Re: SC50

http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney09182007.html

..........It would interesting to know if Paulson still believes that “This is far and away the strongest global economy I’ve seen in my business lifetime”, or if he has adjusted his thinking as troubles in subprime, commercial paper, private equity, and credit continue to mount?

For weeks we’ve been saying that the banks are in trouble and do not have the reserves to cover their losses. This notion was originally pooh-poohed by nearly everyone. But it’s becoming more and more apparent that it is true. We expect to see many bank failures in the months to come. Prepare yourself. The banking system is mired in fraud and chicanery. Now the schemes and swindles are unwinding and the bodies will soon be floating to the surface.

“Structured finance” is touted as the “new architecture of financial markets”. It is designed to distribute capital more efficiently by allowing other market participants to fill a role which used to be left exclusively to the banks. In practice, however, structured finance is a hoax; and undoubtedly the most expensive hoax of all time. The transformation of liabilities (dodgy mortgage loans) into assets (securities) through the magic of securitization is the biggest boondoggle of all time. It is the moral equivalent of mortgage laundering. The system relies on the variable support of investors to provide the funding for pools of mortgage loans that are chopped-up into tranches and duct-taped together as CDOs (collateralized debt obligations). It’s madness; but no one seemed to realize how crazy it was until Bear Stearns blew up and they couldn’t find bidders for their remaining CDOs. It’s been downhill ever since.
The problems with structured finance are not simply the result of shabby lending and low interest rates. The model itself is defective.

John R. Ing provides a great synopsis of structured finance in his article, “Gold: The Collapse of the Vanities”:

"The origin of the debt crisis lies with the evolution of America's financial markets using financial engineering and leverage to finance the credit expansion…. Financial institutions created a Frankenstein with the change from simply lending money and taking fees to securitizing and selling trillions of loans in every market from Iowa to Germany. Credit risk was replaced by the "slicing and dicing" of risk, enabling the banks to act as principals, spreading that risk among various financial institutions….. Securitization allowed a vast array of long term liabilities once parked away with collateral to be resold along side more traditional forms of short term assets. Wall Street created an illusion that risk was somehow disseminated among the masses. Private equity too used piles of this debt to launch ever bigger buyouts. And, awash in liquidity and very sophisticated algorithms, investment bankers found willing hedge funds around the world seeking higher yielding assets. Risk was piled upon risk. We believe that the subprime crisis is not a one off event but the beginning of a significant sea change in the modern-day financial markets.”

The investment sharks who conjured up “structured finance” knew exactly what they were doing. They were in bed with the ratings agencies----off-loading trillions of dollars of garbage-bonds to pension funds, hedge funds, insurance companies and foreign financial giants. It’s a swindle of epic proportions and it never would have taken place in a sufficiently regulated market.

When crowds of angry people are huddled outside the banks to get their money, the system is in real peril. Credibility must be restored quickly. This is no time for Bush’s “free market” nostrums or Paulson’s soothing bromides (he thinks the problem is “contained”) or Bernanke’s feeble rate cuts. This requires real leadership...............