she uses to shuttle her father, who uses a wheelchair, to his doctor’s appointments.

Now, Ms. Blaylock says she regrets ever buying the van, which frequently breaks down. “I am afraid to drive it out of town,” she said.

In some cases, though, the tactics veer toward outright fraud. The Times’s scrutiny of loan documents, including some produced in litigation, found that some used-car dealers submitted loan applications to lenders that contained incorrect income and employment information. As was the case in the subprime mortgage boom, it is unclear whether borrowers provided incorrect information to qualify for loans or whether the dealers falsified loan applications. Whatever the cause, the result is the same: Borrowers with scant income qualified for loans.

Mary Bridges, a retired grocery store employee in Syracuse, N.Y., said she repeatedly explained to a car salesman that her only monthly income was about $1,200 in Social Security. Still, Ms. Bridges said that the salesman falsely listed her monthly income as $2,500 on the application for a car loan submitted by a local dealer to Wells Fargo and reviewed by The Times.

As a result, she got a loan of $12,473 to buy a 2004 used Buick LeSabre, currently valued by Kelley Blue Book at around half that much. She tried to keep up with the payments — even going on food stamps for the first time in her life — but ultimately the car was repossessed in 2012, just two years after she bought it.

“I have always been told to do the responsible thing, but I said, ‘This is too much,’ ” the 76-year-old widow said.

The dealer agreed to pay Ms. Bridges $1,000 after Syracuse University law students threatened to file a lawsuit accusing the company of violating state and federal consumer protection laws.

But Wells Fargo, which resold the car for $4,500 last July, is still pursuing Ms. Bridges for $2,900 — a total that includes her remaining loan balance and an $835 fee for “cost of repossession and sale,” according to a copy of a letter that Wells Fargo sent to Ms. Bridges last August. (Wells Fargo declined to comment on Ms. Bridges.)

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Shahadat Tuhin, 42, with his daughter Sadia Oishika, 10. He says his auto dealer used deceptive practices.
Shahadat Tuhin, 42, with his daughter Sadia Oishika, 10. He says his auto dealer used deceptive practices.Credit Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

Even when authorities have cracked down on dealers, borrowers are still vulnerable to fraud. Last June, Shahadat Tuhin, a New York City taxi driver, bought a car from Mr. Estrada, the salesman in Queens who less than a year earlier had been indicted.

The charge by the Queens district attorney didn’t keep him out of the business. While his criminal case was pending, the salesman persuaded Mr. Tuhin to buy a used car for 90 percent more than the price he agreed upon. Needing the car to take his daughter, who has a heart condition, to the doctor, Mr. Tuhin said he unwittingly signed for a $26,209 loan with completely different terms than the ones he had reviewed.

Immediately after discovering the discrepancies, Mr. Tuhin, 42, said he tried to return the car to the dealership and called the lender, M&T Bank, to notify them of the fraud.

The bank told him to take up the issue with the dealer, Mr. Tuhin said.

M&T declined to comment on Mr. Tuhin, but said it no longer does business with that dealership.

The Money

Investors, seeking a higher return when interest rates are low, recently flocked to buy a bond issue from Prestige Financial Services of Utah. Orders to invest in the $390 million debt deal were four times greater than the amount of available securities.

What is backing many of these securities? Auto loans made to people who have been in bankruptcy.

An affiliate of the Larry H. Miller Group of Companies, Prestige specializes in making the loans to people in bankruptcy, packaging them into securities and then selling them to investors.

“It’s been a hot space,” Richard L. Hyde, the firm’s chief operating officer, said during an interview in March. Investors are betting on risky borrowers. The average interest rate on loans bundled into Prestige’s latest offering, for example, is 18.6 percent, up slightly from a similar offering rolled out a year earlier. Since 2009, total auto loan securitizations have surged 150 percent, to $17.6 billion last year, though some estimates have put the total volume even higher. To meet that rising demand, Wall Street snatches up more and more loans to package into the complex investments.

Much like mortgages, subprime auto loans go through Wall Street’s securitization machine: Once lenders make the loans, they pool thousands of them into bonds that are sold in slices to investors like mutual funds, pensions and hedge funds. The slices that include loans to the riskiest borrowers offer the highest returns.

Rating agencies, which assess the quality of the bonds, are helping fuel the boom. They are giving many of these securities top ratings, which clears the way for major investors, from pension funds to employee retirement accounts, to buy the bonds. In March, for example, Standard & Poor’s blessed most of Prestige’s bond with a triple-A rating. Slices of a similar bond that Prestige sold last year also fetched the highest rating from S.&P. A large slice of that bond is held in mutual funds managed by BlackRock, one of the world’s largest money managers.

Private equity firms have also seen the opportunity in auto subprime lending. A $1 billion investment by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., Centerbridge Partners and Warburg Pincus in a large subprime lender roughly doubled in about two years. Typically, it takes private equity firms three to five years to reap significant profit on their investments.

It is not just the private equity firms and large banks that are fanning the lending boom. Major insurance companies and mutual funds, which manage money on behalf of mom-and-pop investors, are also snapping up securities backed by subprime auto loans.

While there are no exact measures of how many of these loans end up on banks’ balance sheets, interviews with consumer lawyers and analysts suggest the problem is spreading, propelled by the very structure of the subprime auto market.

The vast majority of banks largely rely on dealers to screen potential borrowers. The arrangement, which means the banks rarely meet customers face to face, mirrors how banks relied on brokers to make mortgages.

In some cases, consumer lawyers say, the banks actually ignore complaints by borrowers who accuse dealers of fabricating their income or even forging their signatures.

“Even when they are presented with clear evidence of fraud, the banks ignore it,” said Peter T. Lane, a consumer lawyer in New York. “The typical refrain is, ‘It’s not our problem, take it up with the dealer.’ ”

It could quickly become the banks’ problem, analysts say, if questionable loans sour, causing losses to multiply.

For now, the banks are not pulling back. Many are barreling further into the auto loan market to help recoup the billions in revenue wiped out by regulations passed after the 2008 financial crisis.

Wells Fargo, for example, made $7.8 billion in auto loans in the second quarter, up 9 percent from a year earlier. At a presentation to investors in May, Wells Fargo said it had $52.6 billion in outstanding car loans. The majority of those loans are made through dealerships. The bank also said that as of the end of last year, 17 percent of the total auto loans went to borrowers with credit scores of 600 or less. The bank currently ranks as the nation’s second-largest subprime auto lender, behind Capital One, according to J. D. Power & Associates.

Wells Fargo executives say that despite the surge, the credit quality of its loans has not slipped. At the May presentation, Thomas A. Wolfe, the head of Wells Fargo Consumer Credit Solutions, emphasized that the overall quality of its auto loans was improving. And Tatiana Stead, the Capital One spokeswoman, said that Capital One worked “to ensure we do not follow the market to pursue growth for growth’s sake.”

Prestige says its loans experience relatively low losses because borrowers have discharged many of their other debts in bankruptcy, freeing up more cash for their car payments. Another advantage for the lender: No matter how tough things get for troubled borrowers, federal law prevents them from escaping their bills through bankruptcy for at least another seven years.

“The vast majority of our customers have been successful with their loans and leave us with a much higher credit score,” said Mr. Hyde, Prestige’s chief operating officer.

