Wall Street redux

“He called Standard & Poor’s and asked what would happen to default rates if real estate prices fell. The man at S&P couldn’t say; its model for home prices had no ability to accept a negative number. “They were just assuming home prices would keep going up,” Eisman says.” – this is from The End by Michael Lewis.

And a few relevant quotes from Veblen – I also mentioned the guy on the phone today, he’s written this in the beginning of XX century.

This was written in December 2007: No one knows for sure the full amount of subprime mortgages that have been issued in the past few years in the U.S. -- some say between $1.3 to $2.0 trillion. Financial hucksters and Wall Street paper-dealers found creative ways through a maze of financial instruments (Structured Investment Vehicles, Collateralized Debt Obligations, etc.) to "securitize" these high-risk, "non-securitizable" loans in a Ponzi scheme that will dwarf the junk bonds crisis of the mid 1980s, the $125-150 billion taxpayer-funded bailout of the late-1980s Savings & Loan swindle, and even the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. - A Battered America

And here's the trillion dollar question:

First, total mortgage debt outstanding. Its about $14 trillion dollars.

With the $7 trillion dollars we have committed we could have literally given every homeowner with a mortgage a fifty percent reduction in the principal outstanding.

This would have instantaneously stopped all of the foreclosures by putting all (essentially) homes into positive equity - overnight!

So why wasn't this done? -- The Idiocy of Bernanke's Bubbles and CNBS