could industry-wide work-out of subprime mortgages help?
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that a major industry-wide agreement to work-out issues with sub-prime mortgages coming up for resets will be announced next week.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119638615868608863.html?mod=hps_us_whats_news
If this kind of concerted industry action occurs, it would seem to greatly change the curve of the reset wave many analysts have been watching. Couldn't this provide a boost to the real-estate market? Far fewer people will be forced into foreclosure by a sudden rise in their payments. Fewer foreclosures would have to be positive.
On the other hand, I don't see how this would make the underlying securities backing these mortgages any more attractive. If anything, investors might want to discount mortgage securities even more if they feel the terms governing them can arbitrarily change.
And let's forget about this kind of plan re-kindling interest in new mortgage securities.
Still, on the whole such a massive re-work program might slow down price declines in the next year or so.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119638615868608863.html?mod=hps_us_whats_news
If this kind of concerted industry action occurs, it would seem to greatly change the curve of the reset wave many analysts have been watching. Couldn't this provide a boost to the real-estate market? Far fewer people will be forced into foreclosure by a sudden rise in their payments. Fewer foreclosures would have to be positive.
On the other hand, I don't see how this would make the underlying securities backing these mortgages any more attractive. If anything, investors might want to discount mortgage securities even more if they feel the terms governing them can arbitrarily change.
And let's forget about this kind of plan re-kindling interest in new mortgage securities.
Still, on the whole such a massive re-work program might slow down price declines in the next year or so.
Comments
Supply is already at nearly 1 year, which is just ridiculously high. I believe consensus is that this has happened prior to the largest wave of defaults. Say a bailout was highly successful and prevented 1/2 of all defaults which would otherwise occur. I don't see how this number will be too different from what we saw in 2007, and there was a significant rise in supply against demand for 2007.
Taking foreclosures off the market might stabilize price declines a little, but it would also stabilize rental prices. You're taking people who would have been forced to rent and locking them into a house instead. This effects rent-vs-buy calculations.
How will this make loan originations easier? We all know that it was the easy money more than anything else that drove this bubble. The easy money is drying up. You hear the words credit crunch thrown around, but I don't think they are accurate. The point is if you need 20% to buy, there will be no buyers in NYC, San Fran, San Diego, Seattle, etc. So if the entire industry is subsidizing bums who can't pay their real rent, why would they go back to loaning to those people again?
I think this whole thing is just a boondoggle now. If it happens, maybe nationwide prices decline only 7% next year instead of 9%. If that's what the industry has to look forward to, they'd better start drinking the crazy juice today.
1) the politicians go back and forth and back and forth so many times that by the time they're ready to pass the legislation, it's usually been watered down to a level where the impact will be less than hoped for.
2) Politicians often fails to see the big picture consequences of their grand plans, beyond the immediate impact on their chances for re-election. If they try to fix things the way their proposing, the consequences outlined by sniglet will be severe for the existing residential mortgage market. We don't want the result of what they're trying to do.
This is what I see: The foreclosure problem nationwide must be so bad that we don't even yet fully realize what we're in for. The government regulators and politicians must be seeing something we don't see such as a decline in revenues and tax dollars used to fund programs that keep the government sector jobs and win re-election for the politicians.
Where will the money come from to pay for their proposal? It better not come from our tax dollars. This problem was created by business so business ought to take the brunt of the pain. Government ought not try to save a failing business idea (adjustable rate loans). The lenders should foreclose and the homeowners should re-enter the market as renters.
Let business and industry take care of this. Let a new company spring forward that is willing to help these homeowners and refi them out of their adjusting loans. Oh, wait a minute, I forgot. President Bush already did that. He gave the world FHA Secure. Like I said months ago, this program will be largely ineffective.
From the sketchy stories on this plan (I just saw another on Bloomberg) it seems as if the government isn't putting any money into the bail out. In similar fashion to the Super-SIV bail-out proposal, the Treasury and Fed is merely getting a lot of private parties together in a room to agree on a joint plan of action.
So far, the result seems to be that the major mortgage servicers (Citigroup, Countrywide, etc), and banks feel that it is better to extend the teaser rates of subprime loans in the hope that prices might recover and allow SOME recovery of money rather than force a massive wave of foreclosures in which the banking and investment community get wiped out altogether.
