Another casualty of the Mortgage Meltdown induced paranoia that is sweeping the credit and money markets: Banks no longer trust the indexes which they have relied upon for decades. In other words, they don’t trust each other. And they don’t trust the people who report on what is happening out in the financial marketplace. The simple fact is that they do NOT know how much they are paying or how much they are going to pay, or the actual trend lines in inter-bank lending. This basically slips the rug out of the entire credit infrastructure. 

What this means to the average Joe or Jane is that it adds uncertainty to an already chaotic marketplace. Uncertainty produces fear and fear produces increased risk aversion. Bottom Line: Interest rates are going up no matter what the central banks do. Loans will be harder to get. Asset values will decline because of the difficulty in obtaining financing that is usually associated with the purchase of those assets — like housing and mortgages. 

In terms of policy, it means that decision-makers in government and the private sector need to be honest and straightforward in their reporting of data.

Making lemons appear to be lemonade is going to further erode trust and confidence in the financial systems.

THOSE WHO COUNSEL CAUTION IN GIVING THE PUBLIC THE REAL FACTS ARE PROLONGING THE AGONY. HISTORY SHOWS THAT WHEN THE BAD NEWS IS OUT AND THE PUBLIC BELIEVES THAT IT IS ALL OUT, THE PROCESS OF HEALING AND REJUVENATION BEGINS. Until then, we are headed at best for a limping economy, with declining prospects. 

Pointing out sectors that have upticks does nothing to restore confidence in the overall system. Everyone understands that the failure here was systemic, not economic. Failure to address that issue will simply produce declining confidence in the markets until people start believing what they are told. They won’t believe it unless they can confirm it. And we all have access now to information that will confirm or deny the spin or reports that government and private sector leaders publish.

Time to fess up boys!!!!

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — A New York-based measure of how much it costs banks to borrow money will try to circumvent problems dogging Libor, the London benchmark that sets rates for everything from adjustable-rate mortgages to interest rate futures.

Successful avoidance of some pitfalls that have undermined bankers’ trust in Libor, however, is unlikely to prevent ICAP Plc’s New York Funding Rate from mimicking at least one of its London counterparts’ key traits. That is, a gap with other interest rates that suggests borrowing conditions for the world’s largest banks are still quite stressed.

“At this point, the U.S. index won’t make much difference, but it may be a good idea six months from now,” said Brendan Brown, head of research at Mitsubishi (UFJ) Securities International, in London.

Bankers point to a raft of other indicators, from currency forward rates to swap spreads, to show that bank borrowing costs are still high even while other measures of credit risk have fallen. That discrepancy has been a source of nagging worry for investors and economists looking for proof that the worse of the credit crisis has truly passed.

In fact, an interest rate that side-steps some of the problems that have recently undermined investors’ trust in Libor may even show banks are paying higher rates than shows up in Libor.

A month ago, Libor made its steepest five-day advance since August after concerns emerged that some banks had been underreporting their rates, out of fear they would be penalized if outsiders knew how much they were paying for funding.

Icap (UK:IAP: news, chart, profile) , a London-based inter-dealer broker that specializes in handling over-the-counter transactions like currencies and interest rates, is trying to discourage banks from fibbing about their borrowing costs by making its survey of 40 global banks anonymous.

Plus, rather than ask banks for the rate at which they can borrow short-term, unsecured loans — as the British Bankers Association does — ICAP will ask banks for their estimates of what the going rate is for the average bank.

There’s some urgency among banks, borrowers and the Federal Reserve to know just how costly it is for banks to tap the money market for their borrowings.

These funds are one of the main ways U.S. and overseas banks get capital for their own lending activities. If their costs are running high, they are likely to lend less, a headache for consumers and businesses that rely on flush conditions at banks to fund new mortgages, new auto loans, student loans, acquisitions and expansions.

And if the new measure does show Libor has been printing lower than the true cost of interbank borrowings, a lot of consumers and businesses with loans tied to Libor could get a nasty shock. It’s been estimated that loans and derivative contracts totaling roughly $150 trillion (more than $20,000 for every person on earth) are indexed or tied to Libor in some way.

