NWS Nieuws & Achtergronden
Discussieer hier diepgaander over de actualiteiten.
Morgen beurzen op rood, met name de Belgische met hun bankenzwaartepunt.
Dollar zal weer dalen, olie omhoog en grondstoffen ook weer omhoog. Fine by me!
Dollar zal weer dalen, olie omhoog en grondstoffen ook weer omhoog. Fine by me!
Terecht! Het is de schuld van Washington dat er minder SUVs en andere middeleeuwse auto's worden verkocht.quote:Op zondag 7 september 2008 21:31 schreef pberends het volgende:
Autoproducenten vragen Washington om hulp
For great justice!
POLL: Fannie en Freddie 'bailout' goed nieuws of slecht nieuws?
http://www.blikopdebeurs.com/weblog1/
Zelf ben ik er nog niet helemaal uit ;-)
http://www.blikopdebeurs.com/weblog1/
Zelf ben ik er nog niet helemaal uit ;-)
Één ding weet ik wel: als ze failliet waren gegaan was er NIEMAND blij geweest. DIt was de enige optie. Je kan dit onmogelijk alleen vanuit een beurs-perspectief bekijken.
For great justice!
Nu maar hopen dat ze de boel schoonvegen bij Fannie en Freddie. Wat een corrupte zooi daar.
Bron: National Review (August 18, 2008)
Inside Job
How Fannie and Freddie got away with it
STEPHEN SPRUIELL
For months, President Bush stood by his veto threat. While members of Congress argued over how big the housing bailout should be, the Bush administration took the position that such a bailout was unnecessary and would serve only to reward reckless lenders and borrowers who gambled on home prices during the housing boom and lost. The president’s hand was strengthened when Portfolio magazine revealed that several of the housing bailout’s key sponsors had taken loans at preferential rates from Countrywide Financial, a major beneficiary of the bill.
Then, suddenly, everything changed. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) tasked with supplying liquidity to the mortgage market, saw their stock prices drop by half over the course of a single week of frantic selling in mid-July. Investors panicked at the thought that the troubled companies would lose their access to cheap credit, which would leave them unable to pay back the trillions of dollars they owe on mortgages and mortgage-backed securities.
Eager to calm the markets and stave off a potentially catastrophic collapse, Treasury secretary Hank Paulson asked Congress for the authority to effectuate a bailout of Fannie and Freddie, making explicit what many investors had long considered the GSEs’ implicit government backing. The Democratic leadership in Congress cleverly packaged Paulson’s new powers with the broader housing-market bailout Bush had previously opposed. With his own Treasury secretary urging him to support the measure, Bush abandoned his veto threat and decided to sign a bill that essentially doubled the U.S. public debt overnight.
“It was like a bad weekend in Vegas,” one wag said of Bush’s luck. “One minute he’s up, and the next he’s looking around like, ‘Where’d all the money go?’” Conservatives who cheered Bush’s anti-bailout stance are certainly sharing that sense of bewilderment today. To its credit, the Bush administration has consistently called for tighter regulation of the GSEs. Ironically, the housing bill provides it, but at the cost of giving the bloated and teetering GSEs a blank check to cover their past failures. Fannie and Freddie critics are exasperated; even when the GSEs lose, they win.
The government created Fannie Mae during the Great Depression as part of the New Deal. At its inception, the agency was given the task of buying and securing mortgage debt, thus freeing banks to clear mortgages off their books and make more loans. In 1968, Congress decided to take Fannie’s debt off its books by privatizing the company, but Fannie retained its government charter. In 1970, Congress chartered a second company, Freddie Mac, so that Fannie wouldn’t have a monopoly over the secondary mortgage market.
Since that time, Fannie and Freddie have doubled the amount of mortgage debt on their books every five years — from $15 billion in 1970 to nearly $5 trillion today. This astonishing rate of growth was powered by the market’s assumption that the government would stand behind Fannie and Freddie if the companies got into trouble. The government’s “implicit guarantee” allowed Fannie and Freddie to borrow money at interest rates just slightly higher than the low rates the U.S. Treasury enjoys. With access to cheap credit and low regulatory capital requirements, Fannie and Freddie leveraged themselves to the gills and grew huge. Now that the mortgage market has turned sour, rising defaults have left the giants hovering near the brink of insolvency.