The Risks

All it took was three months.

Dolores Jackson, a teacher’s aide in Jersey City, says she thought she could handle the $540 a month on the 2012 Chevy Malibu she bought in January 2013.

But the payments on the $27,140 loan from Exeter Finance, which is owned by Blackstone, quickly overwhelmed her, and she prepared to declare bankruptcy in April.

“I was drowning,” she said.

Other borrowers have also found themselves quickly overwhelmed by car loan payments.

Even after getting a second job at Staples, Alicia Saffold, 24, a supply technician at the Fort Benning military base in Georgia, could not afford the monthly payments on her $14,288.75 loan from Exeter. The loan, according to a copy of her loan document reviewed by The Times, came with an interest rate of nearly 24 percent. Less than a year after she bought the gray Pontiac G6, it was repossessed.

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 Marcelina and Jonathan Mojica, and their dog, Lilly. “The car gets more money than what we put in our fridge,” Mr. Mojica said.
 Marcelina and Jonathan Mojica, and their dog, Lilly. “The car gets more money than what we put in our fridge,” Mr. Mojica said.Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times

In the case of Marcelina Mojica and her husband, Jonathan, they are keeping up with their payments on their $19,313.45 Wells Fargo auto loan — but just barely. They are currently living in a homeless shelter in the Bronx.

“The car gets more money than what we put in our fridge,” said Mr. Mojica, 28. Such examples of distress underscore the broader strains within the subprime auto loan market.

Exeter Finance declined to comment on Ms. Saffold or Ms. Jackson, but Blackstone, its parent company, emphasized that the credit quality of its lender’s loans was improving and that it worked hard to ensure its customers received the best rates. To ensure the accuracy of loan documents, Blackstone said, employees vet both dealers and borrowers.

“Exeter Finance believes it’s important to provide people with the option to finance transportation essential to their livelihood,” said Mark Floyd, the company’s chief executive.

Still, financial firms are beginning to see signs of strain. In the first three months of this year, banks had to write off as entirely uncollectable an average of $8,541 of each delinquent auto loan, up about 15 percent from a year earlier, according to Experian.

Some investors think the time is right to start selling their holdings. Earlier this year, for example, private equity firms, including K.K.R., sold most of their stake in the subprime auto lender, Santander Consumer USA, when the lender went public. Since the company’s initial public offering, the stock has fallen more than 16 percent.

While losses from soured car loans would be far less than those on subprime mortgages, the red ink could still deal a blow to the banks not long after they recovered from the housing bust. Losses from auto loans might also cause the banks to further retrench from making other loans vital to the economic recovery, like those to small business and would-be homeowners.

In another sign of trouble ahead, repossessions, while still relatively low, increased nearly 78 percent to an estimated 388,000 cars in the first three months of the year from the same period a year earlier, according to the latest data provided by Experian. The number of borrowers who are more than 60 days late on their car payments also jumped in 22 states during that period.

As a result, some rating agencies, even those that had blessed auto loan securitizations with high ratings, are starting to question the quality of the loans backing those securities, and warn of losses that investors could suffer if the bonds start to sour. Describing the potential trouble ahead, Kevin Cole, an analyst with Standard & Poor’s, said, “We believe these trends could lead to higher losses and weakened profitability in a few years.”

If those losses materialize, they could pummel a wide range of investors, from pension funds to insurance companies to mutual funds held by Americans preparing for retirement. For the huge baby-boomer generation, including many whose savings were sapped by the 2008 crisis and the ensuing recession, any losses from the auto loan securities could deal them another setback.

“Borrowers are haunted by this debt, and it can crater their credit scores, prevent them from getting other loans and thrust them even further onto the financial margins,” said Ahmad Keshavarz, a consumer lawyer in New York.

Some borrowers are stuck making payments on loans that were fraudulently made by dealers, according to an examination of dozens of lawsuits against dealers. There are no exact measures of just how many people whose cars have been repossessed end up in this predicament, but lawyers for borrowers say that it is a growing problem, and one that points to another element of subprime auto lending.

Thanks to an amendment to the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul, the vast majority of dealers are not overseen by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Since its start in 2010, the agency has earned a reputation for aggressively penalizing lenders, but it has limited authority over dealers.

The Federal Trade Commission, the agency that does oversee the dealers, has cracked down on certain questionable practices. And although the agency has won a number of cases against dealers for failing to accurately disclose car costs and other abuses, it has not taken aim at them for falsifying borrowers’ incomes, for example.

Photo

Alicia Saffold, 24, received a loan with an interest rate of nearly 24 percent. Her car was soon repossessed.
Alicia Saffold, 24, received a loan with an interest rate of nearly 24 percent. Her car was soon repossessed.Credit Tami Chappell for The New York Times

And the help is not coming fast enough for borrowers like Mr. Durham, the retiree in Binghamton; Mr. Tuhin, the taxi driver in Queens; or Ms. Saffold, the technician in Georgia.

“Buying the car was the worst decision I have ever made,” Ms. Saffold said.

LARGEST MORTGAGE LENDER IN THE WORLD HAS A 58% PLUNGE IN MORTGAGE ORIGINATIONS

The MSM was certainly quiet about Wells Fargo’s shitty 2nd quarter results where they saw revenue fall, while using accounting entries to relieve loan loss reserves to generate a fraudulent miniscule profit. Wells Fargo is the largest mortgage lender in the world. The number of mortgage originations crashed by 58% versus last year. A critical thinking individual might ask how we could be experiencing a strong housing recovery with skyrocketing price appreciation if the largest mortgage lender in the world is experiencing a crash in their mortgage lending business, with a 39% decline in mortgage banking income. Luckily, there are few critical thinking people in the country and none in the captured mainstream media who are touting these shitty results as solid. 

It’s amazing how much profit you can generate with accounting entries. The brilliant CEO of Wells Fargo reduced his provision for future losses by $435 million versus last year, therefore generating the standard EPS beat required by the Wall Street shysters. The economy is currently in recession, subprime auto loans are beginning to go bad, the housing recovery fraud will lead to future mortgage losses, and student loan debt is a ticking time bomb. So Wells Fargo dramatically reduces the amount set aside for bad debt losses. Just like they were doing in 2007.

They are also desperately trying to sell their student loan portfolio before it becomes an exploding cigar in their faces. I’m sure Obama and his minions will pay top dollar to acquire that subprime slime. The brilliant bankers at Wells Fargo increased auto loans by 11% as everyone knows consumers with less and less household income are great credit risks. If you can fog a mirror, you can get a 7 year auto loan. What could possibly go wrong? 

Even the criminal banking cabal can no longer crank out fraudulent profits to prop up their stock prices. This little game of extend, pretend and defend their criminal acts and fraudulent accounting is growing long in the tooth. The collapse is coming. You will not be warned. It will happen over a weekend. On Monday they will have changed the rules. You will be the loser. Take your money out of the banks.

LARGEST MORTGAGE LENDER IN THE WORLD

How exactly did home prices skyrocket by 14% last year? Inquiring minds want to know how you can have a healthy housing recovery with rising home prices when mortgage originations are 74% below 2012 levels at the largest mortgage lender on the planet. Somebody ask Lyin Larry Yun from the National Association of Realtoors or Steve Liesman at CNBC. I’m sure they have a truthful answer backed up by facts.  