In fact, the universe of financial instruments tied to Libor is so huge that some bankers are nervous that any efforts to tweak the way Libor is collected could make a bigger mess.

Libor “is extremely important,” said Terry Belton, head of fixed income strategy at J.P. Morgan Chase. “We would probably create more problems by changing it in a material way than we would solve,” he said.

Libor rises…

ICAP’s efforts to publish a new bank lending rate follows an unusual period where Libor as well as other bank lending rates have frequently topped central bank policy rates, meaning banks are paying more to borrow because of heightened credit and liquidity risk

The difference, or spread, between the three-month U.S.-dollar Libor and the effective federal funds rate rose to more than 80 basis points on Wednesday. Usually, dollar-denominated Libor tracks closely with the fed funds rate. See earlier story on Libor’s rise.

By other measures, costs for banks’ borrowing needs have also been rising. The spread between three-month Libor and overnight index swaps has been climbing since February. What’s known among credit analysts as the BOR-OIS spread gives a view of Libor that strips out expectations that central banks will raise or lower rates.

These spreads “are all signs that there is stress in the market,” said Eoin O’Callaghan, market economist for BNP Paribas in London.

Such signs of stress are worrisome for the Fed, which has $462 billion in special lending programs to financial institutions as it tries to get money flowing in frozen pockets of the credit market.

Notwithstanding efforts by the Fed and other central banks to “meet panic demands for liquidity” by making more funds available to financial institutions, still “many markets are not functioning normally,” noted Thomas Hoenig, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, in a speech Tuesday.

In contrast to rates that reflecting bank costs, indexes that track perceived credit risk and rates paid by corporations have been tumbling. Markit’s index of high-grade, North American credit default swaps has fallen about 27% since late-March. The spread between safe-haven 10-yield Treasury notes and bonds issued by companies with Baa ratings, which indicate riskier but still investment-grade companies, has also narrowed since mid-March.

… But not by enough?

Amid these concerns, other measures of short-term borrowing, such as the over-the-counter market to buy currencies like euros or sterling for future delivery, also suggest Libor just may not be high enough.

The British Bankers Association gets the Libor “fix” by polling global banks including Citigroup’s Citibank (C

) and Lloyds TSB Group (UK:LLOY: news, chart, profile) every day on what they are paying for funds.

The group says it doubts its Libor panel banks are contributing to deliberate distortions of the rate. Still, it has brought forward a review of how the rate gets calculated. See related story. And banks may be paying more for their loans than Libor suggests for purely innocent reasons.

It’s just not that liquid a market, bankers note.

Plus, the massive and surprise losses resulting from the U.S. housing market collapse have created a lot of variation among financial institutions when they try to borrow money. Banks that are light on funding or carry poor credit are likely to pay a far higher rate in the forward currency market, for instance, than the Libor panel would reflect.

“This is a problem that is temporary in nature and reflects the dislocation in the financing market,” J.P. Morgan Chase’s Belton said. He predicts that as central banks inject more money into the financial system “and as things there improve, we’ll move back to a world where all banks in panel have similar financing rates.”

Banks are likely paying more to borrow money, whether that’s reflected in Libor or another indicator, simply because supply has dried up. Banks, mutual funds and corporations that lend in the bank borrowing market are keeping more cash to themselves.

“Confidence in and between banks has been dented significantly after the Bear Stearns Cos. (BSC

) episode. Investors and banks are reluctant to lend cash to banks, effectively wondering who the next casualty will be,” said economists at Societe Generale in a report.

In mid-March, Bear Stearns came close to collapse, causing fears of a run on Wall Street.

“Also, money market funds, which are liquidity providers, continue to fear redemptions and invest at very low maturities,” they noted.

New York fixing

Since the NYFR will be based on a survey, rather than actual transactions, there still will be no way of telling if banks are giving an honest assessment of borrowing costs.

“There’s not really an ultimate check on whether the rates banks are reporting are the right rates,” said Brown of Mitsubishi Securities.

One thing that will change, however, is the time zone.