This is the hail-Mary school of business theory: your investment is toast already so you'd might as well let your bad assets ride for as long as possible just in case a miracle occurs. What do you have to lose?
Of course, the details on this bail-out are extremely vague right now, so we should be a little cautious about jumping to conclusions just yet. Remember that when the Treasury department announced the plan for a SIV bailout that the markets counced up, and a lot of ink was spread about how everyone was going to be saved. A week or so later, however, it became apparent that the SIV bail-out proposal had massive holes and it was unclear how it could actually work in the real-world. Now the SIV bail-out proposal is a running joke.
Sometimes I get the impression that political and business leaders are just trying to calm the markets through PR, and are hoping that they can come up with some wacky theoretical proposal that will allow the markets to think happy thoughts for a month or so and recover on their own. It's not like there is really an intention to follow-through with an actual bail-out after all...
"Treasury officials say financial institutions are likely to set criteria that divide subprime borrowers into three groups: those who can continue to make their payments even if rates rise, those who can't afford their mortgages even if rates stay steady, and those who could keep their homes if the maturity date of their mortgages were extended or the interest rates remained at the teaser rates. ONLY THE THIRD GROUP WILL BE ELIGIBLE FOR HELP."
Questions, why would group 1 continue to pay? I'll just play dead and be group #3. Who decide these groups? On what criterias? Most people are in group #2 anyway and that doesn't help. Who take the loses of teaser rate for all these time? Cause teaser rate does not turn a profit. What happen to the investor guarantee rate? It better not be coming out of taxpayers money. This thing is a cluster f*** in the making and wave of lawsuits waiting to happen.
To me, it seems like this entire debacle has the potential for being bigger than the S&L bailout and the Enron crisis. I feel like we're living through something historic.
I don't see how delaying the adjustment of the ARM is going to do anything but postpone the inevitable foreclosure or forced sale of these homes. If they can't afford the adjusted payment now, what makes any of us believe that they'll be able to afford the adjusted payment a few years from now, or that prices will be back up at that time so the homeowner could sell?
Any delays would seem to reward the corporate CEOs and executives by hiding the inevitable, long enough so they can collect their bonuses and check out.
Isn't that exactly what happened in Japan in the early 90's? The banks wouldn't write off loans, even though they knew they were bad. The net result being, the banks just quit lending and the economy ground to a halt.
Check this article from back in July. Seems like it may have been prescient
Hidden U.S. subprime losses may mirror Japan bank crisis
I think they are simply trying to spread out the losses over a longer time period so that they won't all smack he economy in the face at the same time. This conveniently allows a lot of execs time to get while the gettin's good, however.
Whether it works, I don't know. Subprime seems to be the least of our problems, so if that's all they are focusing on, this is all just hand-waving.
All these plans are dilatory tactics whether it's the super-SIV or freeze ARM.
These are political tactics to make sure the pain does not start next year while you know who is still in office. Call me a conspiracy theorist or whatever, but everything that's going on in DC or gov't is pure PR spin.
Don't underestimate the stupidity of citizenry of this country. They bought I-wreck bait, hook, and sinker they'll buy anything just let them switch the channel back to American Idol.....
The Repukes know they probably won't win in 2008 so what a great gift to the next admin
This is a common refrain, but I don't believe it's really all that true. The Iraq debacle really came about as a perfect storm of assumptions. People's willingness to go along with Iraq was based on a number of assumptions which turned out to be true. Everyone thinks about the WMD deal as being the only false assumption.
However, citizens (by enlarge) assumed they could trust reports coming out of the CIA, and the government at large. People assumed a new war would go as 'wonderfully' as the last Iraq war. People assumed that the federal government had already worked out a reasonable plan, and would carry it out. People assumed that most Iraqis toiled under the tyranny of Hussein's regime, and that they would welcome our soldiers as France did during WWII. Finally, they assumed that by toppling one more dictator, the world would become a slightly less dangerous place.
Since then, every American has learned that they can't trust what the government reports (WMDs), can't trust the government to act when they are in distress (New Orleans), and can't expect any solutions to our problems from the government in general.