Via Zero Hedge

 

SUBPRIME AUTO NATION

Have you heard the news? Auto sales are booming. Total sales for the month of August were 1,285,202 vehicles, according to Autodata Corp, the highest monthly sales figure for any August since 2007, when 1.47 million autos were sold in the United States. Year to date auto sales have totaled 9.7 million and are on track to reach 14.5 million. Between 2006 and 2007, auto sales ranged between 16 million and 18 million. They crashed below 10 million in 2009. The Keynesians running our government have pulled out all the stops to restart this engine of consumer spending. First they wasted $3 billion of taxpayer funds on the Cash for Clunkers debacle. Almost 700,000 perfectly good cars were destroyed in order to keep union workers happy.  This Keynesian brain fart distorted the used car market for two years, raising prices for cars needed by the working poor. After that miserable failure, they realized the true secret to selling vehicles is to give them away to anyone that can scratch an X on a loan document, with 0% interest for 60 months, financed by Federal government controlled banking interests. Add in some massive channel stuffing and presto!!! – You’ve got an auto sales boom.

General Motors sales are up 3.7% over 2011. Ford Motors sales are up 6% over 2011. The Obama administration continues to tout their saving of the U.S. auto industry with their bailout in 2009 that saved unions and screwed bondholders. If this strong auto recovery is not an illusion, how do you explain the two charts below? General Motors stock is down 42% since 2011. The highly proclaimed success story called Ford Motors has seen their stock collapse by 50% since 2011. This is surely a sign of tremendous success and anticipation of soaring profits for these bastions of American manufacturing dominance.

Chart forGeneral Motors Company (GM)

Chart forFord Motor Co. (F)

This is America, land of the delusional and home of the vain. The appearance of success is more important than actual success. The corporate mainstream media dutifully reports the surge in auto sales is surely a sign the economy is recovering and the consumer has finished deleveraging and is ready to spend again. The government propaganda machine proclaims the surging auto sales are due to their wise and forward thinking policies (like the Chevy Volt). Luckily for them, there are millions of gullible Americans who believe the storyline and are easily convinced that driving a $30,000 new car, financed over seven years, makes them a success. The decades of Bernaysian marketing propaganda has worked its magic on the government educated, math challenged citizenry. There are only two things that matter to the non-thinking auto buyer (renter) – the monthly payment and what the next door neighbor and his coworkers will think. Buying a fuel efficient car they can afford, paying it off in three or four years, and driving it for ten years, while saving the monthly car payment, is what a practical, rational thinking person would do. The fact that only 20% of the 9.7 million vehicles sold this year have been small cars and the average sales price of new cars sold is now $31,000 proves Americans are still living in a delusional fantasyland of cheap gas and monthly payments for eternity.

As gas prices surpass $4 per gallon across the country, somehow 4.7 million of the 9.7 million vehicles sold in 2012 have been pickups, vans, crossovers or SUVs. Three of the top eight selling vehicles are pickups. Luxury vehicle sales are booming, with Mercedes, BMW, Porsche, Land Rover and Audi showing double digit percentage sales gains over 2011. We’ve entered a recession, gas prices are approaching all-time highs, job growth is pitiful, and Americans continue to buy luxury gas guzzlers on credit. This will surely end well.

The average payment on a new car in 2012 is $461. For used cars, the average monthly payment is $346. Today, 77% of new car purchases are financed. About half of all used vehicles involve financing. Of those cars financed, 89% are through a loan vs. 11% with a lease. A critical thinking person might wonder how a country with 4 million less employed people than we had in 2007, median household net worth down 35%, and real wages lower than they were in 2007, could be experiencing an auto boom. The answer is a government/corporate/banker/media effort to funnel taxpayer funds to deadbeats across the land in a fruitless attempt to create a facade of recovery. Our governing elite are convinced that more debt peddled to the masses is the path to recovery for an economy that imploded due to excessive debt peddled to the masses in the first place. Essentially, it comes down to who benefits from the peddling of debt. It isn’t the masses, as they become enslaved in the chains of debt and monthly payments in perpetuity. Debt peddling benefits Wall Street bankers, politicians, and mega-corporations selling crap to the masses.

The storyline being sold to the vegetative dupes (watching Honey Boo Boo) that occupy space in this delusional paradise we call America, by the corporate media, is that consumers have deleveraged and are ready to resume their “normal” pattern of spending money they don’t have on stuff they don’t need. Of course, the facts always seem to get in the way of a good yarn. Consumers have never deleveraged. Consumer credit outstanding is at an all-time high of $2.58 trillion. The decline from $2.55 trillion in 2008 to $2.4 trillion in 2010 was NOT deleveraging. It was the Wall Street Too Big To Fail banks taking a big dump on the American taxpayers. They passed their bad debts to you through TARP, the Federal Reserve buying their toxic “assets”, and ZIRP. 

Revolving credit (credit card) debt peaked at just above $1 trillion in 2008 and “declined” to $850 billion during 2010.  The media storyline is that you buckled down and paid off your credit cards, therefore depressing consumer spending and creating a recession. Sounds convincing except for the fact that it’s a load of bullshit. The Federal Reserve’s own data proves it to be false. Your friendly Wall Street banks have written off $213 billion of credit card debt since 2008 and passed the bill to the few remaining taxpayers in this country. For the math challenged, this means that consumers have actually INCREASED their credit card debt by $68 billion since 2008. The bad news for our Chinese crap peddling mega-retailers is that the significantly poorer average middle class American household is using their credit cards to pay their property tax bills, IRS bills, and utility bills in order to survive.  

Credit Card Charge-off in Dollars 2005 – 2011 — Not Seasonally Adjusted:

Year Dollar Amount
2011 $46,017,459,671
2010 $75,090,106,350
2009 $83,179,901,000
2008 $53,506,353,600
2007 $38,149,440,000
2006 $32,111,934,400
2005 $40,634,994,400
Year & Quarter Dollar Amount
2012Q1 $8,772,385,443

 

The category of debt that barely budged in the 2009 collapse was non-revolving credit. It stayed in the $1.5 trillion range in 2009 and has since surged to over $1.7 trillion in 2012. What could possibly have made this debt skyrocket by $200 billion when the GDP has only grown by 12% over the same time frame? You guessed it – your corporate fascist friends in Washington DC and on Wall Street. Non-revolving debt consists of auto loan debt of $663 billion and student loan debt of approximately $1 trillion. Student loan debt has shot up by $300 billion since 2008. This student loan debt is being distributed, like candy by a pedophile, from the Federal government in an effort to artificially hold down the unemployment rate.

Approximately $500 billion of the student loan debt is held directly by the Federal government, up from $100 billion in 2008. The Feds guarantee the majority of the remaining student loan debt. Can you think of a more subprime borrower than a 40 year old former construction worker getting a liberal arts degree from the University of Phoenix, sitting at his computer in his underwear scratching his balls, and paying with a $10,000 Federal student loan from you? This fraudulent attempt to obscure the true employment situation will end in tears for the borrowers and the American taxpayer. It’s tough to make a loan payment without a job. The student loan bailout is just over the horizon and will cost you at least $300 billion. Delinquencies are already off the charts.