The British Bankers Association gets the so-called fixing of rates at 11 a.m. London time, or about 6 a.m. New York time. That’s about three hours before banks in the United States can start borrowing money in U.S. dollars, so may not accurately reflect the price of costs facing banks trying to tap these dollar markets.

ICAP’s planned NYFR rate instead will query banks at 9:30 a.m. New York time.

ICAP’s planned rate will also attempt to give a better view of what’s going on in the market for dollar-based bank borrowing than one of its current measures, eurodollar deposits. It gets this data from bid-ask spreads ICAP users provide for these deposits and supplies it to the Fed, which publishes the bid rate daily on its H. 15 statistical release. Go to the Fed’s Web site.

As the financial markets have convulsed, those eurodollar deposit rates have increasingly reflected a wider bid-ask spread, perhaps skewing the published rate.

“Since August, and especially since Bear Stearns, our desk has been setting that range very wide to reflect that trading is a lot messier,” said Lou Crandall, chief economist at Wrightson ICAP, the New York research arm of ICAP.

“It made us look for a more objective way to say where rates are trading,” he said.

NYFR is designed to give a clearer snapshot of bank borrowing costs. But it’s not designed to become the next Libor, which is the benchmark for so many loans and derivatives, Crandall stressed.

“This is designed to supplement Libor, not replace it,” Crandall said. “The series we had been publishing was no longer adequate for that purpose.” 

Laura Mandaro is a reporter for MarketWatch in San Francisco.

THE PROBLEM WITH AMERICAN HEALTHCARE

AN UNAVOIDABLE TRUTH — IT DOESN’T WORK

When Marianne Falacienski’s husband started a new job, the family could not afford the health plan. Ms. Falacienski, 32, found individual coverage only for him and their daughter, Gabrielle.

WHY OBAMA HAS THE RIGHT APPROACH:

INCREMENTAL STEPS TO ELIMINATING MIDDLEMEN WHO ADD COST BUT NO VALUE

THE REASON WHY HEALTHCARE COSTS ARE SO HIGH: We let it get that way because we thought we were not paying for it. We were lulled into this fraudulent situation by the presence of “insurance” which was just a hidden tax which we call “PRIVATE TAXATION.” This opened the door for the profit motive to dominate healthcare.  The inevitable result was cutting costs by delivering less care, increasing revenues by increasing premiums, and avoiding delivery by small print. 

THE EFFECT ON AMERICAN HEALTH: Americans are dying younger, with higher infant mortality than 40 other countries, and living lives of quiet desperation and stress locked in by a system that requires us to choose between life and death, between quality of life or suffering, and between being overmedicated into virtual stupor or becoming our own physicians and deciding what medications we need.

WHO CONTROLS OUR OPTIONS: The presence of insurance along with government complicity has interfered with the normal market forces found in every other country on the planet. Examples abound where the cost of a medication is $120 per month here whereas it could be as little as 5 cents elsewhere. 

The pharmaceutical industry dictates medical protocol: the profit motive requires them to present protocols that require long-term constant daily medications which now average 8-10 pills per day for many people. 

The pharmaceutical industry controls the FDA (virtually all FDA employees have worked for Pharma, are working for Pharma or will work for Pharma and Pharma literally pays most of the budget of the FDA). 

Any protocol that is preventative is opposed by Pharma and opposed by the insurance companies because revenues would decline, costs would decline and thus the need for expensive insurance premiums would also decline. 

Any intervention protocol is likewise not covered by insurance and declared “placebo” or “experimental” unless it is accompanied by a protocol of 53 pills per day for life as in the case of a lung transplant. 

The inescapable conclusion is that the insertion of insurance into our lives has increased our effective rate of taxation without us realizing it was a tax, it has reduced the level, quantity, availability and quality of care, and is responsible for half of all bankruptcies filed.

Obama’s plan, while it continues to include the insurance infrastructure, loosens the death grip of the insurance-Pharma cartel. It can lead to continued enhancements of the system and eventually to a single payer system which is what everyone else in the world has. 

