The Nation: Home Sweet Gone

Home Sweet Gone
Nomi Prins



Behind every great bubble and its subsequent bust lies the power of Wall Street's trading operations. In the case of our national housing market saga and toxic subprime fallout, it's true that banks and specialist lending institutions rapaciously extended credit to ill-equipped borrowers.

But that's not the whole story. Housing value fluctuations weren't just caused by lending run amok, but by the trading that enabled the lending and made a precarious situation even worse.

Regardless of whether you adopt the progressive view of the crisis (banks lured borrowers with reckless procedures) or the conservative one (borrowers should have known not to get in over their heads), lenders knew it was an easy game to lavish money and extract fees from consumers as long as they had lots of customers wanting to own the home of their dreams.

More than that, they knew they could package and sell loans to investors, indirectly through Wall Street firms, and directly, to traders, creating room on their balance sheets to originate even more mortgages. Trouble was, investor appetite for the once-lucrative sub-prime mortgage packages dried up as credit did. Investment banks that bet their client investors would be there forever got crucified and are paying the price with multi-billion dollar writedowns and ejected CEO's. But so are homeowners, for whom every piece of bad news makes their individual financial situation seem worse.

With Citigroup's $11 billion writedown, on top of the $2.2 billion writedown the firm had already announced in third-quarter earnings, more of that destructive news poured from Wall Street. Citigroup's writedowns were not just due to losses resulting from borrowers defaulting on mortgage payments, but to exuberant trading on top of the mega-exuberant leveraging of those trades. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071217/prins

Maybe putting "In God we trust" on the currency wasn't such a grand idea.

Worshipping greed has only lead to an imperialism gone afoul.

Ughhh

I hate it when this happens.