        

When has offering low interest debt in ample portions to people without jobs, income or assets ever backfired before? The bankers and politicians that control this country seem to be a one-trick pony. They will never admit that debt is the problem and reducing it the solution. The real solution would make them poorer, so their solution is to pour gasoline on the fire with more debt at lower interest rates to more people. The addict will keep injecting more poison into their system until sudden death. The bankers and politicians know we are a car-centric society and appeal to our vanity and poor math skills to keep the game going.     

During the first quarter of this year, total U.S. car loans totaled $52.5 billion. That’s 49% higher than the same period in 2009. Also during the first quarter, the average amount financed on new vehicles rose by $589, to $25,995, and for used cars by $411, to $17,050. Furthermore, buyers are stretching out payments for longer terms: The average length of new- and used-vehicle loans jumped a full month during the first three months of this year, to 64 and 59 months, respectively. The surge in auto sales is being completely driven by doling out more loans for a longer time frame to deadbeat borrowers. Subprime auto loans now make up 45% of all car loans and the vast majority of all used car loans.  They have even created a category called Deep Subprime. Borrowers classified as “deep subprime” (i.e. those with Vantage scores below 600) account for 10.7% of auto loans. You can also classify them as loans that will never be repaid.

 

Two thirds of all car sales are for used cars, so the fact that 37% of all new cars are being sold to subprime borrowers is exacerbated by the ridiculous lending practices for used cars. The fine folks at Zero Hedge have provided the outrageous data and a chart that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt what awaits the American taxpayer – another bailout. Zero Hedge has already revealed the GM fake recovery by detailing their channel stuffing over the last two years. Now they’ve dug up more dirt on why car sales are surging. What could possibly go wrong providing loans for more than the value of the asset to people with a history of not paying their debts?

  • Subprime borrowers received 56.46% of loans on used cars in the quarter, up from 52.70% a year earlier.
  • The average loan-to-value on new cars was 109.55%
  • The average used car loan-to-value ratio rose to 126.62%
  • 77% of Subprime Auto Loans are for a period greater than five years

It’s amazing how many cars you can sell when you aren’t worried about getting paid. This is the beauty of a fiat currency, a printing press, and a taxpayer available to pick up the tab after the drunken party gets out of hand. The chart below provides the details of our superhighway to disaster. The percentage of used car loans to prime borrowers is now at an all-time low, while the percentage of loans to subprime borrowers is near all-time highs reached just prior to the 2008 crash. When lenders cared about being paid back in the early 2000’s, they rarely made loans longer than five years. Today, more than 77% of all subprime used car loans are longer than five years and average FICO scores are now well below 600. Just to clarify – if your FICO score is below 600 – YOU ARE A DEADBEAT.

When you start to connect the dots, things that didn’t seem to make sense begin to crystallize. This is all part of the master plan concocted by Bernanke, Geithner, Obama and the Wall Street Shysters. The auto section of my local paper now makes sense. Offers of 7 year financing at 0% interest and monthly lease offers of $150 to $200 for brand new cars now are understandable. The newer model BMWs, Cadillac Escalades, Volvos, and Jaguars I see parked in front of the low income luxury gated townhome community in West Philadelphia now makes sense. A pizza delivery guy driving a new Lexus is now explainable.   

The master plan is fairly simple. The Federal Reserve lends money to the Wall Street banks for 0% interest. These banks then turn around and provide credit card debt at 13% interest, new & used car loans to prime borrowers at 5% interest, and new & used car loans to subprime borrowers at 16%. When you can borrow for free, you can take a chance that a significant number of your borrowers will default. Essentially, Ben Bernanke is screwing the prudent savers and senior citizens by paying them 0.15% on their savings in order to subsidize the bankers that destroyed the country so they can make auto loans to the same people who took out the zero percent down interest only no doc mortgage loans in 2005. In addition, Wall Street knows the Bernanke Put is still in place. If and when these subprime loans explode in their faces again, Bennie, Timmy and Obamaney will come to the rescue with your tax dollars. Its heads you lose, tails you lose, again.    

 The chart below is like a who’s who of TARP recipients. The top 20 auto lenders control half the market. And look at the leader of the pack. Our friends at Ally Bank are the market share leader. You remember Ally Bank – they conveniently changed their name from GMAC (also known as Ditech – biggest subprime mortgage lender) after losing billions and being bailed out by you. They still owe you $11 billion and are 85% owned by the U.S. Treasury. No conflict of interest there. You have the biggest auto lender on earth controlled by the Obama administration. Do you think they have an incentive to make as many loans as humanly possible to help Obama create the illusion of an auto recovery? The only downside is for the American taxpayer when we have to eat billions more in Ally/GMAC losses. This insolvent excuse for a lending institution has been extremely aggressive in the subprime auto lending market and has forced the other wannabes – Wells Fargo, JP Morgan, Capital One and Bank of America – to lower their lending standards. Does this scenario ring a bell? 

top_20_car_lenders_market_share

We’ve become a subprime auto nation, addicted to easy debt, living lives of hope, delusion and minimum monthly payments. Storylines about economic recovery, fraudulent government statistics showing lower unemployment, feel good propaganda from the corporate mainstream media, and a return to easy money debt fueled spending does not constitute a real recovery. Until the bad debt is purged from the system and saving takes precedence over spending, the country will stagger and ultimately fall under the weight of its immense debt. We are lost in a blizzard of lies. This subprime fueled engine of recovery will propel the country into the same canyon of reality we entered in 2008. The crack up boom approaches.

 

survival seed vault

 

80 YEARS LATER – SAME CULPRITS, SAME RAGE

The young man stands on the edge of his porch
The days were short and the father was gone
There was no one in the town and no one in the field
This dusty barren land had given all it could yield

I’ve been kicked off my land at the age of sixteen
And I have no idea where else my heart could have been
I placed all my trust at the foot of this hill
And now I am sure my heart can never be still
So collect your courage and collect your horse
And pray you never feel this same kind of remorse

Dust Bowl Dance – Mumford & Sons

langesquatter.jpg (31737 bytes) 

The song from Mumford & Sons called Dust Bowl Dance is as pertinent to today as it was in describing the Great Depression.   I was taken by the lyrics and the rage in the song. The setting for the song is the Dust Bowl of the 1930’s in the US Midwest. Picture the Joads in Grapes of Wrath. As I listened to the song again this morning I was struck by the similarities between the time period described in the song and our present situation.

The lyrics by Marcus Mumford tell the story of a young man who’s lost everything. His family is either dead or forced off their land. My interpretation of the lyrics is that the bank has foreclosed on his farm after their crops failed during the dust bowl. I picture a Mr. Potter like character who held the mortgages on all the farms and houses in a small community. The evil banker didn’t care that families had lived on this land for decades, raising their families along with the crops. These hard working farmers had done nothing wrong. They were victims of circumstances. But bankers didn’t care about ruining lives. The family farmers didn’t participate in the Roaring 20’s, borrow on margin to invest in stocks, or reap ungodly profits. The farmers were victims of land speculators and bad weather. The only son in the song took the law into his own hand and shot the evil banker. He was ready to do his time, because his act was righteous payback.

