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Rumpl4skn
Joined: 11 Feb 2006
Posts: 2597
Location: 36° 3'N x 86°40'W
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 Posted: Tue Mar 18, 2008 7:08 pm Post subject: |
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My GF is the stock guru in the house, and she became very active in the market again about 6 months ago. One of the first shows she tuned in to was Cramer's Mad Money. She found his approach abrasive, but the show overall entertaining, and she liked some of what she heard.
About 2 months ago, she began to comment that she "no longer trusted him", for several reasons. Around that time, I had gotten a copy of John Hanky's educational video, "Critical Thinking", and we watched it together. It definitely started her mental juices flowing.
The next day, after Cramer's show, she told me (and I'm paraphrasing), "That Critical Thinking DVD got me wondering, and I've decided that Jim Cramer is a flake, if not a total phony. All you have to do is pay attention to what he says from week to week and you can see he's pointing people in convoluted directions. There's something weird going on here."
When I played the DonHarrold.net vids, she was in complete agreement. Thanks for those links, guys.
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Peter
Joined: 26 Jun 2007
Posts: 1476
Location: The Canadian shield
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| Posted: Tue Mar 18, 2008 7:14 pm Post subject: Beware of sneaks BEARing STEARN warnings... |
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J.P. Morgan the god-father of soul...less money grubbing.
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The grand design, reflected in the face of Chaos. |
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atm
Joined: 16 Apr 2006
Posts: 2695
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| Posted: Tue Mar 18, 2008 9:15 pm Post subject: |
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Lehman Brothers slumps as Wall St wonders: who's next?
From The Times
March 18, 2008
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/banking_and_finance/article3571867.ece
Fears that America is facing another bank collapse spread across Wall Street yesterday, despite emergency measures by the Federal Reserve Bank to prevent the US banking system from imploding and a government-backed rescue deal to save Bear Stearns.
Shares in Lehman Brothers plunged as much as 40 per cent before closing down about half that at $31.75 as traders worried that the investment bank would experience the same lack of confidence from its counterparts and customers as Bear Stearns had faced at the end of last week and would suffer a surge in liquidity demands.
Traders ignored comments by Richard Fuld, Lehman’s chairman and chief executive, as he insisted that the bank had $35 billion (£17.5 billion) of cash and liquid assets and a further $160 billion of unencumbered assets, which could be sold to generate cash.
The stock of its bigger rivals also fell sharply. Shares in Morgan Stanley were down 8 per cent at $36.38 at the close, those of Merrill Lynch were off 5 per cent at $41.18, Citigroup ended the day down 6 per cent at $18.62 and Goldman Sachs closed down 4 per cent $151.02. The Dow Jones industrial average swung wildly within a 300-point range before closing up 21.20 points at 11,972.30.
Interbank lending almost ground to a halt yesterday, with banks fearful of dealing with each other, prompting talk of another round of coordinated central bank aid.
In an effort to minimise the fallout and in conjunction with the firesale of Bear Stearns to JPMorgan Chase, on Sunday the Fed cut its discount lending rate by a quarter of a percentage point to 3.25 per cent and announced another series of liquidity measures.
The problem was particularly acute in sterling markets, with the gap between indicative three-month interbank borrowing rates and the Bank of England loans more than 70 basis points – the highest for the year. Some analysts said that big players on the interbank market had been doing as little as £700 million a day of business over the past week, a fraction of the several billions that would have been executed a year ago.
Panic-selling of shares in MF Global - a derivatives broker – pushed its shares down by as much as 70 per cent in New York.
Shares in Bear Stearns, the bank that was rescued in an all shares deal by JPMorgan Chase at the weekend at a 94 per cent discount, plunged almost 84 per cent to close at $4.81. JPMorgan was expected last night to dismiss about half of Bear Stearns’s staff, making about 200 redundant from its office in Canary Wharf, London.
The severe losses among banking stocks came as one of the world’s leading economists said that the US Federal Reserve’s dramatic actions over the past few days had been interpreted as evidence that the central bank believes that there is another banking group facing severe funding difficulties.
Robert Shiller, of Yale University, who is co-founder of America’s leading house price index, told The Times: “It signals that the Fed must know how bad things really are. It looks like they think something is really wrong.”
Chris Whalen, head of the Wall Street consultancy Institutional Risk Analytics, said: “Any firm not affiliated with a large commercial bank is vulnerable to suffer from severe funding difficulties.
We have reached the end of the game. Around two thirds of all hedge funds won’t be around by the year end because they can’t survive without leverage.”
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atm
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"The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education".
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Fintan
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Joined: 18 Jan 2006
Posts: 3890
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| Posted: Tue Mar 18, 2008 11:19 pm Post subject: |
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Terrific. Looks like a shareholder revolt is on the cards over the totally
derisory $2-a-share JPM offer for the stock. Too right! This "deal" stinks.