Will this administration try to pull some strings to make sure we don't fall in to a great depression during their watch? Undoubtedly they will try. But don't expect it to fool the people. And here's one piece of proof. There are probably 6 republicans with an outside chance of getting their nomination, and probably 5 democrats. That is an extremely wide selection considering the first primaries are only a month away. People are looking for change, and people are looking for solutions, and they seem to be willing to look past Clinton, Romney, Obama, and Guilliani to get them.
Paulson's Plan to Punish the Public
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2 ... ublic.aspx
Seth Jayson
November 30, 2007
If you don't learn from the past ...
If the mortgage crisis and housing bubble have taught us one thing, it should be to watch out for the unintended consequences of greed. Unfortunately, our nation's legislators and political appointees haven't learned that lesson. Recent plans for housing and mortgage bailouts generally run from dumb to dumber. Today, The Wall Street Journal reported on yet another scheme, reportedly being spearheaded by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. It's an idea so naively populist and antimarket that you would think it came from Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, if not for its cringe-inducing, Beltway-wonk moniker: the Hope Now Alliance.
In short, bankers and loan servicing outfits are going to lower interest rates on strapped borrowers so they don't lose their houses. How much and how long, and who qualifies are all still up in the air. No doubt, this will sound good to those folks who signed on for mortgages they can't actually afford. It will also look good to politicians angling to score points before the next election, and to bleeding hearts everywhere. It will also look good to select mortgage-industry players -- like Countrywide Financial (NYSE: CFC) and Citigroup (NYSE: C), which could really use a government-led bailout.
Unfortunately, this ill-conceived salve will ultimately punish the silent majority of Americans, people who didn't go out and make bone-headed financial decisions over the past half decade. Let's take a look at why.
A history of the housing Ponzi scheme
Since 2001, too-cheap financing pumped up housing prices to ridiculous levels. This was enabled by speculative lending from Wall Street to Main Street: Big banks like Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS), Bear Stearns (NYSE: BSC) and others were providing the lending capital to outfits like deathwatch candidate Countrywide, mostly dead NovaStar Financial and Impac Mortgage Holdings, along with dozens of completely dead lenders. They did this by purchasing mortgage loans from these lenders so that they could chop them into mortgage-backed securities of dizzying complexity and dubious credit quality, which were, in turn, sold to suckers ... err, "investors," all over the world.
This provided a musical-chairs-like situation in which lenders produced as much volume as they could, no matter how bad the loans or credit risk, because they got paid to pass that risk along, through Wall Street's Wise bankers, to whatever "investor" ended up with the loans, in the form of stuff called MBS, CDOs, CDO-squared, R2D2, and so on. There was a flood of money to the lenders, which stimulated excessive demand, in-turn, stimulating excessive price appreciation. (You will note that there was no Paulson-led "Hope Now Alliance" coming together at that point to try and rein in this dangerous orgy of greed, though the consequences were plain to anyone who bothered to examine it.)
Greedy flippers and naive homebuyers resorted to gimmicky loans, like interest-only and "option" adjustable-rate mortgages, because it was the only way they could pay inflated prices for the properties they wanted. They got a few years of artificially low payments, thanks to artificially low teaser rates. The catch was that when the loans reset after a few years, they'd jump up several points, to 9%, 10%, 11%.
This may not sound like a big deal, until you run the math on the payments to see that many people would be facing twice the mortgage bill they were used to. Now that those mortgages are resetting and home prices are dropping like rocks, they can't make their payments, and they can't flip the houses for a profit, so loans are defaulting. The fancy securities -- what I call Wall Street dog food -- have become nearly worthless, and the music has stopped, without any chairs for anyone. Ironically, stupid, leveraged bets on these lousy securities have crippled the banks themselves, and CEOs and other execs have been getting the boot at places like Citigroup, Merrill Lynch (NYSE: MER), and Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS).
Hank to the rescue!
Hank Paulson's latest plan to protect homebuyers from their own mistakes is simple: Lenders extend those teaser rates for a few years. It's a win-win, right? What's the harm, especially when there's no bill to pay? You just reset those interest rates to low levels, and everything will be fine, right? Who could be against a policy that would keep Americans in their homes? One negotiated with the private sector itself?
This Fool, for one.
Making the credit crunch crunchier
Remember, the only reason those teaser-rate loans were made in the first place was because lenders (and thus the investors buying the mortgages from the lenders) could count on a much larger, contractually guaranteed payoff in the future, when those interest rates were due to reset. Take away that payoff and you take away any incentive to loan to borrowers of marginal credit quality. Usher in an era when government and banks reset loan rates at their whim, and you can be sure that investors will never again buy securities based on adjustable-rate mortgages.