Eighty years ago the last Fourth Turning was also in its infancy. They generally last 15 to 20 years. The catalyst for the last Fourth Turning was the great stock market crash of 1929.   The 1920s “boom” enriched only a fraction of the American people. Earnings for farmers and industrial workers stagnated or fell. Farmers were barely getting by during the roaring 20s. Only the Wall Street crowd was getting rich.  The economic growth of the 1920s did not reach most Americans: 60% of American families earned less than the amount necessary to support their basic needs ($2,500 was considered enough to support a family’s basic needs). The agricultural sector was similarly stagnant: farm prices dropped after World War I when Europe again began to feed itself and new grain exports from South American further depressed prices. The lack of purchasing power of rural people and farmers resulted in declines in consumer purchasing in those areas, as well as increased defaults on debt. Rural, urban, and suburban consumers began to increase their personal debts through mortgages, car loans, and installment plans to buy consumer goods, such as radios.

The ever-growing price for stocks was, in part, the result of greater wealth concentration within the investor class. Eventually the Wall Street stock exchange began to take on a dangerous aura of invincibility, leading investors to ignore less optimistic indicators in the economy.  Over-investment and speculating (gambling) in stocks further inflated their prices, contributing to the illusion of a robust economy.

The crucial point came in the 1920s when banks began to loan money to stock-buyers since stocks were the hottest commodity in the marketplace. Wall Street banks encouraged Wall Street investors to use the stocks themselves as collateral. When stocks dropped in value, and investors could not repay the banks, the banks were left holding near-worthless collateral. Banks went broke, pulling productive businesses down with them as they called in loans and foreclosed mortgages in a desperate attempt to stay afloat. The Federal Reserve was responsible for regulating the banks. They were responsible for the easy money policies during the 1920s. The biggest financial institutions in the country included: Citibank, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan & Co., Chase National Bank, and Wells Fargo. Sound familiar?

The Great Depression was caused by the Federal Reserve and their owners, the biggest Wall Street banks, aiding and abetting reckless speculation, greed and extreme risk taking with mountains of debt. The rich got richer and the poor got poorer. The income inequality in the U.S. reached an all-time peak in 1928. It stayed at a high level until World War II. The glory years of the American Empire were from 1941 through 1979, when the middle class was growing, and the income distribution in the country was fair and equitable, as our manufacturing based economy raised all boats.

The income inequality in the country reached the same extreme level in 2007, just prior to the Wall Street created financial implosion. It has not improved in the last four years. In the early 1930s there was the feeling of revolution in the air. With unemployment at 25% and people in desperate straits, the government feared communists or fascists gaining power. The New Deal was really a way to keep the citizens occupied so that a revolution would not take hold. There was much anger towards the bankers and aristocracy who caused the Great Depression. The anger is reflected in the Mumford & Sons lyrics:

Your oppression reeks of your greed and disgrace
So one man has and another has not
How can you love what it is you have got
When you took it all from the weak hands of the poor?
Liars and thieves you know not what is in store

Dust Bowl Dance – Mumford & Sons

The 2008 financial crash was caused by loose Federal Reserve monetary policies, lack of Federal Reserve regulation over criminally reckless Wall Street banks, and incredible levels of bad debt rampant throughout our economic system. The true unemployment rate today is 23%. Another parallel between the early 1930s and today can be seen in the chart below. Almost 11,000 banks, or 40% of all the banks in the U.S., went out of business. Predictably, these were all small banks. None of the connected Wall Street banks went out of business. They benefitted, as 40% of their competition disappeared. Too Big to Fail existed 80 years ago. You may also note that savers were punished, as interest paid on savings plunged from 5% to below 1% and the earnings of middle class workers collapsed.

1929 1933
Banks in operation 25,568 14,771 
Prime interest rate 5.03% 0.63%
Volume of stocks sold (NYSE) 1.1 B 0.65 B
Privately earned income $45.5B $23.9B
Personal and corporate savings $15.3B $2.3B

Historical Statistics of the United States, pp. 235, 263, 1001, and 1007.

 

During the early years of the current depression more than 400 banks have gone insolvent and another 800 banks are on the FDIC endangered species list. Therefore, approximately 15% of all the banks in the U.S. will no longer compete with the Wall Street banks that caused the financial crisis. Since 2008, the top five biggest banks in the U.S. have dramatically increased their market share and power. They are: Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and Goldman Sachs. Amazing how the exact same banks that caused the 1929 and the 2008 market crashes came out unscathed and more powerful after each crisis.

  FDIC Bank Failures

The mainstream media tries to convince the American public that the stock market going up means the economy is improving and they are doing better. The chart below shows that the stock market bottomed in 1932 and proceeded to go up almost 500% by 1937. It’s too bad only the bankers and richest people in society could afford to own stocks. While the stock market soared, the average person struggled to survive. Only the privileged stock owners prospered. The common man suffered.

The unemployment rate remained at elevated levels until World War II. The New Deal policies of Franklin Roosevelt did not end the Great Depression. The common man had trouble putting bread on their table during the entire decade of the 1930’s. The storyline about FDR’s Keynesian spending ending the Depression is false.

The 1930s were filled with seething anger. The Liberty League and Father Charles Coughlin, the Rush Limbaugh of his time, used anti-communist and socialist rhetoric to convince millions of Americans that the model used in Nazi Germany was better than FDR’s New Deal policies. This pushed Roosevelt further to the left against big business and toward more socialist programs to insure getting the votes of the poor. These were bleak days in our country’s history. General Smedley Butler revealed a plot to overthrow the Roosevelt administration and replace it with a fascist dictatorship. The country roiled with furious rage.

In 1932, approximately 80 years ago, 43,000 marchers (17,000 veterans) descended upon Washington D.C.  The Bonus Expeditionary Force, also known as the “Bonus Army”, marched on Washington to advocate the passage of the “soldier’s bonus” for service during World War I.  They set up a camp with tents to bring attention to their cause. After Congress adjourned, bonus marchers remained in the city and became unruly. On July 28, 1932, two bonus marchers were shot by police, causing the entire mob to become hostile and riotous. The government turned the U.S. military upon its citizens. Army cavalry units led by General Douglas MacArthur dispersed the Bonus Army by riding through it and using gas. Fifty five veterans were injured and 135 were arrested. Critics of the marchers described them as communists, troublemakers, and criminals.

Fast forward 80 years and we have protestors setting up camp in a public square, not far from where the same exact banks that caused the Great Depression have created the Greater Depression. The biggest Wall Street banks have gotten bigger. The Federal Reserve, in collusion with the Wall Street banks, has engineered a two year stock market rally, while the average American has seen their wages decline, food and energy prices soar, home prices fall, and banks paying them .1% on their savings. Anger and disillusionment continue to build in this country like a volcano preparing to blow. Some people are angry at Washington politicians. Some are angry at Wall Street. Others aren’t sure who to be angry at. The evil oligarchy of bankers, corporate titans, and bought off Washington politicians that control the agenda and mainstream media, continue to scorn, ridicule and denigrate the middle class of America. Their financial engineering is failing. They’ve gone too far. The debt accumulation is unsustainable. The mood of the country has darkened and talk of revolution and the shadow of impending violence is growing.