Mandatory insurance is a sell-out for continuation of the current system regardless of what sound bites are attached to it. Obama is once again taking the courageous position of recognizing the nuance and complexity oft he situation and taking hits for not “mandating” insurance for everyone. The Clinton-Edwards “mandatory” plan is good politics, bad economics and unworkable.

Mandatory health insurance is a tax pure and simple. Except by inserting private insurance companies into the mix it adds between 100% to 500% to the costs of healthcare. Mandatory insurance is a wealth transfer system and anyone who promotes it is either purposefully or inadvertently playing into the hands of the few people who benefit financially from this corrupt system while the rest of us continue our lives of quiet desperation and stress.

May 4, 2008

Even the Insured Feel the Strain of Health Costs

By REED ABELSON and MILT FREUDENHEIM

The economic slowdown has swelled the ranks of people without health insurance. But now it is also threatening millions of people who have insurance but find that the coverage is too limited or that they cannot afford their own share of medical costs.

Many of the 158 million people covered by employer health insurance are struggling to meet medical expenses that are much higher than they used to be — often because of some combination of higher premiums, less extensive coverage, and bigger out-of-pocket deductibles and co-payments.

With medical costs soaring, the coverage many people have may not adequately protect them from the financial shock of an emergency room visit or a major surgery. For some, even routine doctor visits might now take a back seat to basic expenses like food and gasoline.

“It just keeps eating into people’s income,” said James Corbin, a former union official who works for the local utility in Tucson.

Mr. Corbin said that under their employer’s health plan, he and his co-workers are now obliged to pay up to $4,000 of their families’ annual medical bills, on top of about $1,600 a year in premiums. Five years ago, they paid no premiums and were responsible for only about $2,000 of their families’ medical bills.

“That’s a big jump,” Mr. Corbin said. “You’ve just lost a month’s pay.”

Already, many doctors say, the soft economy is making some insured people hesitant to get care they need, reluctant to spend a $50 co-payment for an office visit. Parents “are waiting longer to bring in their children,” said Dr. Richard Lander, a pediatrician in Livingston, N.J. “They say, ‘The kid isn’t that sick; her temperature is only 102.’ ”

The problem of affording health care is most acute for people with no insurance, a group expected to soon exceed 48 million, but those with insurance say they too are feeling the pain.

Since the recession of 2001, the employee’s average cost of an annual health care premium for family coverage has nearly doubled — to $3,300, up from $1,800 — while incomes have come nowhere close to keeping up. Factor in other out-of-pocket medical costs, and the portion of the average American household’s income that goes toward health care has risen about 12 percent, according to the consulting and accounting firm Deloitte, and is now approaching one-fifth of the average household’s spending.

In a recent survey by Deloitte’s health research center, only 7 percent of people said they felt financially prepared for their future health care needs.

Shirley Giarde of Walla Walla, Wash., was not prepared when her husband, Raymond, suddenly developed congestive heart failure last year and needed a pacemaker and defibrillator. Because his job did not provide health benefits, she has covered them both through a policy for the self-employed, which she obtained as the proprietor of a bridal and formal-wear store, the Purple Parasol.

But when Raymond had his medical problems, Ms. Giarde discovered that her insurance would cover only $22,000, leaving them with about $100,000 in unpaid hospital bills.

Even though the hospital agreed to reduce that debt to about $50,000, Ms. Giarde is still struggling to pay it — in part because the poor economy has meant slumping sales at the Purple Parasol. Her husband, now disabled and unable to work, will not qualify for Medicare for another year, and she cannot afford the $758 a month it would cost to enroll him in a state-run insurance plan for individuals who cannot find private insurance.

She recently refinanced her car, a 2002 Toyota Highlander, to help pay for her husband’s heart medicines, which cost some $400 a month.

Experts say that too often for the underinsured, coverage can seem like health insurance in name only — adequate only as long as they have no medical problems.

“There’s a real shift in the burden of health care to people who happen to be sick,” said Paul B. Ginsburg, the president of the Center for Studying Health System Change, a research group in Washington.

Companies and policy makers have yet to focus on what the faltering economy means for employees’ medical care, said Helen Darling, president of the National Business Group on Health, a Washington association of about 200 large employers.

