| Vertigo-X said: http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2008-10-05-1.html So, what do you guys think of this person's perspective on the media coverage? |
The basic premise is wrong. Sub-prime lending didn't cause this crisis. If all of those loans had gone bad 20 or 30 years ago then we would certainly be tip toeing around waiting for the other shoe drop (and it usually does) and then there's a recession for 2-5 years.
If you examine the record you can find many housing bubbles that are followed by housing slumps. When you have those housing slumps you start getting a lot of foreclosures.
The 100% LTV loans (that were NOT associated with Fannie or Freddie and were NOT associated with CRA) that were pushed by the banks and wholesale mortgage lenders were examples of the worst type of B-Paper. These were the loans that were wrapped up into CDO's, sliced and diced then auctioned off and then would be hedged against with credit swaps. Funny thing is most of the credit swaps supposed collateral was mostly CDO's. So in effect banks, investors, etc, were buying CDO and insuring them with credit swaps based on CDO's. That's a real cool trick and an obvious was to create money from nothing when housing prices are going up and and obvious way to turn the whole CDO pool of credit obligations (they act mostly like bonds) into shit. When the housing market starts taking a downturn and some of the CDO's start going bad what happens? That's when the people with CDO's go to the people they bought the Credit Swaps from to cover their losses, and guess what, there's no money because the Credit Swaps value is based on the value of the CDO's which are now basically worthless because they are illiquid.
From that point on lots of bad things happen. A lot of them have alread happened and a lot are still to come.
Fun Fact: Foreclosures for houses valued at over $1mill have almost doubled in the last year.