The Great Depression was not an event, it was an era. It was an era of discontent, pain, suffering, and ultimately war and death. The people who lived through this era have mostly died off. We have entered a new similar era. The average citizen sees the American Dream of a better life slipping away due to the corruption, greed, and immorality of our political and financial systems. The Federal Reserve’s current chosen mandate is to make the stock market go up, while impoverishing the middle class. The 1% better hope the police and military continue to obey their orders, because the 99% are angry and heavily armed. This Fourth Turning has ten to fifteen years to go. Every previous Fourth Turning has included violence, war and death on an epic scale. Winter has arrived and it will be a long arduous journey until we reach Spring. The choices we make in the next few years will decide the fate of our country. I hope we choose wisely.

 

“Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun.”

Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

There will come a time I will look in your eye
You will pray to the God that you always denied
The I’ll go out back and I’ll get my gun
I’ll say, “You haven’t met me, I am the only son”

Dust Bowl Dance – Mumford & Sons

EXTEND & PRETEND IS WALL STREET’S FRIEND

“We now have an economy in which five banks control over 50 percent of the entire banking industry, four or five corporations own most of the mainstream media, and the top one percent of families hold a greater share of the nation’s wealth than any time since 1930.   This sort of concentration of wealth and power is a classic setup for the failure of a democratic republic and the stifling of organic economic growth.” Jesse – http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/

Source: Barry Ritholtz

“All of the old-timers knew that subprime mortgages were what we called neutron loans — they killed the people and left the houses.” – Louis S. Barnes, 58, a partner at Boulder West, a mortgage banking firm in Lafayette, Colo

The storyline that has been sold to the public by the Federal government, Wall Street, and the corporate mainstream media over the last two years is the economy is recovering and the banking system has recovered from its near death experience in 2008. Wall Street profits in 2009 & 2010 totaled approximately $80 billion. The stock market has risen almost 100% since the March 2009 lows. Wall Street CEOs were so impressed by this fantastic performance they dished out $43 billion in bonuses over the two year period to their thousands of Harvard MBA paper pushers. It is amazing that an industry that was effectively insolvent in October 2008 has made such a spectacular miraculous recovery. The truth is recovery is simple when you control the politicians and regulators, and own the organization that prints the money.

A systematic plan to create the illusion of stability and provide no-risk profits to the mega-Wall Street banks was implemented in early 2009 and continues today. The plan was developed by Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson, Tim Geithner and the CEOs of the criminal Wall Street banking syndicate. The plan has been enabled by the FASB, SEC, IRS, FDIC and corrupt politicians in Washington D.C. This master plan has funneled hundreds of billions from taxpayers to the banks that created the greatest financial collapse in world history. The authorities had a choice. This country has bankruptcy laws. The criminally negligent Wall Street banks could have been liquidated in an orderly bankruptcy. Their good assets could have been sold off to banks that did not take their extreme greed based risks. Bond holders and stockholders would have been wiped out. Today, we would have a balanced banking system, with no Too Big To Fail institutions. Instead, the years of placing their cronies within governmental agencies and buying off politicians paid big dividends for Wall Street. Their return on investment has been fantastic.

The plan has been as follows:

  • In April 2009 the FASB caved in to pressure from the Federal Reserve, Treasury, and Wall Street to suspend mark to market rules, allowing the Wall Street banks to value their loans and derivatives as if they were worth 100% of their book value.
  • The Federal Reserve balance sheet consistently totaled about $900 billion until September 2008. By December 2008, the balance sheet had swollen to $2.2 trillion as the Federal Reserve bought $1.3 trillion of toxic assets from the Wall Street banks, paying 100 cents on the dollar for assets worth 50% of that value.

  • In November 2009 the Federal Reserve and IRS loosened the rules for restructuring commercial loans without triggering tax consequences. Banks were urged to extend loans on properties that had fallen 40% in value as if they were still worth 100% of the loan value.
  • By December 2008 the Federal Reserve had moved their discount rate to 0%. For the last two years, the Wall Street banks have been able to borrow from the Federal Reserve for free and earn a risk free return of 2%. The Federal Reserve has essentially handed billions of dollars to Wall Street.
  • When it became clear in October 2010 that after almost two years of unlimited liquidity being injected into the veins of zombie banks was failing, Ben Bernanke announced QE2. He has expanded the Fed balance sheet to $2.6 trillion by injecting $3.5 billion per day into the stock market by buying US Treasury bonds. Bernanke’s stated goal has been to pump up the stock market. While taking credit for driving stock prices higher, he denies any responsibility for the energy and food inflation that is spurring unrest around the world.
  • The Federal Reserve has increased the monetary base by $500 billion in the last three months in a desperate attempt to give the appearance of recovery to a floundering economy.

FRED Graph

  • Beginning on December 31, 2010, through December 31, 2012, all noninterest-bearing transaction accounts are fully insured, regardless of the balance of the account, at all FDIC-insured institutions.  The unlimited insurance coverage is available to all depositors, including consumers, businesses, and government entities. This unlimited insurance coverage is separate from, and in addition to, the insurance coverage provided to a depositor’s other deposit accounts held at an FDIC-insured institution.

When You’re Losing – Change the Rules

Wall Street banks had absolutely no problem with mark to market rules from 2000 through 2007, as the value of all their investments soared. These banks created products (subprime, no-doc, Alt-A mortgages) whose sole purpose was to encourage fraud. Their MBA geniuses created models that showed that if you packaged enough fraudulent loans together and paid Moody’s or S&P a big enough bribe, they magically became AAA products that could be sold to pension plans, municipalities, and insurance companies. These magnets of high finance were so consumed with greed they believed their own lies and loaded their balance sheets with the very toxic derivatives they were peddling to the clueless Europeans. They didn’t follow a basic rule. Don’t crap where you sleep. When the world came to its senses and realized that home prices weren’t really worth twice as much as they were in 2000, investment houses began to collapse like a house of cards. The AAA paper behind the plunging real estate wasn’t worth spit. After Lehman Brothers collapsed and AIG’s bets came up craps for the American people, the financial system rightly froze up.

After using fear and misinformation to ram through a $700 billion payoff to Goldman Sachs and their fellow Wall Street co-conspirators through Congress, it was time begin the game of extend and pretend. Market prices for the “assets” on the Wall Street banks’ books were only worth 30% of their original value. Obscuring the truth was now an absolute necessity for Wall Street. The Financial Accounting Standards Board already allowed banks to use models to value assets which did not have market data to base a valuation upon. The Federal Reserve and Treasury “convinced” the limp wristed accountants at the FASB to fold like a cheap suit. The FASB changed the rules so that when the market prices were not orderly, or where the bank was forced to sell the asset for regulatory purposes, or where the seller was close to bankruptcy, the bank could ignore the market price and make up one of its own. Essentially the banking syndicate got to have it both ways. It drew all the benefits of mark to market pricing when the markets were heading higher, and it was able to abandon mark to market pricing when markets went in the toilet. 

“Suspending mark-to-market accounting, in essence, suspends reality.” – Beth Brooke, global vice chair, at Ernst & Young

Wall Street desired all the billions of upside from creating new markets for new products. Their creativity knew no bounds as they crafted MBOs, MBSs, CDOs, CDSs, and then chopped them into tranches, selling them around the world with AAA stamps of approval from the soulless whore rating agencies. When the net result of a flawed system of toxic garbage paper was revealed, there was no room at the exits for the stampede of investment bankers. The toxic paper was on the banks’ books and no one wanted to admit the greed induced decision to purchase these highly risky, volatile “assets”. The trade had not gone bad, the ponzi scheme had unraveled. Suspending FASB 157 has been an attempt to hide this fraudulent business model from investors, regulators and the public. By hiding the true value of these assets, the financial system has never cleared. The banks remain in a zombie vegetative state, with the Federal Reserve providing the IV and the life support system.