“It’s a bad-news situation when an individual or household has to pay out-of-pocket three, four or five times as much for their health plan as they would have at the time of the last recession,” she said. “Americans have been giving their pay raise to the health care system.”

Sage Holben, a 62-year-old library technician with diabetes who is active in her local union in St. Paul, says that in 2003 union members agreed to a two-year freeze on wages to protect their health care coverage. But for the union, which will begin talks on the next contract this fall, it may be difficult to continue that trade-off, Ms. Holben said. “It’s at the point where we’re losing, anyway,” she said.

“I live paycheck to paycheck,” said Ms. Holben, who makes close to $40,000 a year at Metropolitan State University.

When she took the job in 1999, she says, the health benefits required no co-payments for doctor visits. Now, her out-of-pocket cost per visit is $25, and she pays $38 a month for her diabetes medicine. She has not been to the eye doctor in two years, even though eye exams are crucial for people with diabetes and she knows she needs new glasses. Nor does she monitor her blood sugar as regularly as she should because of the cost of the supplies.

“It’s not an extravagant expense,” she said. “It just adds up.” And it comes atop the increasing cost of utilities, gasoline and food — and the few hundred dollars of repairs her 1994 Chevrolet Cavalier needs.

Many employers do recognize that their workers are struggling financially even as they are asking them to pick up more of their health-care bills.

“It makes the work we have to do even more challenging,” said Anne Silverman, the vice president in charge of benefits in North America for the publishing company Reed Elsevier. “Employees are being stretched in terms of their disposable income.”

Even so, more companies may see themselves as having little choice but to require employees to pay even more of their health expenses, said Ted Nussbaum, a benefits consultant at the firm Watson Wyatt Worldwide. And when a weak economy undermines job security, he said, workers may simply have to accept reduced benefits.

While Mr. Nussbaum and other consultants say it is unlikely that significant numbers of employers will simply drop coverage for their workers, the weak economy could prompt more of them to push for so-called consumer-driven plans. Such plans tend to offset lower premiums with higher annual deductibles.

And while these plans often allow employees to put pre-tax savings into special health care accounts, they typically end up forcing the worker to assume a bigger share of overall medical costs. About six million people are now enrolled in these medical plans.

Among employers, the hardest pressed may be small businesses. Their insurance premiums tend to be proportionately higher than ones paid by large employers, because small companies have little bargaining clout with insurers.

Health costs are “burying small business,” said Mike Roach, who owns a small clothing store in Portland, Ore. He recently testified on health coverage at a Senate hearing led by Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon.

Last year, Mr. Roach paid about $27,000 in health premiums for his eight employees. “It’s a huge chunk of change,” he said, noting that he was forced to raise his employees’ yearly deductible by 50 percent, to $750.

Around the nation, some workers are simply priced out of their employee health plans.

After Brian Falacienski of Milton, Fla., was laid off last year from his job as a surveyor for a construction company, he found another position. But the cost of his new health plan — $800 a month for coverage with a $1,000 annual deductible — was beyond the means of Mr. Falacienski, 38, who is married and has a 2-year-old daughter.

His wife, Marianne, started researching individual insurance policies and was able to find policies for her husband and daughter offering basic, if minimal, coverage, costing $161 a month for father and daughter. But Ms. Falacienski, 32, who has arthritis and the severe digestive disorder Crohn’s disease, is now uninsured. Because of her conditions, she said, four major insurers rejected her.

“I even applied for Medicaid,” she said, “but I wasn’t low-income enough.”

For all the talk about how similar they are, the differences have largely been overlooked. The main difference I see is that Obama has a broader understanding of macroeconomics — which means that he understands that if you push here then something else pops up there. He understands nuance and complexity in a highly ambiguous world.

Once you get past sound bites and continuous loop feeds of irrelevant chatter, and then do some research you find two things: Bill Clinton’s policy advisors agree with Obama, not Hillary. And virtually 100% of all economic advisers score Obama’s proposals as having economic merit vs. Hillary’s proposals which contain solely political appeal. 

