Word: creditation
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...Wall Street Journal suggests that B of A may hold a special place in the government's heart because it bought Countrywide and Merrill Lynch at times when a public bailout of those companies could have caused the credit system angina. With Congress and watchdog agencies watching how the Treasury and Fed are using their thinning cash reserves, B of A will not be getting any sympathy or special dispensations from regulators...
...Except for low home prices and very low mortgage rates, all of the elements for a recover in housing are missing. Those two things should be enough, but balanced against them are shrinking access to credit, an inability of Americans to get higher wages, and crippling unemployment. (See pictures of Cleveland struggling with unemployment...
...Consumers have lost access to credit. The fact that mortgage rates have dropped does not even begin to offset that. Qualifying for a mortgage is harder than ever. Banks have reason to be cautious. One of the large credit bureaus just released a report that says 4.7% of payments for bank-issued credit cards were late sixty days or more in March, an increase of 38% over the same month last year. According to Reuters, "In March, lenders closed 20 million card accounts, sending the total down by 58 million since the peak in July 2008 to 380 million." Banks...
...Talk of "green shoots" is everywhere. The stock market is up 34% since early March. Credit market conditions are easing too, if less dramatically. Housing sales are picking up in some of the hardest hit markets, though prices are still dropping. Measures of business activity and consumer sentiment are returning to levels last seen before the great global financial panic of last fall. (Read about the impact of swine flu on the pork market...
...Then there's all that bad debt. We've now mostly worked through the subprime mortgage mess that started this whole debacle, but lots more losses - from prime mortgages, credit cards, commercial real estate, you name it - are still to come. Morgan Stanley economist Richard Berner estimated on Tuesday that even in the most bullish case, banks and other lenders have only recognized about half the $1.7 trillion in loan losses they're likely to suffer over the course of the downturn. In Berner's "bear" case, losses will top $4 trillion...