The stink is one of low-down dirty-dealing by powerful market players.
The guy who is going to screw this ripoff is high-school dropout and now
billionaire Joe Lewis. He has over $1 Billion of his $3 Billion fortune
tied up in Bear Stearns stock. Whisper is he has hedged this investment,
but he has the deep pockets and motivation to fight this all the way.
And he will.
Bear Stearns management should have told JPM to stick their offer and
backed the Fed into a corner: telling them that the market confidence
was THEIR problem; that BS management responsibility was to their own
shareholders --so they would file for Chapter 11 on last Monday morning.
The Fed would have had no choice but to ante up. But of course, all that
presumes that Bear Stearns managment were on the up and up.
Latest is that Bear Stearns shares are already at four times the offer
from JPMorgan. One analyst has priced the stock as worth $22, not far
off the back-of-an-envelope figure I posted on Monday of $20 a share.
| Quote: | Bear Stearns faces action over cut-price takeover
By Stephen Foley in New York - Tuesday, 18 March 2008
Enraged shareholders at Bear Stearns are threatening an assault on the company's cut-price takeover by JPMorgan Chase, and its share price yesterday reflected hopes of an alternative outcome for the bank.
Because the book value of the company remained close to $84 per share, chief executive Alan Schwartz had suggested last week – and some investors, analysts and employees argued yesterday – that shareholders would have got more money back if the company had been liquidated.
Some complained Bear Stearns shareholders had been sacrificed by the Fed in its desperation for a fix that did not destabilise the financial system. The company's second largest shareholder, Joe Lewis, the British currency trader whose disastrous investment in Bear Stearns last autumn has lost more than $1bn, predicted shareholders would reject what he called "a derisory offer".
Anger began as early as Sunday night's conference call to discuss the deal. An individual Bear Stearns shareholder asked why the transaction benefited the bank's investors more than a liquidation, but JPMorgan's finance chief Mike Cavanagh said he should direct his question to Bear managers instead. The unidentified called concluded: "I vote not to approve this sale."
JPMorgan shares jumped more than 10 per cent yesterday as investors decided its acquisition was a steal, but Mr Cavanagh said the deal will cost it much more than the $236m (£118m) it is paying for Bear Stearns shares. He put the figure at $5bn-$6bn, including integration costs, a restructuring of Bear's trading positions and – top of the list – provisions for potential legal actions from shareholders, trading partners and others.
Jeff Harte, analyst at Sandler O'Neill, told clients: "We suspect many Bear Stearns shareholders will be disappointed with the outcome, and, while we believe an approval is the more likely outcome, we do not believe it is incomprehensible that this deal may have bought the company additional time to assess its situation which may lead shareholders to reject the offer."
Bear Stearns has promised to put the deal to its shareholders within the next few weeks. In an emergency review over the weekend, regulators have already given the deal the green light, JPMorgan said that it was expected to close in record time before the end of June.
It remained highly uncertain last night what the consequences of a shareholder rejection of the deal might be, but a closing price of $4.81 per Bear Stearns share suggested that some investors were betting on a more positive outcome.
JPMorgan's agreement to guarantee all Bear Stearns transactions means it already has the right "to direct the business, operations and management" of the company. If the deal is not approved, it has the right to buy Bear Stearns' midtown Manhattan headquarters, making an independent future particularly complicated.
Meredith Whitney, the bearish financial sector analyst at Oppenheimer & Co, said there was no bank with the balance sheet strength to take over Bear Stearns, other than JPMorgan. She advised shareholders to cut their losses. "They should take the money and run."
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/bear-stearns-faces-action-over-cutprice-takeover-797198.html |
| Quote: | Hopeful investors bet on higher offer for Bear Stearns
By Nick Clark
Wednesday, 19 March 2008
Investors in the US were betting yesterday on a higher offer for Bear Stearns, as the bank's share price soared four times higher than Sunday's $2-a-share offer from JPMorgan Chase.
Shares in Bear stormed up 68.8 per cent to $8.12 on the New York Stock Exchange yesterday morning as investors predicted JPMorgan's $236m (£117m) takeover offer would meet resistance from Bear's shareholders. The stock retreated later on, but still closed nearly 23 per cent higher than the previous night's close at $5.91.
Rob Hegarty, managing dir-ector of the securities and investment practice at the res-earch firm TowerGroup, said: "There have been rumblings in the market that shareholders might not accept the offer, as well as rumours of higher bids. This has all given hope to some investors that Bear Stearns won't be sold for $2 a share." Mr Hegarty said the stock was also experiencing volatility on short-term trading.
