Word: cdos
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...Monday the House of Representatives saved us from the greedy fingers of Wall Street. Rather than surrender a single nickel of taxpayer money to the mob that gave us Alt-A mortgages, collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and credit-default swaps, the House voted down the big bailout. Mr. Market was a very unhappy camper, dropping 777 points and change - or $1.2 trillion in market value. "This is a huge cow patty with a piece of marshmallow stuck in the middle of it, and I am not going to eat that cow patty," vowed Representative Paul Broun, Republican of Georgia...
...take a different look at that beating on the Dow. Turn the $1.2 trillion into a gain (say, by passing a bailout law that actually loosens stuck gears of credit) and the long-term capital gains tax on it is $180 billion, which could buy a lot of crap CDOs. And then perhaps resell them at a profit. If we take that $1.2 trillion as a loss, the government foregoes tax money, because taxpayers will report lower incomes after they write off investment losses. Revenues drop, so the government then has to keep priming the pump by increasing spending, which...
Then there's the nonsense that ratings agencies shoveled out about the risk levels of collaterized debt obligations (CDOs), how this new bit of financial wizardry deserved AAA and AA designations even though it rested partly on a foundation of subprime mortgages. It was all justified by super-sophisticated models - way too sophisticated for "you" to understand - that looked back at real estate pricing and foreclosures and couldn't conjure a scenario in which the holders of the most senior parts of these tranches wouldn't get paid...
...charge-off rates," warned Joshua Rosner, managing director of Graham Fisher & Co. and Joseph R. Mason, a finance professor at Drexel University in a paper in early 2007. When all the indicators went bad - delinquencies and interest rates up, home prices down - the agencies started yanking the ratings on CDOs by the carload. As the number of subprime delinquencies started to climb, and the magic mark-to-model accounting that the investment houses used to value their AAA and AA CDOs got market-tested - as in, "What will you give me for this piece of paper?" - the game was over...
...bunk that firms like Lehman and Bear Stearns were serving upabout having adequate capital to cover losses on their unsellable inventories of CDOs? Perhaps you remember when Bear tried to take its pile of garbage, dress it up and dump it wholesale on the suckers in a public offering. That one got laughed off the market...