The inescapable irony is that if you want the “good ole days” of Clinton economics and prosperity, vote for Obama. If you want narrow carefully orchestrated proposals that will fail for lack of support (like healthcare in 1993), then go ahead and vote for Hillary. 

For Democrats, Instincts Differ on Economics

The latest change in Fed policy sounds good. You get that warm fuzzy feeling that credit will loosen up and that things are getting better. But the fact remains, that this is ANOTHER transfer of the power to create money to the PRIVATE sector, it is another green light for PRIVATE TAXATION, and worst of all, it comes at a time when inflation is already running high and threatening to become worse than at any time in recent history.

Flooding the market with more dollars is simple: it reduces the value of those dollars. as the value goes down some businesses will appear to prosper, but when those business owners go to buy something, they will realize they lost profit even though their accountants report they made more. In nutshell, if it costs $25 to buy a loaf of bread or $15 to buy a gallon of gas, the fact that your sales went up won’t do you any good.

Beware the earnings figures from public reporting companies. There is no FASB directive that requires real disclosure of real earnings in constant currency. This will become painfully obvious as the next 12 months unfold.

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — The Federal Reserve, along with other central banks, said Friday that it was increasing the funding it is providing to banks and announced that, for the first time, it was willing to accept bonds backed by auto loans and credit cards.

“In view of the persistent liquidity pressures in some term funding markets, the European Central Bank, the Federal Reserve and the Swiss National Bank are announcing an expansion of their liquidity measures,” the Fed said in a statement.

The Fed took the move in an attempt to flood the market with supply and lower short-term lending rates, such as the London interbank offered rate, or Libor.

The U.S. central bank announced an increase, to $75 billion from $50 billion, in the amounts auctioned to eligible depository institutions under its biweekly Term Auction Facility, beginning with the auction on May 5.

This increase will bring the amounts outstanding under the TAF to $150 billion.

The move to expand the TAF was widely anticipated because of strong demand for loans through the program.See full story.

“The program is now reaching a magnitude where it can play a significant role in plugging the gap between the remaining demand for unsecured term funding in the bank market and the latest decline in supply following the run on Bear Stearns,” wrote Lou Crandall, chief economist for Wrightson ICAP.

The expansion was “probably marginally disappointing because there was a widespread expectation … that the Fed would extend the term of at least some TAF auctions to three months,” wrote Stephen Stanley, chief economist for RBS Greenwich Capital.

The TAF, announced on Dec. 12, was followed in March by the creation of several other Fed lending programs targeted at different sectors of the credit markets.

All told, the Fed has now offered to lend up to $462 billion in cash and Treasurys to the markets, in addition to the nearly unlimited funds available through the discount window and the primary credit dealer facility.

The three-month Libor rate — a benchmark for lending between banks — was 2.78% on Thursday, well above the 2% federal funds rate. Crandall said extra supply from the Fed in the next three weeks should tighten the spread between the Libor and fed funds rates.

Deeper cooperation

The Federal Open Market Committee also has authorized further increases in its existing temporary currency-swap arrangements with the European Central Bank and the Swiss National Bank.

These arrangements will now provide dollars in amounts of up to $50 billion and $12 billion to the European Central Bank and the Swiss National Bank, respectively, representing increases of $20 billion and $6 billion.

The FOMC also authorized an expansion of the collateral that can be pledged by bond dealers in the Fed’s Schedule 2 Term Securities Lending Facility auctions of Treasurys.

Primary dealers may now pledge AAA/Aaa-rated asset-backed securities, in addition to already eligible residential- and commercial-mortgage-backed securities and agency collateralized mortgage obligations.

Accepting asset-backed paper could help provide money to the student-loan market, Crandall noted. 

Steve Goldstein is MarketWatch’s London bureau chief. Washington Bureau Chief Rex Nutting contributed to this report.

Today we have a bill pending that stops the meltdown. It is a courageous and creative step that protects all parties. It requires YOUR input, so pass this along to as many other people as you can. This is much more than a step in the right direction. It would be nice to see support from the presidential contenders as well.