Let’s Play Hide the Losses

Part two of the master cover-up plan has been the extending of commercial real estate loans and pretending that they will eventually be repaid. In late 2009 it was clear to the Federal Reserve and the Treasury that the $1.2 trillion in commercial loans maturing between 2010 and 2013 would cause thousands of bank failures if the existing regulations were enforced. The Treasury stepped to the plate first. New rules at the IRS weren’t directly related to banking, but allowed commercial loans that were part of investment pools known as Real Estate Mortgage Investment Conduits, or REMICs, to be refinanced without triggering tax penalties for investors.

 

The Federal Reserve, which is tasked with making sure banks loans are properly valued, instructed banks throughout the country to “extend and pretend” or “amend and pretend,” in which the bank gives a borrower more time to repay a loan. Banks were “encouraged” to modify loans to help cash strapped borrowers. The hope was that by amending the terms to enable the borrower to avoid a refinancing that would have been impossible, the lender would ultimately be able to collect the balance due on the loan. Ben and his boys also pushed banks to do “troubled debt restructurings.” Such restructurings involved modifying an existing loan by changing the terms or breaking the loan into pieces. Bank, thrift and credit-union regulators very quietly gave lenders flexibility in how they classified distressed commercial mortgages. Banks were able to slice distressed loans into performing and non-performing loans, and institutions were able to magically reduce the total reserves set aside for non-performing loans.

If a mall developer has 40% of their mall vacant and the cash flow from the mall is insufficient to service the loan, the bank would normally need to set aside reserves for the entire loan. Under the new guidelines they could carve the loan into two pieces, with 60% that is covered by cash flow as a good loan and the 40% without sufficient cash flow would be classified as non-performing. The truth is that billions in commercial loans are in distress right now because tenants are dropping like flies. Rather than writing down the loans, banks are extending the terms of the debt with more interest reserves included so they can continue to classify the loans as “performing.” The reality is that the values of the property behind these loans have fallen 43%. Banks are extending loans that they would never make now, because borrowers are already grossly upside-down.

Extending the length of a loan, changing the terms, and pretending that it will be repaid won’t generate real cash flow or keep the value of the property from declining. U.S. banks hold an estimated $156 billion of souring commercial real-estate loans, according to research firm Trepp LLC. About two-thirds of commercial real-estate loans maturing at banks from now through 2015 are underwater. Media shills proclaiming that the market is improving, doesn’t make it so. The chart below details the delinquency rates from 2007 through 2010 as reported by the Federal Reserve:

  Real estate loans Consumer loans
All Booked in domestic offices All Credit cards Other
Residential Commercial
2010 4th Qtr 9.01  9.94  7.97  3.71  4.17  3.10 
2010 3rd Qtr 9.77  10.90  8.69  4.03  4.60  3.39 
2010 2nd Qtr 10.02  11.32  8.74  4.25  5.07  3.37 
2010 1st Qtr 9.78  10.97  8.66  4.63  5.76  3.48 
2009 4th Qtr 9.48  10.29  8.74  4.64  6.36  3.48 
2009 3d Qtr 9.00  9.67  8.57  4.72  6.51  3.61 
2009 2nd Qtr 8.19  8.69  7.84  4.85  6.75  3.69 
2009 1st Qtr 7.19  7.89  6.55  4.62  6.50  3.52 
2008 4th Qtr 5.99  6.57  5.49  4.29  5.65  3.37 
2008 3rd Qtr 4.88  5.26  4.66  3.73  4.80  3.05 
2008 2nd Qtr 4.21  4.39  4.15  3.55  4.89  2.80 
2008 1st Qtr 3.56  3.70  3.50  3.48  4.76  2.76 
2007 4th Qtr 2.89  3.06  2.75  3.41  4.60  2.66 
2007 3rd Qtr 2.40  2.78  1.98  3.20  4.41  2.48 
2007 2nd Qtr 2.01  2.30  1.63  2.99  4.02  2.37 
2007 1st Qtr 1.77  2.03  1.43  2.93  3.97  2.29 

 

Delinquency rates on residential and commercial loans in early 2007 were in the range of 1.5% to 2.0%. Now the MSM pundits get excited over a decline from 8.7% to 8.0%. These figures show that even after trillions of Federal Reserve and Federal Government intervention, delinquencies remain four times higher than normal. In the real world, cash flow matters. Payment of interest and principal on a loan matters. Actual market values matter. According to Trepp, LLC, a data firm specializing in commercial data, non-performing commercial real estate loans makes up 72% of the $320 million in non-performing loans reported by banks in February. These figures are after the “extremely” relaxed definition of non-performing allowed by the Federal Reserve. The game is ongoing. Misinformation abounds. The SEC now issues press releases saying they are worried that banks are covering up losses, when they were involved in encouraging the banks to cover-up their losses. Last week the SEC announced they have become concerned that extend and pretend, along with another practice known as “troubled debt restructuring” that allows banks to break loans into pieces, may have been abused in order to diminish the volume of reserves banks are holding. What a shocking revelation. Who could have known?

Are You Smarter than a Wall Street CEO?

The Federal Reserve paid shills and Wall Street front men are out in droves declaring that TARP was a success and the banking system is recovering strongly. Columnists like Robert Samuelson declare  TARP was a great investment and will profit the taxpayer. Samuelson says that the Treasury has recouped $244 billion of the $245 billion it invested in banks and that, when it winds down its last investments, it likely will show a $20 billion profit from the banks. This type of propaganda is ludicrous, as Barry Ritholtz succinctly points out:

“No, we are not profitable on the bailouts. TARP has $123B to go before breakeven, and the GSEs are $133B in the hole. All told, the Taxpayers have a long way to go before we are breakeven. That’s before we count lost income from savings, bonds, etc., the increased costs of food stuff and energy due to inflation (the Fed’s has done this on purpose as part of their rescue plan), the higher fees the reduced competition of megabanks has created, and the future costs our Moral Hazard will have wrought in increased risks and disasters.”Barry Ritholtz

Source: Barry Ritholtz

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have hundreds of billions in bad loans sitting on their balance sheets. Their total cost to taxpayers will reach $400 billion, and never be repaid. The Federal Reserve has over $1 trillion in toxic assets on its balance sheet, off loaded by the TARP recipient banks in 2009. The taxpayer will never be repaid for this toxic waste. The government is implementing the Big Lie theory. If you tell a big lie often and loud enough, the non-thinking masses will believe it. That leaves us with today’s fantasy world.