If you think credit is tight now, just wait until you yank away potential returns from the people putting up the capital for all those loans.
And let's not forget that Paulson's plan introduces an incredible moral hazard. By rescuing greedy and naive borrowers from their mistakes, our government encourages others to take big, stupid, bankruptcy-inducing risks, secure in the knowledge that the government will bail them out when times get rough. That means trillions of dollars in capital will be ill-invested yet again, something that's much less likely to happen when speculators are made to suffer the consequences of their behavior.
No free lunches
Here's another problem. Someone is going to have to foot the bill for this. Banks and associated entities that will, over the short term, finance this homeowner bailout are not going to do it out of the goodness of their hearts. Reported Hope Now Alliance honchos like Countrywide and Citigroup (NYSE: C) are, I'm certain, only doing this because they hope it will be cheaper than having to pay up for their lending sins all at once. Moreover, it gives them a chance to look like good guys who care about the commoners -- never mind the fact that they were quite happy to fleece borrowers with gawd-awful mortgage "affordability products" for years.
Still, this will sting some of these banks and mortgage servicers, so you can bet they're going to pass along the costs. They're going to do it by firing employees. (Countrywide and Citigroup are already doing that.) They're going to do it by moving offices to offshore tax havens, outsourcing, closing branches, lowering deposit rates, hiking fees, and whatever else it takes. (Golden parachutes for Wall Street failures are pricey.)
Worst of all, they're going to do it by soaking future borrowers -- people like the majority of us, who didn't do something stupid -- with higher rates than we would have otherwise paid for mortgage loans, credit cards, and commercial loans. They'll have to. They've got their own lenders to pay, and those lenders aren't going to simply hand over-stretched Americans a pile of money.
Foolish final thought
There's another reason that Paulson's latest plan will punish the public. It will have the effect of artificially supporting a home-price bubble that desperately needs a correction. Historical rent-to-purchase data show just how far home prices need to come down in order to return to mean. That requires a painful drop, and it will happen sooner or later.
Paulson's plan means fewer homes dumped back on the market at lower prices, where they belong. Now that he's a politician and not the CEO of Goldman Sachs, Paulson apparently believes that the market shouldn't be allowed to correct on its own. He's wrong about that, and he's wrong to support any plan that will only delay the inevitable. Better the quick, painful correction than the decades-long, slow bleed that he's nurturing now. For evidence of how ugly things get when policy-makers try to coddle the financial industry rather than let the market apply its harsher, faster, medicines, just take a look at how long the banking mess continued in Japan.
Of course, a decade from now, if the economy is still suffering because of an ill-conceived housing bailout plan designed to win favor with the public and cover the economic hind-end of his boss, George Bush, Paulson won't have to issue any gomen nasai. He'll already be long gone, retired to his millions.
You and I will pay the bills.
Well, if no bail-out takes place then MOST Americans are going to suffer terribly as housing prices collapse, and bring despair to all existing home-owners (which is the majority of families these days). Yes, it's ludicrous to expect that political leaders and business men are going to stand aside and allow house prices to crash, appearing as if they aren't doing anything about it.
It is far better to put together crazy schemes to save struggling home-owners, even at the risk of making problems worse, if the pain can be pushed off just a wee bit longer. When the housing crash comes the business leaders and politicians are all toast anyway, so why not just try to prolong things some more in the hope that a miracle will bail us out? So what if all these bail-outs make things worse in the end? The politicians and bankers are already going to be shot against the wall in the revolution, so whether the depression is a little deeper or not is irrelevant.
Furthermore, it is much better to be percieved as helping the common man than to do nothing, even if that "help" makes matters worse. Look at how much FDR is revered even though most of his policies likely only deepened the depression? Instead society looks back on all the government efforts to "help" people in the depression with a great nostalgia and fondness.
Ergo, stupidity on people's part. Assumptions piled upon assumptions (sounds a lot like what made CDO such wonderful financial product). I would not contribute to it being a perfect storm...too easy a cop-out. A perfect storm almost sounds like uncontrollable circumstances came together in some random fashion. But what we have is a willful, calculated act. Leaders at the top knew what they wanted except they did not think through.