Write your congressmen and women and get this thing passed. The Senate and House are standing on the line between mayhem and an orderly society and have taken the right steps. The rest is up to you.

It isn’t perfect, but the bill would do more to stem the tide of foreclosures, evictions and declining home prices than anything else on the table. It will protect your home equity, it will stabilize the economy, and it will give the U.S. dollar just the shot of confidence it needs to slow the rising threat of hyper-inflation.

Call and write your congressman/woman, call and write your senators, flood them with emails.

This is not about the morality of or ideology of whether it was more the fault of one group over another. This is about the practicality of holding our society together. Nothing is more important to the your lifestyle than this bill no matter who you are.

Mortgage Aid Plan Advances in House

CLINTON — MCCAIN FORECLOSURE FREEZE GETS COLD SHOULDER BUT SOUNDS GOOD

Well here is a version (SEE ARTICLE BELOW) of what we have been pushing for months —- changing the terms of the mortgages so that the homeowner can stay in the house and the mortgage can be modified, sold or recast for capital accounting. This is a lot more sophisticated than the “mortgage freeze” proposed by Clinton and McCain and it is working already so we can’t dispute the success.

• The problem with a “mortgage foreclosure freeze” is that it is a sound bite that doesn’t really mean anything — like the gas tax holiday. It doesn’t address any of the problems but it gives rise to the illusion that the homeonwer is getting some relief.
• The problem for Obama is that he sounds like he is against providing relief because he understands the nuances of how to get that relief — without pandering for votes. People don’t like nuance and don’t have the time for complex answers. So they vote against themselves based on sound bites, hoping gas prices will go down (they won’t) and that their house will be saved by just doing one thing like a freeze on foreclosures that lasts ninety days (that won’t work either).

There is no Clinton-McCain plan for relief because no order, legislation or rule is pending that will freeze anything and nothing is pending. Hillary and John are just blathering. They haven’t ACTUALLY proposed the plan by introducing a bill on the Senate floor. The plan of these pandering politicians is get elected (the people be damned): the method is to make use of time-honored sound bites that consist of misleading statements and outright lies. The truth is that neither McCain nor Clinton has a clue about gas prices or mortgages.

Although this trading of mortgage obligations is obviously providing some relief, it doesn’t address the root cause of the mortgage meltdown. And much as I don’t care for the people or their methods who perpetrated this fraud on the world, there is no REAL solution unless some value is restored to the balance sheet of financial institutions and investors who purchased the collateralized mortgage obligations. Thus combining attributes of this plan with a more comprehensive plan to restore the capital reserves of financial institutions and investors would be preferable.

vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

HOUSING

Investors move in to save broken mortgages

By E. Scott Reckard
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

May 1, 2008

Jared Lanning, struggling to pay a home loan on which he owed more than his house was worth, was thinking he might just let the lender take back the property. Then he got a call one evening from an Orange County investor who had bought his mortgage.

“I want out of your loan,” said the investor, Evan Gentry, chief executive of G8 Capital of Ladera Ranch, who offered to lower the balance and the interest rate.

Lanning, a crane operator in Englewood, Colo., was skeptical. A phone pitch, after all, had led to his getting the unaffordable loan in the first place. But Gentry was legit: He helped Lanning get a new Federal Housing Administration-insured mortgage — with a $12,000 lower balance. Gentry also paid $5,000 in closing costs for the new loan. Lanning’s new monthly payment is $200 less than before.

Investors — including big fish like former Countrywide Financial Corp. President Stanford Kurland as well as smaller fry like Gentry — are buying loans on the cheap from lenders who want them off their books. By paying less than face value for the mortgages, the new holders can modify loan terms, including shrinking the amount owed, and still make money.

With some economists projecting 2 million foreclosures this year, legislators and regulators are hoping to encourage wide use of this model. They want lenders and investors in mortgage bonds to mark down what borrowers owe and then provide them with lower-cost loans. It’s a tricky business: No one wants to be seen as bailing out speculative buyers or imprudent lenders, but they also don’t want mass foreclosures to devastate neighborhoods and the economy.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. described the problem Wednesday as “a self-reinforcing cycle of default, foreclosure, home price declines and mortgage credit contraction, the likes of which we have not experienced since the 1930s.” The agency is proposing that the government lend $50 billion to 1 million borrowers to help them replace unaffordable loans.