The reality on the ground does not match the rhetoric coming from the government, Wall Street and the corporate mainstream media. The truth is as follows:

  • The vacancy rate for office space in the U.S. is currently 16.5%.
  • The vacancy rate for industrial space in the U.S. is currently 14.2%.
  • The vacancy rate for retail space in the U.S. is currently 13%.
  • Delinquencies within collateralized debt obligations in commercial real estate loans rose to 14.6% in February. The increase signals a trend of higher delinquencies in the segment. Signs of pressure surfaced as early as January when the delinquency rate on CDOs within commercial real estate loans hovered well above 13%.
  • According to Moody’s, CRE prices are down 4.3% from a year ago and down about 43% from the peak in 2007.
  • The delinquency rate on loans packaged and sold in commercial mortgage-backed securities rose to a record 9.2% in February, according to a March 15 report by Moody’s.
  • Regional and local community banks have as much as 80% of their balance sheets tied up in commercial real estate, and very few other sources of significant fee income to offset CRE losses.
  • CRE once had an estimated national value of $6.5 trillion.  Today it stands at an optimistic $3.5 trillion.
  • There are 1.8 million homes seriously delinquent, in the foreclosure process or REO that are not currently listed for sale.
  • There are about 2 million current negative equity loans that are more than 50% “upside down”.
  • Home prices are off 31.3% from the peak. The Composite 20 is only 0.7% above the May 2009 post-bubble bottom and will probably be at a new post-bubble low soon.

In the face of this data, mouthpieces for the Federal Reserve go before Congress and try to paint an optimistic picture. “While we expect significant ongoing CRE-related problems, it appears that worst-case scenarios are becoming increasingly unlikely,” Patrick Parkinson, the Federal Reserve’s director of banking supervision and regulation, told Congress. Parkinson said that since the beginning of 2008 through the third quarter of 2010, commercial banks had incurred almost $80 billion of losses from commercial real estate exposures. Banks are estimated to have taken roughly 40% to 50% of losses they will incur over this business cycle, he said.

The Federal Reserve will be forced by the Federal Courts to reveal the banks they have saved from failure since 2008 by funneling billions of practically interest free tax payer dollars into their hands. The Fed is expected to release this week documents related to discount window lending from August 2007 to March 2010, including the peak month of October 2008, when loans hit $111 billion. It will be revealed they kept alive hundreds of banks that should have died. Shockingly, the supposedly taxpayer protecting Dodd-Frank law exempts past discount window lending from an audit by the Government Accountability Office, that’s examining much of the central bank’s other crisis-era programs. That champion of the little people, Barney Frank, said such disclosures might have “a negative market effect. If people saw the data the next day, they come to the conclusion that the bank must be in trouble.” Openness and transparency are evidently grey areas for Mr. Frank. Despite the non-disclosures, free Fed bucks, accounting fraud and uninterested regulators, over 300 banks managed to go out of business in the last two years, essentially bankrupting the FDIC. Have no fear. The Treasury gave the FDIC an unlimited line of credit with your money.

 

It is fascinating that every Friday afternoon the FDIC announces approximately three bank failures. Steady as she goes. No panic. Just a slow trickle of failure. But the reality is much worse than the show. Despite the gimmicks of extending and pretending, there are 900 banks essentially insolvent sitting on the FDIC “Problem” list. This is after closing the 300 banks. There are at least a couple hundred billion of losses in the pipeline, to be funded by the American people/Chinese lenders. A critical thinking American might ask, if things are getting better, why does the number of troubled banks continue to rise week after week, month after month?

One year ago the website www.businessinsider.com listed the 10 major regional banks with the highest risk from commercial real estate loans. These 10 banks had $133 billion of commercial real estate loans on their books. Most, if not all, are still in business today. The fact is those real estate loans are worth 30% to 50% less than they are being carried on the books. A true valuation of these loans would put all 10 of these banks out of business. They are dead banks walking. In a world where transparency, honesty, and true free markets reigned supreme, these banks would pay for their poor risk taking choices. They would be liquidated and their assets would be sold off to banks that did not make horrific lending decisions. Failures would fail.  

Bank CRE Loans (bil.) % of Tier 1 Capital
NY Community Bank $22.0 915%
Wintrust Financial Corp. $3.4 419%
M&T Bank $20.8 378%
Synovus $11.2 376%
Wilmington Trust $4.0 369%
Marshall & Iisley $13.8 283%
Zions Bancorporation $13.4 253%
Regions Financial $28.3 218%
UMB Bank $1.3 156%
Comerica $14.3 97%

 

How could anyone deny the world is back on track after examining the following chart?

 

It should warm your heart to know that Financial Profits have amazingly reached their pre-crash highs. All it took was the Federal Reserve taking $1.3 trillion of bad loans off their books, overstating the value of their remaining loans by 40%, borrowing money from the Fed at 0%, relying on the Bernanke Put so their trading operations could gamble without fear of losses, and lastly by pretending their future losses will be lower and relieving their loan loss reserves. The banking industry didn’t need to do any of that stodgy old school stuff like make loans to small businesses. Extending and pretending is much more profitable. 

The big four of JP Morgan, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo should have undergone orderly bankruptcy liquidation in 2008. They took on a vast amount of leverage and a vast amount of risk. Their greedy bets went bad. In a true capitalist system, they would have failed. Instead, in our crony capitalist system, they were bailed out by taxpayers and continue to function as zombie banks pretending to be healthy. They reported profits of $34.4 billion in 2010. Every dime of these profits was generated through accounting entries that relieved their provisions for loan losses. These “brilliant” CEOs who virtually destroyed the worldwide financial system in 2008, looked into their crystal balls and decided their loan losses in the future would be dramatically lower. I’ll take the other side of that bet. I dug into their SEC filings to get the information in the chart below. Just the fact that Citicorp and Bank of America have still not filed their 10K reports after 3 months tells a story.

Bank   Source CRE Mortgages Credit Card Total Loans Loss Reserve % of Loans
JP Morgan 12/31 10K $53,635 $174,211 $137,676 $692,927 $32,266 4.7%
Citicorp 9/30 10Q $79,281 $209,678 $216,759 $654,311 $43,674 6.7%
Bank of America 9/30 10Q $77,062 $394,007 $142,298 $933,910 $43,581 4.7%
Wells Fargo 12/31 10K $129,783 $337,105 $22,375 $757,267 $23,022 3.0%

 

These four “Too Big To Fail” bastions of crony capitalism have $340 billion of commercial real estate loans on their books. That’s a lot of extending and pretending. Just properly valuing those loans at their true market value would wipe out most of their loan loss reserves. I wonder if Vikrim and his buddies have noticed that home prices have begun to plunge again. Deciding to not foreclose on home occupiers that haven’t made a mortgage payment in two years is not a long term strategy. These four banks have $1.1 billion of outstanding mortgage debt on their books. I wonder what a 20% further decline in home prices will do to these loans. Throw in another half a billion of credit card loans to Americans being hammered by soaring energy and food prices and you have a toxic mix of future losses. These banks are gonna need a bigger boat.

The game of extend and pretend at the expense of the American working middle class is growing old. When this game is over, Wall Street will be looking for another bailout. The American people will not fall for the lies again. Wall Street’s oppression reeks of greed and disgrace. They are liars and thieves. They have pillaged and stolen all that was left to steal. I will be surprised if they get out alive.

Well you are my accuser, now look in my face
Your opression reeks of your greed and disgrace
So one man has and another has not
How can you love what it is you have got
When you took it all from the weak hands of the poor?
Liars and thieves you know not what is in store

There will come a time I will look in your eye
You will pray to the God that you always denied
The I’ll go out back and I’ll get my gun
I’ll say, “You haven’t met me, I am the only son”

Dust Bowl Dance – Mumford & Sons