Iran and Iraq were in power equilibrium after the 1st gulf war. By taking away one, a power vacuum is created and we are seeing remifications of that today; moreover, why do the dirty work yourself by replacing Iraq with the US to confront Iran? This is not a hindsight analysis, thousands of historical data points from recent European history to ancient history could have foretold that.
Anyway, now I'm really off topic......
"temporary" mortgage freeze is doomed
And even if they can do this wouldn't that destroy the market for such securities (as others have already mentioned)?
Isn't there a forth group too? The group that committed fraud by inflating lying about their income, assets, etc.? I assume anyone that has committed fraud is automatically ineligible and it seems from some recent articles that fraud was actually quite common.
It seems to me that there are two possible futures:
If a house goes into foreclosure, the house is immediately turned over to a semi-private organization (much like the bad S&L loans were handled by Resolution Trust Corp) listed on the bidding site for everyone to bid on nationally with standardized information like photos, map location, crime statistics, etc (more relevant info than your typical RE site since many can't visit the house in real time). The bank (or the mortgage holder through CDO say) that made the bad loan has two options either wait for the result of the bid or accept a market value of the house right away from the semi-private organization. The organization could make money by taking the difference between what it pays to the bank and what the ultimate bid is.
you know, it seems to me there is a little problem here. not represented on this list are a whole bunch of companies (like NEW) that issued most of the loans and are now in receivership. So are those debt-holders just SOL? Not sure how a bankrupt entity can sign up to give preferred treatment to certain customers based on their ability to pay.
The more you look at this, the more it looks like window dressing.
http://market-ticker.denninger.net/2007 ... riday.html
I agree completely. I think that the real purpose of this is psychological. Somewhere up high they are having conversations like this.
HH (head honcho): What can we do to push this crash out another 5 years like the dotcom bubble?
BB (bernake): Not much I'm afraid. We can try interest rates, but it might not work as well this time.
HH: Ok, fine...how about stemming the tide until Jan 2009?
BB: Hard to tell. China's economy will crash around September 2008, and it's likely to push us from recession to depression. Of course, we have 2 quarters of negative growth until it's called a recession, so we might be able to play with the names of things. But really people will notice when they don't have any jobs.
HH: Alright, can you at least make things float until Feb 2008 so I can cash out?
BB: The way things are falling? No way...unless...it might just work. We could pretend to have the problem solved. By the time everyone realizes it's not a solution, we'll just blame the failure on private business for not being able to work out a bailout. PERFECT.
I don't believe we are headed for a recession. The medicine required to fix our economic woes will need to be much stronger...unfortunately.
All the hairbrain ideas being floated by Govt/FED/Wallstreet are the result of "panic thinking". There is no way out without big pain.
I once owned a place in TX. On my property was a tree. When we bought the place the tree was straight but over time it started to become crooked. Most of the limbs were on the same side the tree was leaning...towards the crook side. The tree tried in vain to save itself by shedding a few of the limbs on the "downside" but the problem was that the actual trunk had become crooked. Eventually the tree just toppled over.
When an entity starts to go crooked there is reached a "tipping point" when the only recourse is complete collapse.
Something so simple yet somehow reflective of the whole teetering pile of #$^% that is our economic/FED/Govt/Wallstreet system.
Timmmmbbbbbeeerrrrrr!!!!
http://money.cnn.com/2007/12/03/news/ec ... tm?cnn=yes
So my question is what exactly does thousands mean? 999,999? 1,001? Aren't there about 2 million homes on the market today? With another couple million financed via risky mortgages? This bailout keeps sound more and more like a gift to the few and a drop in the larger bucket to me.
There will be many people that have interest rates about to "re-adjust", and by giving them another 2 or 5 years of constant rates the ability to sell their house in several years if prices moderate, or as they are in the workforce they most likley will receive raises (or modivate them to work harder to).
In the end any bailout is never pretty, however this current structure doesnt use public money and helps mortgage bankers spread out the pain...which might prevent some of them from going bankrupt or being forced to sell securities at firesale prices. The prices of MBS and CDO's will moderate out over time since everyone that is currently selling them NEED to. I have friends that work at WAMU, and they told me that they have not had a securitization sale (selling mortgages in the open market) since July! This means that holding them is worth more than the discounted price in the market.
http://money.cnn.com/2007/12/03/real_es ... n=money_pf
Gee, investors aren't climbing over themselves to give up their ROI? This news is so shocking that I wonder if we've entered the Twilight Zone.