Shareholders were taken by surprise by the merger. Last week, the bank was forced to rush out a denial that it faced liquidity problems after spec-ulation in the market, only to be bailed out with emergency funding by the Federal Reserve and JPMorgan days later. On Sunday, news emerged that Bear had agreed to a $236m offer from JP.
Shareholders have seen their holdings practically wiped out in days, and some have said they are unhappy with JP's offer. The second largest shareholder on the register, the British billionaire Joe Lewis, has already said he intended to reject the bid. Mr Lewis, whose holding has disintegrated from $967.8m on Christmas Eve to $22.1m under the terms of JPMorgan's offer, told CNBC: "I think it is a derisory offer and I don't think they will get shareholder approval." Last night, Mr Lewis was understood to be considering his options.
Mr Hegarty said: "This is where things become interesting. Do shareholders settle for the offer or risk the potential bankruptcy of Bear as they push to try and get a higher price?"
Another concern, should shareholders reject JPMorgan's offer, is the potential to lose the Federal Reserve's backing. "The Fed has provided backing to Bear Stearns via JPMorgan. If that bid is rejected, they are potentially putting the billions of dollars of backing at risk," Mr Hegarty added.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/hopeful-investors-bet-on-higher-offer-for-bear-stearns-797867.html |
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atm
Joined: 16 Apr 2006
Posts: 2695
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| Posted: Tue Mar 18, 2008 11:35 pm Post subject: |
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America was conned - who will pay?
The South Sea Bubble ended in riots as trust was lost. Wall Street also duped the public
Larry Elliott, economics editor
The Guardian,
Monday March 17 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/mar/17/economics.useconomy
Bear Stearns marks the moment when the global financial crisis went critical.
Up until last Friday, it had been possible - just about - to believe that the worst was over and that things were about to get better. That pretence was stripped away when JP Morgan, at the behest of the Federal Reserve, stepped in when the hedge funds pulled the plug on the fifth-biggest US investment bank.
It is now clear that no end is in sight to the turmoil, and the reason for that is that the Fed and the US treasury are no closer to solving the underlying problem than they were eight months ago.
The crisis will only end when house prices stop falling and banks stop racking up huge losses on their loans. Doing that, however, will require the US government to intervene directly in the real estate market to end the wave of foreclosures.
Ideologically, it is ill-equipped to take that step and, as a result, property prices will fall and the financial meltdown will go on and on.
Ultimately, though, action will be taken because there will be political pressure for it. Indeed, it is somewhat surprising that there is not already rioting in the streets, given the gigantic fraud perpetrated by the financial elite at the expense of ordinary Americans.
The US has just had its weakest period of expansion since the 1950s. Consumption growth has been poor. Investment growth has been modest. Exports have been sluggish. But if you are at the top of the tree, the years since the last recession in 2001 has been a veritable golden age. Salaries for executives have rocketed and profits have soared, because the productivity gains from a growing economy have been disproportionately skewed towards capital.
Patriotic
For ordinary Americans, though, it has been a different story. Real wages have been growing slowly; at just 1.6% a year on average over the latest upswing, well down on the experience of earlier decades. Business, of course, needs consumers to carry on spending in order to make money, so a way had to be found to persuade households to do their patriotic duty.
The method chosen was simple. Whip up a colossal housing bubble, convince consumers that it makes sense to borrow money against the rising value of their homes to supplement their meagre real wage growth and watch the profits roll in.
As they did - for a while.
Now it's payback time and the mood could get very ugly.
Americans, to put it bluntly, have been conned. They have been duped by a bunch of serpent-tongued hucksters who packed up the wagon and made it across the county line before a lynch mob could be formed.
The debate now is not about whether the US is in recession but how deep and long that recession will be.
Super-bears have started to say that this is perhaps "The Big One", by which they mean the onset of a new Great Depression. The need to rescue Bear Stearns has done little to still those voices.
As the economics team at HSBC recently pointed out, there has been a "catastrophic breakdown" of trust, and when that has happened in the past - the US in the 1930s, Japan in the 1990s - chucking extra money at the banks in the hope that they will start lending again proves ineffective.
It's not hard to see why trust has become such a rare commodity: Wall Street at the height of the securitisation mania had, in effect, become London at the time of the South Sea Bubble crisis in 1720. Vast quantities of funny paper were changing hands even though those involved in the deals had no idea of their true worth. Nor did they care. Inevitably, now the bubble has burst and the huge Ponzi securitisation scam has been exposed, there has been a reaction. The securitisation market is dead, there is less money sloshing round the system, banks are hoarding their cash.