Sub-prime mortgages with interest rates ratcheting higher have proved less of a problem than once feared, because interest rates overall have dropped. But a “toxic combination” of falling home prices and borrowers who can’t afford even the initial low rates on adjustable loans is now the issue, FDIC Chairwoman Sheila C. Bair said in an interview this week.

“Many more borrowers are under water,” she said. “And many more are just walking away.”

Many people bought homes with nothing-down loans at the peak of the housing boom — 29% of all buyers in 2007 made no down payments, Treasury Secretary Henry S. Paulson Jr. said recently. Others have sucked all their equity out of their properties with refinancings.

According to Moody’s Economy.com, some 8.8 million Americans — more than 10% of all homeowners — owe more than their houses are worth, although a Mortgage Bankers Assn. economist contended the figure was lower, perhaps 8%. In any case, there is wide agreement that many of those troubled borrowers have proved surprisingly ready to abandon their properties, even when lenders offer to modify their loan terms as they were encouraged to do by the Bush administration.

“We are working with borrowers to keep them in their homes, but a lot of them really don’t want to stay,” said Babette Heimbuch, chairwoman of FirstFed Financial Corp. of Los Angeles, a savings and loan operator that specialized in adjustable-rate mortgages, including many that were made without full documentation of borrowers’ incomes.

FirstFed has about $6.3 billion in loans on its books. It said that $667 million of that balance, more than 10%, was delinquent or in foreclosure as of March 31, up from just $46 million a year earlier. FirstFed said Wednesday that it lost $69.8 million, or $5.11 a share, during the first quarter this year compared with a profit of $8.4 million, or 61 cents, a year earlier. It set aside $150.3 million for loan losses during the quarter, up from $3.8 million during the first quarter of 2007.

Because FirstFed kept most of its loans on its books rather than selling them, it should have been easier for the company to work with borrowers to modify the loans. Heimbuch said FirstFed forecloses only after analyzing 10 other options to offer the borrower, including lowering the interest rate; changing to a five-year, fixed-rate loan requiring payment of interest only; and writing down the loan balance.

Still, she said, up to 50% of borrowers who miss payments don’t respond to letters and repeated telephone calls to see if something can be worked out.

Some customers had acquired second mortgages and couldn’t make new arrangements with the other lender, she said. “I think some know they told us the wrong income and are afraid to come clean, though we would still work with them . . . to keep them in their homes if possible.”

For struggling borrowers, it’s a big mistake not to return such calls these days, said Gus A. Altazurra, a veteran mortgage executive who recently raised $10 million from private investors to buy and modify loans for which homeowners are still making payments.

“They’re probably going to help you, given the current situation,” said Altazurra, whose Irvine-based Vertical Fund Group has been negotiating with lenders of all sizes to buy loans. He said “a flood” of mortgages went up for sale in April after lenders closed their books on a horrendous first quarter.

Altazurra, who has paid as little as 31 cents on the dollar for some loans, said the terms of some mortgages made at the peak of the boom were hard to believe. One loan he bought from a Texas bank was to a borrower with a very low credit score — 484 — who refinanced and cashed out 100% of the equity in the property, he said.

Gentry, the other Orange County loan buyer, said he had obtained commitments from investors to provide $100 million in capital for workouts on loans that have stopped paying, current loans that can no longer be sold and foreclosed properties. He has bought nearly $50 million in mortgages and property so far.

Gentry purchased Lanning’s loan in a pool of mortgages from a San Diego lender that was going out of business. He said that on average his private venture was paying 70 cents to 80 cents on the dollar for loans like Lanning’s that were still current, and “less if the loans are nonperforming.”

Lanning had no home equity left — and thus had little incentive to keep sacrificing to make payments — before he got the smaller, cheaper FHA loan. Now his outlook has changed.

“We can’t do anything frivolous now,” he said. “But if we do it right, we have enough. That other loan was just pushing us over the top.”