Fannie and Freddie’s extraordinary lobbying efforts have enabled them to retain their government benefits while evading restraints that would have prevented such a foolish concentration of risk. The companies spent more than $200 million on lobbying and campaign contributions over the past ten years, ranking them at the top among mortgage-industry givers. They hired well-connected Washington players as executives and lavished them with multi-million-dollar compensation packages. Fannie Mae opened up “Partnership Offices” in various congressional districts, helping members appear deeply involved in affordable-housing issues.
The GSEs’ political activities were not limited to lobbying members of Congress. Affordable-housing non-profit groups that criticized Fannie and Freddie dropped their complaints after receiving sizable charitable contributions. Some Wall Street banks chafed at being essentially locked out of the secondary mortgage market, but they kept their concerns quiet over fears that they would lose profitable work selling Fannie and Freddie’s mortgage-backed securities. Fannie and Freddie’s influence on outside groups helped them gain influence inside Congress: Affordable-housing advocates like Democratic congressman Barney Frank of Massachusetts and investor-friendly Democrats like Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York are among Fannie and Freddie’s staunchest defenders.
Those whom Fannie and Freddie couldn’t influence through generosity quickly found themselves on the receiving end of some nasty smears. In his 2002 book Government-Sponsored Enterprises: Mercantilist Companies in the Modern World, Thomas H. Stanton relates the story of former Treasury undersecretary Gary Gensler. In 2000, Gensler testified in support of legislation that would have eliminated the GSEs’ line of credit at the Treasury Department (the very line that Paulson successfully sought to expand). When the GSEs’ borrowing costs ticked up slightly in response to Gensler’s remarks, a Fannie Mae spokesman accused him of depriving more than 200,000 families of the chance to own a home.
Though Fannie Mae would later apologize and retract the outrageous claim, the GSEs have used this tactic numerous times against other critics. When members of Congress voice concerns about the GSEs, their constituents soon start getting letters from Fannie and Freddie warning them that their representative is trying to make mortgages more expensive. This is exactly what happened to Rep. Paul Ryan, a Republican from Wisconsin, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article in which editorial-page editor Paul Gigot, a longtime critic of the GSEs, pronounced Fannie and Freddie “unique in their thuggery.”
Fannie and Freddie’s ethical line-skirting doesn’t always go unnoticed; in 2006, illegal fundraising activities earned Freddie Mac $3.8 million in fines from the Federal Election Commission. And accounting scandals uncovered at both GSEs in 2004 led to over $10 billion in financial restatements and the resignation of top executives at both companies. But even though Fannie and Freddie’s regulator, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, constrained their activities to some degree in the wake of the scandals, Fannie and Freddie’s congressional enablers stalled major legislation that would have created a new regulator for the GSEs with the power to take over the companies and force them to shrink their ballooning portfolios. From the GSEs’ point of view, that was $3.8 million well spent.
The mortgage-market blow-up — and Fannie and Freddie’s subsequent near-death experience — finally convinced Congress that the GSEs needed a tougher regulator, and one of the few silver linings in the abysmal housing bill is that it creates one. The new Federal Housing Finance Agency would have the power to put Fannie and Freddie into a federal receivership if it finds that the companies are not adequately capitalized. A government takeover with an eye toward downsizing, breaking up, and selling off the GSEs might be the best option for U.S. taxpayers, who now find themselves on the hook for what could turn out to be hundreds of billions of dollars. Breaking up and fully privatizing the GSEs would at least spare taxpayers from future bailouts.
The fear among critics of the GSEs is that even with a tougher regulator, Fannie and Freddie will be able to convert their outsize lobbying abilities into congressional pressure on their regulator to leave them alone. Shortly after Paulson announced his bailout plan, Sen. Jim DeMint, a Republican from South Carolina, pointed out that if Fannie and Freddie were to receive explicit taxpayer backing, then the companies should be treated like any other federal entity and banned from lobbying the federal government.
DeMint proposed an amendment to this effect, but Senate majority leader Harry Reid refused to allow a vote. What’s more, a Reid staffer sent an e-mail to a lobbyist listserv warning K Street of DeMint’s attempt to ban Fannie and Freddie from lobbying — and offering assurances that Reid would be moving to block DeMint’s amendment. This e-mail was bound to get someone’s attention; Fannie and Freddie have retained at least 42 lobbying firms this year alone.