Except most of them are falling behind before they default, so they won't qualify for "group 4" treatment, so they won't get a bail out. so it's really a non issue.
no, that means no one wants to buy them at a price that covers their cost, so they are forced to hold them. And since they can't sell them, they don't have working capital to write more mortgages - since it is all tied up in the loans they are holding
It's called the "Credit Crunch". you should read up on it.
Currently I have a good friend that works with in credit dept and they told me that they are making more money on holding the current loans than selling them in the market, thus it means the market value is underpriced. Its simply SUPPLY & DEMAND, more people are forced to sell loans for solvency issues, thus those that just WANT to sell them would receive a lower price. That is the reason WAMU hasnt sold any in months.
For people that get into the program, they will have several years to work out a stratgy to refinance if prices moderate, get raises and promotions at work, and other variety of ways to stabilize yourself over time. Most loans that get the extra time will be fine.
It has been estimated that approx 15% of Suprime loans will go bad, but what about the other 85% of people that pay on time? (or use whatever percentage, its larger than 50%, thus more people are ok than suffer). Of PRIME loans, it is estimated that less than 5% will go bad. So that means the other 95% of people that have a loan are doing just fine, or scraping by and wont go into forclosure.
It is true that we have not hit bottom, yet most likely by the end of 2008. It will be ugly and more crap to hit the markets.
DJO - Im quite sure that I know more about the Banking Industry than you do, so no need to lecture me. I work with insuring banks all day (worked on a small bank's account today).
I'm hesitant to put any faith in these kinds of numbers. Not that they couldn't be accurate, they could. I just don't have very much faith in the prognosticators at large. Do you have a reference for these numbers? I mean, if it's NAR I'm revising them up in my head. If it's some established bear, maybe I revise them down in my head.
Mostly, with major details still up in the air, like how many years of declines are we looking at, and how bad of a recession are we looking at, well I just don't buy anyone's numbers right now.
Also, I don't exactly buy the theory that buying people an extra 2 years will help anything. If inflation is running at 4% (officially) and annual raises are running at 2%...well how is it going to get easier for people to pay their mortgage in two years? Their mortgage is fixed, so I guess if the mortgage eats up 90% of their salary, then you can mostly ignore inflation, but if it's closer to 50% then inflation on everything else will eat up most of your increase in income.
I'll apologize for the tone, but I stand by what I said
1) According to your financial statement WAMU originated $156B in home loans in 2006 (p25), yet their balance of "home loans held in portfolio" decreased from $135B to $118B (p34). So, they hold less than one year's volume on their balance sheet for investment and they are also decreasing the amount they hold. The explanation for this decrease? "the $17.79 billion transfer to loans held for sale in the fourth quarter.". If they aren't selling them, where does all this loan volume go?
edit: Proceeds from loans held for sale = $123B (p64). Knew it had to be in there.
2) The "market is underpriced" is a matter of opinion. It is just another way of saying there is more supply of loans for investors than there is demand. If the WAMU business model is originate loans and to sell them at face + a slight premium (which is what it appears to me to be) and offers right now are at a discount, then the business model needs to change - you need to hold the loans. That is what is going on, otherwise you need to shut down your lending engine.
If you want to talk friends at WAMU, I was talking to one of your CXO-level execs at a party a couple weeks ago. He was remarkably less sanguine about the prospects for subprime than you.
I don't trust those numbers seeing as how misestimation of those numbers is part of what got us into this mess in the first place. It would be nice to see the assumptions behind them too because I would bet they are assuming pretty small price declines. And contrary to popular belief forclosures are less of a function of ability to make payments and more of a function of declining home prices.
Check out their distribution of "loans held for portfolio"
California = 49%
NY/NJ = 13%
Florida = 8%
WA/OR = 6%
Texas = 3%
Illinois = 3%
And this doesn't count what they've sold. This is the good stuff.
Is Rob Dawg Right About WaMu?
I was a bit nervous about what I was reading, until I recalled that someone who is "quite sure that I know more about the Banking Industry than you do" assured me that everything there will be ok.
In the words of Carl Spackler: