NightBlogger

Mike “Mish” Shedlock
Financial Entities On The Brink of Disaster
Lehman (LEH)
Washington Mutual (WM)
Fannie Mae (FNM)
Freddie Mac (FRE)
Corus Bank (CORS)
BankUnited (BKUNA)
Downey Savings (DSL)
Wachovia (WB)
Regions Financial (RF)
MBIA (MBI)
Ambac (ABK)
More

Moe Bedard
Fan & Fred: The Lies, the Cover Ups
Fannie Mae isn’t an ordinary company and this isn’t a run-of-the-mill accounting scandal. The U.S. government had no financial stake in the failure of Enron or WorldCom. But because of Fannie’s implicit subsidy from the federal government, taxpayers are on the hook if its capital cushion is insufficient to absorb big losses. Private profit, public risk. That’s quite a confidence game — and it’s time to call it.

Moe- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have failed and you, the tax payer, ARE bailing them out. I just wanted to make that loud and clear.

Were there warning signs that Wall Street and our government knew more than they led us to believe? This October 4, 2004 article in the Wall Street Journal did a great job of pulling the covers off Fannie Mae’s questionable accounting practices and Enron style way of doing business. It also verifies that there were more than enough warning signs of the impending implosion 4 years later.

WSJ 10/4/2004: Fannie Mae Enron?

For years, mortgage giant Fannie Mae has produced smoothly growing earnings. And for years, observers have wondered how Fannie could manage its inherently risky portfolio without a whiff of volatility. Now, thanks to Fannie’s regulator, we know the answer.

The company was cooking the books. Big time.

We’ve looked closely at the 211-page report issued by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (Ofheo), and the details are more troubling than even the recent headlines. The magnitude of Fannie’s machinations is stunning, and in two key areas in particular they deserve to be better understood. By improperly delaying the recognition of income, it created a cookie jar of reserves. And by improperly classifying certain derivatives, it was able to spread out losses over many years instead of recognizing them immediately.

The facts are that Kenneth Lay and Enron were amateurs when compared to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Enron was just politically connected. They weren’t pros like Fannie and Freddie who get a government implied “guarantee” to bail them out in case those cooked books FRY!

So, how did this all happen? How did we go 4 years with the writing clearly on the walls that these mortgage giants were BS’ing their shareholders, our government and the media? That’s easy to answer. MONEY! Fannie and Freddie have spent a combined total of $170 million in lobbying Washington since 1998 and 19.3 million in campaign contributions to well known Republicans and Democrats according to Politico. More

The Prince of Wales has warned the development of genetically modified crops risked creating “the biggest disaster environmentally of all time”. In a passionate intervention on the issue of GM food, Charles accused multi-national corporations of conducting an experiment with nature which had gone “seriously wrong”. He told the Daily Telegraph: “What we should be talking about is food security not food production - that is what matters and that is what people will not understand. “And if they think also that somehow it’s all going to work because they are going to have one form of clever genetic engineering after another then again count me out, because that will be guaranteed to cause the biggest disaster environmentally of all time.” More

July 14 (Bloomberg) — The U.S. Treasury Department’s plan to shore up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is an “unmitigated disaster” and the largest U.S. mortgage lenders are “basically insolvent,” according to investor Jim Rogers. Taxpayers will be saddled with debt if Congress approves U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s request for the authority to buy unlimited stakes in and lend to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Rogers said in a Bloomberg Television interview. Rogers is betting that Fannie Mae shares will keep tumbling.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. analyst Daniel Zimmerman said the mortgage finance companies’ shares may fall another 35 percent and lowered his share-price estimate for Fannie Mae to $7 from $18 and for Freddie Mac to $5 from $17. Freddie Mac fell 18 cents, or 2.3 percent, to $7.57 at 11:16 a.m. in New York Stock Exchange trading, while Fannie Mae rose 13 cents, or 1.3 percent, to $10.38.

“I don’t know where these guys get the audacity to take our money, taxpayer money, and buy stock in Fannie Mae,” Rogers, 65, said in an interview from Singapore. “So we’re going to bail out everybody else in the world. And it ruins the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet and it makes the dollar more vulnerable and it increases inflation.” The chairman of Rogers Holdings, who in April 2006 correctly predicted oil would reach $100 a barrel and gold $1,000 an ounce, also said the commodities bull market has a “long way to go” and advised buying agricultural commodities. More

Market Oracle
It has been almost ten full months now since the Fed first lowered interest rates. If you remember at first there was a lot excitement over the Fed cuts. The DOW and Nasdaq rallied to new 52-week highs a few weeks after the first rate cut in September. The rally and promise of more Fed intervention for the market made many big name commentators extremely optimistic about the market.

But just a few weeks later the market turned lower and has been stuck in a bear market ever since. The banking problems multiplied and inflation skyrocketed with oil rising almost double in price now from where it was a year ago. The rate cuts tasted good at first, but are no longer palatable. When thinking about the financial markets sometimes it is best to take stock of things before trying to look ahead and decide if you need to make changes to your portfolio or figure out where to look for the best investment opportunities. A lot can be learned about looking at where the market was a year ago and comparing it to today.

A year ago from today the DOW, S&P 500, and Nasdaq were all climbing higher. They had experienced a fast and furious correction that took the S&P 500 down over seven percent in February of 2007. The financial media blamed that quick correction on “credit worries,” a fast drop in the dollar versus the yen, and a huge correction in the Chinese stock market. Rumors also circulated that some billion dollar Bear Stearns hedge funds were in trouble.

Over the next few months as the market went higher everyone thought that all of these problems were gone. Then the financial press started to focus on oil prices that were making new highs and the threat to inflation that they posed. In July the market peaked as talk intensified that the Fed might actually start to raise interest rates by the end of the year. Indeed Fed fund futures a year ago were pricing in rates hikes by the end of 2007.

Fed officials gave repeated speeches and statements that sounded hawkish on interest rates. At the same time though the drop in real estate prices started to pick up and the value in “subprime” mortgage securities went into collapse. Rumors abounded that several large hedge funds were in trouble. The Fed publicly ignored all of this. At its August FOMC meeting they released a more hawkish statement on inflation to prepare the way to raise rates. The market dropped hard that day and James Cramer blasted the Federal Reserve and Ben Bernanke on TV for knowing “nothing.” His statement was one of the most watched moments in financial TV reporting as people watched it millions of times on the Internet. More

“…this is my way of indicating that the situation is as serious as it gets. It means that I feel as though everyone reading should consider taking immediate evasive action. All the jawboning about conspiracy, how things could have been, how things should be, etc. are behind us now. You know, EMERGENCY, act fast, eyes wide, nostrils flared, etc.

While the food supply situation has skated along a knife edge so far this year, with higher prices and many countries experiencing food riots, widespread famine did not take hold. In an incredible move, the Japanese quietly eased rice shortages by releasing portions of their imported rice stockpiles—from giant warehouses in Tokyo—into the system; a welcome but one off blip in the big picture. What happens next time? Now, this growing season, when yields need to be at record levels to avert disaster, what do we find? Floods or droughts in several of the breadbaskets of the world.

Whatever your plans are, I hope that you’re ready to execute them (or, better yet, are executing them). I’m pretty sure that most people have done nothing, and I don’t know why this continues to amaze me. The food situation is far off the radar screens of Joe Average. It only becomes a problem after it’s too late to do anything substantive to ameliorate conditions. We’ve already seen food riots, armed escorts for grain deliveries, rationing, sharply higher prices. And still, I’m mostly noticing yawns and drugged gurgles from the herd. Meanwhile, the die is all but cast on this year’s lower crop yields.

If the herd had any idea of what was coming, this show would be over inside of 24 hours. You might be sick of reading this on Cryptogon, but, it’s worth repeating: Use your time wisely.” More