Reid won his cloture vote on the bill, ending debate, but that still left DeMint with 30 hours to stymie the bill’s progress. “We said, ‘Look, everyone can go home if [Reid would] just promise to schedule a vote on Fannie and Freddie lobbying at a later date,’” a DeMint spokesman said. “But they wouldn’t even give us that.” DeMint kept everyone there for a rare Saturday session, when the bill finally passed 72–13.
President Bush, who once opposed most of the bill’s provisions, decided to sign it, citing the creation of a strong new regulator for Fannie and Freddie as evidence that, in essence, the GSEs’ party is over. Meanwhile, Fannie and Freddie were sending politicians a very different signal in the form of invitations to a pair of lavish galas they plan to throw at luxurious hotels in Denver and Minneapolis during this year’s political conventions. It appears the GSEs will spare no expense to wine and dine the powerbrokers who will ultimately decide whether they can continue to operate a business model under which the profits are private, but the risk is socialized.
Why did DeMint risk angering all of his colleagues over this one amendment? Why wouldn’t Reid back down? And where were DeMint’s fellow Republicans? The answer to all of these questions is that Fannie and Freddie’s extraordinary lobbying efforts have won them powerful allies in Congress and enabled them to evade meaningful oversight for decades. The ease with which these allies were able to thwart DeMint’s attempt to rein in Fannie and Freddie perfectly illustrates why he was right to insist that their empire of influence be dismantled.
Bron: National Review (August 18, 2008)
Inside Job
How Fannie and Freddie got away with it
STEPHEN SPRUIELL
For months, President Bush stood by his veto threat. While members of Congress argued over how big the housing bailout should be, the Bush administration took the position that such a bailout was unnecessary and would serve only to reward reckless lenders and borrowers who gambled on home prices during the housing boom and lost. The president’s hand was strengthened when Portfolio magazine revealed that several of the housing bailout’s key sponsors had taken loans at preferential rates from Countrywide Financial, a major beneficiary of the bill.
Then, suddenly, everything changed. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) tasked with supplying liquidity to the mortgage market, saw their stock prices drop by half over the course of a single week of frantic selling in mid-July. Investors panicked at the thought that the troubled companies would lose their access to cheap credit, which would leave them unable to pay back the trillions of dollars they owe on mortgages and mortgage-backed securities.
Eager to calm the markets and stave off a potentially catastrophic collapse, Treasury secretary Hank Paulson asked Congress for the authority to effectuate a bailout of Fannie and Freddie, making explicit what many investors had long considered the GSEs’ implicit government backing. The Democratic leadership in Congress cleverly packaged Paulson’s new powers with the broader housing-market bailout Bush had previously opposed. With his own Treasury secretary urging him to support the measure, Bush abandoned his veto threat and decided to sign a bill that essentially doubled the U.S. public debt overnight.
“It was like a bad weekend in Vegas,” one wag said of Bush’s luck. “One minute he’s up, and the next he’s looking around like, ‘Where’d all the money go?’” Conservatives who cheered Bush’s anti-bailout stance are certainly sharing that sense of bewilderment today. To its credit, the Bush administration has consistently called for tighter regulation of the GSEs. Ironically, the housing bill provides it, but at the cost of giving the bloated and teetering GSEs a blank check to cover their past failures. Fannie and Freddie critics are exasperated; even when the GSEs lose, they win.
The government created Fannie Mae during the Great Depression as part of the New Deal. At its inception, the agency was given the task of buying and securing mortgage debt, thus freeing banks to clear mortgages off their books and make more loans. In 1968, Congress decided to take Fannie’s debt off its books by privatizing the company, but Fannie retained its government charter. In 1970, Congress chartered a second company, Freddie Mac, so that Fannie wouldn’t have a monopoly over the secondary mortgage market.
Since that time, Fannie and Freddie have doubled the amount of mortgage debt on their books every five years — from $15 billion in 1970 to nearly $5 trillion today. This astonishing rate of growth was powered by the market’s assumption that the government would stand behind Fannie and Freddie if the companies got into trouble. The government’s “implicit guarantee” allowed Fannie and Freddie to borrow money at interest rates just slightly higher than the low rates the U.S. Treasury enjoys. With access to cheap credit and low regulatory capital requirements, Fannie and Freddie leveraged themselves to the gills and grew huge. Now that the mortgage market has turned sour, rising defaults have left the giants hovering near the brink of insolvency.
Fannie and Freddie’s extraordinary lobbying efforts have enabled them to retain their government benefits while evading restraints that would have prevented such a foolish concentration of risk. The companies spent more than $200 million on lobbying and campaign contributions over the past ten years, ranking them at the top among mortgage-industry givers. They hired well-connected Washington players as executives and lavished them with multi-million-dollar compensation packages. Fannie Mae opened up “Partnership Offices” in various congressional districts, helping members appear deeply involved in affordable-housing issues.
The GSEs’ political activities were not limited to lobbying members of Congress. Affordable-housing non-profit groups that criticized Fannie and Freddie dropped their complaints after receiving sizable charitable contributions. Some Wall Street banks chafed at being essentially locked out of the secondary mortgage market, but they kept their concerns quiet over fears that they would lose profitable work selling Fannie and Freddie’s mortgage-backed securities. Fannie and Freddie’s influence on outside groups helped them gain influence inside Congress: Affordable-housing advocates like Democratic congressman Barney Frank of Massachusetts and investor-friendly Democrats like Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York are among Fannie and Freddie’s staunchest defenders.
Those whom Fannie and Freddie couldn’t influence through generosity quickly found themselves on the receiving end of some nasty smears. In his 2002 book Government-Sponsored Enterprises: Mercantilist Companies in the Modern World, Thomas H. Stanton relates the story of former Treasury undersecretary Gary Gensler. In 2000, Gensler testified in support of legislation that would have eliminated the GSEs’ line of credit at the Treasury Department (the very line that Paulson successfully sought to expand). When the GSEs’ borrowing costs ticked up slightly in response to Gensler’s remarks, a Fannie Mae spokesman accused him of depriving more than 200,000 families of the chance to own a home.
Though Fannie Mae would later apologize and retract the outrageous claim, the GSEs have used this tactic numerous times against other critics. When members of Congress voice concerns about the GSEs, their constituents soon start getting letters from Fannie and Freddie warning them that their representative is trying to make mortgages more expensive. This is exactly what happened to Rep. Paul Ryan, a Republican from Wisconsin, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article in which editorial-page editor Paul Gigot, a longtime critic of the GSEs, pronounced Fannie and Freddie “unique in their thuggery.”
Fannie and Freddie’s ethical line-skirting doesn’t always go unnoticed; in 2006, illegal fundraising activities earned Freddie Mac $3.8 million in fines from the Federal Election Commission. And accounting scandals uncovered at both GSEs in 2004 led to over $10 billion in financial restatements and the resignation of top executives at both companies. But even though Fannie and Freddie’s regulator, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, constrained their activities to some degree in the wake of the scandals, Fannie and Freddie’s congressional enablers stalled major legislation that would have created a new regulator for the GSEs with the power to take over the companies and force them to shrink their ballooning portfolios. From the GSEs’ point of view, that was $3.8 million well spent.
The mortgage-market blow-up — and Fannie and Freddie’s subsequent near-death experience — finally convinced Congress that the GSEs needed a tougher regulator, and one of the few silver linings in the abysmal housing bill is that it creates one. The new Federal Housing Finance Agency would have the power to put Fannie and Freddie into a federal receivership if it finds that the companies are not adequately capitalized. A government takeover with an eye toward downsizing, breaking up, and selling off the GSEs might be the best option for U.S. taxpayers, who now find themselves on the hook for what could turn out to be hundreds of billions of dollars. Breaking up and fully privatizing the GSEs would at least spare taxpayers from future bailouts.
The fear among critics of the GSEs is that even with a tougher regulator, Fannie and Freddie will be able to convert their outsize lobbying abilities into congressional pressure on their regulator to leave them alone. Shortly after Paulson announced his bailout plan, Sen. Jim DeMint, a Republican from South Carolina, pointed out that if Fannie and Freddie were to receive explicit taxpayer backing, then the companies should be treated like any other federal entity and banned from lobbying the federal government.
DeMint proposed an amendment to this effect, but Senate majority leader Harry Reid refused to allow a vote. What’s more, a Reid staffer sent an e-mail to a lobbyist listserv warning K Street of DeMint’s attempt to ban Fannie and Freddie from lobbying — and offering assurances that Reid would be moving to block DeMint’s amendment. This e-mail was bound to get someone’s attention; Fannie and Freddie have retained at least 42 lobbying firms this year alone.
Reid won his cloture vote on the bill, ending debate, but that still left DeMint with 30 hours to stymie the bill’s progress. “We said, ‘Look, everyone can go home if [Reid would] just promise to schedule a vote on Fannie and Freddie lobbying at a later date,’” a DeMint spokesman said. “But they wouldn’t even give us that.” DeMint kept everyone there for a rare Saturday session, when the bill finally passed 72–13.
President Bush, who once opposed most of the bill’s provisions, decided to sign it, citing the creation of a strong new regulator for Fannie and Freddie as evidence that, in essence, the GSEs’ party is over. Meanwhile, Fannie and Freddie were sending politicians a very different signal in the form of invitations to a pair of lavish galas they plan to throw at luxurious hotels in Denver and Minneapolis during this year’s political conventions. It appears the GSEs will spare no expense to wine and dine the powerbrokers who will ultimately decide whether they can continue to operate a business model under which the profits are private, but the risk is socialized.
Why did DeMint risk angering all of his colleagues over this one amendment? Why wouldn’t Reid back down? And where were DeMint’s fellow Republicans? The answer to all of these questions is that Fannie and Freddie’s extraordinary lobbying efforts have won them powerful allies in Congress and enabled them to evade meaningful oversight for decades. The ease with which these allies were able to thwart DeMint’s attempt to rein in Fannie and Freddie perfectly illustrates why he was right to insist that their empire of influence be dismantled.
Good intentions and tender feelings may do credit to those who possess them, but they often lead to ineffective — or positively destructive — policies ... Kevin D. Williamson
Vreemde gedachtegang inderdaad. Die bedrijven willen zo min mogelijk belasting betalen, maar als zij innovatie negeren als een stel domme idioten, moet opeens de overheid ze helpen.quote:Op zondag 7 september 2008 21:36 schreef Q. het volgende:
[..]
Terecht! Het is de schuld van Washington dat er minder SUVs en andere middeleeuwse auto's worden verkocht.
President Camacho
TV series: Boardwalk Empire | Burn Notice | Dexter | Game of Thrones | Impractical Jokers | Luther | Sherlock | Sons of Anarchy
TV series: Boardwalk Empire | Burn Notice | Dexter | Game of Thrones | Impractical Jokers | Luther | Sherlock | Sons of Anarchy
Nieuw bestuur erin. Nieuwe policy. Nieuw kapitaal erin. En de walk-away's aanpakken (of er idd geen andere oplossing was).
Staat goed op zijn CVquote:On Bernanke's second day before Congress, this time in front of Rep. Barney Frank's House Financial Services Committee, the Fed chairman said the troubled Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were adequately capitalized, and were in no danger of failing.
Ik denk een opluchtingsrally. Weer een stukje zekerheid is er nu dat niet de hele boel instort en er nu ook fundament is voor goede hypotheek papieren.quote:Op zondag 7 september 2008 20:11 schreef henkway het volgende:
hoe gaat dat uitwerken op de AEX?? ach onbekend is positief he??
Mooi draadje op IEX: http://www.iex.nl/forum/topic.asp?forum=23&topic=1174335
quote:Illuminati schreef:
Tja, ik vind het altijd vervelend Jos Koets te moeten tegenspreken, maar ga dit nu wel doen.
In de USA wordt het misschien lastiger om een hypotheek te krijgen, maar dat is verdomme terecht. Niet iedere yokel zou een huis moeten kunnen kopen.
De banken die hypotheken in de USA originaten moeten die kunnen funden anders staat de boel stil (zoals nu deels).
Wat de overheid bereikt is dat GOEDE hypotheken kunnen worden geherfinancierd via F&F en dat F&F goed schuildpapier gaan uitgeven. En dat dit een liquide markt wordt, een soort vliegwiel.
Het belangrijkste probleem was namelijk dat ook goede debiteuren geen hypo meer konden krijgen de laatste tijd (tegen normale condities).
Op deze manier worden de normale banken enabled goeie hypo's te schrijven en worden mensen die geen hypo kunnen betalen (en die dat voorheen ook niet hadden moeten mogen)weer tot huur gedwongen (goed voor de voorraad trouwens).
Effect op banken en rente in Nederland ? nulkommanada, hooguit positief. Een markt is een vliegwiel en zodra de amerikaanse markt beter gaat lopen, gaan wij er minder last van hebben.
Macro gezien zal de US rente wat gaan stijgen, maar niet direct. Wellicht gaat Trichet dan niet verlagen. Maar als ik nu de dollar bekijk (alweer aan het aantrekken, nu 1,4253, verwacht men eerder een rentedaling in Europa dan in de USA.
Dus deposito rente ? Liquiditeit blijft nog een issue, dus blijven die 5+% deals wel bestaan vooralsnog. De banken zelf worden hier niet solider door.
Godfather Bodybuilding topic reeks
Uit dat stukje van Lyrebird
quote:Since that time, Fannie and Freddie have doubled the amount of mortgage debt on their books every five years — from $15 billion in 1970 to nearly $5 trillion today. This astonishing rate of growth was powered by the market’s assumption that the government would stand behind Fannie and Freddie if the companies got into trouble.
En de overheid, dacht ach als de banken die schulden doorzetten naar buitenlandse banken dan is er geen probleem , zolang de schulden doorgezet worden, mogelijk is daar ook briefwisseling over??quote:Op zondag 7 september 2008 23:16 schreef ItaloDancer het volgende:
Uit dat stukje van Lyrebird
[..]
[ afbeelding ]
De hamvraag blijft wel...... waar komt dat geld vandaan om het nieuwe fundament te storten (FM^2).
Dat zal zeker effect hebben, wat nu opeens is de huizencrisis niet opgelost.... zelfs verre van.
Dat zal zeker effect hebben, wat nu opeens is de huizencrisis niet opgelost.... zelfs verre van.
Ik ga ook bij Washington om geld vragen, ik vloog enkele dagen geleden in een Boeing vliegtuig en kwam 5 minuten te laat aan. Dat wil ik wel graag gecompenseerd hebben.
"Privatize Profits, Socialize Losses"
...en we noemen het kapitalisme.
Het Amerikaanse systeem loopt op zijn laatste benen heb ik het idee. Consumeren om het overeind te houden wordt steeds moeilijker. Het makkelijke crediet is allemaal opgebruikt, de leningen rijzen de pan uit en alle noodgrepen wakkeren inflatie aan.
...en we noemen het kapitalisme.
Het Amerikaanse systeem loopt op zijn laatste benen heb ik het idee. Consumeren om het overeind te houden wordt steeds moeilijker. Het makkelijke crediet is allemaal opgebruikt, de leningen rijzen de pan uit en alle noodgrepen wakkeren inflatie aan.
quote:Op maandag 8 september 2008 06:21 schreef NorthernStar het volgende:
"Privatize Profits, Socialize Losses"
...en we noemen het kapitalisme.
Het Amerikaanse systeem loopt op zijn laatste benen heb ik het idee. Consumeren om het overeind te houden wordt steeds moeilijker. Het makkelijke crediet is allemaal opgebruikt, de leningen rijzen de pan uit en alle noodgrepen wakkeren inflatie aan.
Babylon will fall
*****Kraak........
ik hoop niet dat het af gaat kalven voor 9 uur, wil er wel short op
Ik geloof dat de basisprincipes van het kapitalisme inmiddels afgeschaft zijn in de USA. Toch jammer dat Joseph McCarthy dood is, die had er vast wel iets over te zeggen gehad.quote:Op zondag 7 september 2008 22:16 schreef pberends het volgende:
[..]
Vreemde gedachtegang inderdaad. Die bedrijven willen zo min mogelijk belasting betalen, maar als zij innovatie negeren als een stel domme idioten, moet opeens de overheid ze helpen.
For great justice!