Having allowed the housing boom to rage out of control for too long and then delaying cuts in interest rates until the housing market was gripped by recessionary forces, the Fed is now trying to make up for lost time with a burst of hyperactivity. It will cut interest rates on Wednesday and keep cutting them: financial markets expect the Fed funds rate to be 1% by the summer, and they are probably right. In most downturns, easier monetary policy does the trick. Lower interest rates make it cheaper to borrow and also change the trade-off between saving and spending. This may not be the usual sort of downturn, however, with consumers going through a period of debt revulsion after the excesses of recent years, even so the consensus is that after two or three quarters of falling output, a slow and sluggish recovery will be under way.
Deflation
These hopes are likely to be dashed, unless there is intervention at home and internationally to tackle the crisis. Domestically, the priority should be to stop homes that have been foreclosed being auctioned on the open market, since by selling them at a 50% discount property prices are driven down. The US does not seem to have learned the lessons from Japan, which encouraged a fire sale of property in the 1990s and was sucked into a classic debt deflation trap as a result. Those who argue, with some force, that it would be counter-productive to intervene in the market because the US needs to work the rottenness out of its system must recognise that the cold turkey option will be very long and painful.
The second form of intervention should be to shore up the dollar, the collapse of which is worrying countries that rely heavily on exports and is the main reason for the surge in commodity prices.
Co-ordinated intervention by the major central banks needs to be at the top of the agenda at next month's G7 meeting in Washington, and there could be action even sooner if the dollar continues to tank.
In the longer term, lessons must be learnt from the turmoil. One is that you don't solve the problems of a collapsing bubble by blowing up another, which is what Alan Greenspan did after the dotcom fiasco in 2001 - the most irresponsible behaviour of any central banker in living memory.
The second lesson is that there has to be far stricter regulation not just of the US real estate market but of Wall Street, to prevent the return of irresponsible lending as soon as the recovery is firmly under way.
If this is, heaven help us, The Big One, one of the only consolations will be that the repugnance at the orgy of speculation that has sapped the strength of the US economy will put a new New Deal on the political agenda.
But for this to happen there has to be a political response and even though this year's presidential election will be held in the shadow of recession, there appears not to be a potential FDR among the contenders for the White House.
Yet if this crisis really does get as bad as some are forecasting, the public will rightly demand more than a slap on the wrist for Wall Street.
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| Quote: |
'Helicopter Ben' and his 0% remedy for Depression
Ben Bernanke
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/mar/19/useconomy.interestrates
Ashley Seager
The Guardian,
Wednesday March 19 2008
Ben Bernanke is in the spotlight as never before, two years after taking over at the US Federal Reserve from Alan Greenspan . The Fed's chief is facing potentially the worst financial crisis the world has seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s and now, as then, this one is Made in America.
So it is fortunate that in his academic life Bernanke was a student of the Depression and so should have as good an idea as anyone of how to get out of one or, preferably, avoid one.
Six years ago he famously said the Fed could resort to cutting interest rates to zero and, quoting from Milton Friedman, suggested dropping money from helicopters if the US economy slid into deflation or falling prices. That earned him the label Helicopter Ben from critics who disliked the idea of expanding the money supply in that way.
The 54-year old was chief of George Bush's council of economic advisers for four years before taking the top job at the Fed. During his academic career at MIT, Stanford and Princeton he wrote extensively about the Great Depression and acknowledged in a speech at Friedman's 90th birthday party in 2002 that the Fed was at fault during the Depression for not expanding demand.
"I would like to say to Milton and Anna [Friedman] regarding the Great Depression. You're right, we did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again."
Now with house prices in freefall Bernanke is widely expected by economists to cut interest rates ultimately to 1% or even zero as he does whatever he can to prevent a slump.
He is also likely to sanction further injections of funds into frozen money markets to try to thaw them. Bernanke has until recently drawn attention to rising inflationary pressures. But most observers think he will put those concerns to one side while he battles against a recession which will push inflation lower as demand contracts. He knows he cannot be the Fed chief who let the economy fall into recession or worse.
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Cramer flip flopping. Classic:
Cannibalomics 101, in plain English:
| Quote: |
Can’t Grasp Credit Crisis? Join the Club
March 19, 2008
Economic Scene
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/19/business/19leonhardt.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
By DAVID LEONHARDT
Raise your hand if you don’t quite understand this whole financial crisis.
It has been going on for seven months now, and many people probably feel as if they should understand it. But they don’t, not really. The part about the housing crash seems simple enough. With banks whispering sweet encouragement, people bought homes they couldn’t afford, and now they are falling behind on their mortgages.
But the overwhelming majority of homeowners are doing just fine. So how is it that a mess concentrated in one part of the mortgage business — subprime loans — has frozen the credit markets, sent stock markets gyrating, caused the collapse of Bear Stearns, left the economy on the brink of the worst recession in a generation and forced the Federal Reserve to take its boldest action since the Depression?
I’m here to urge you not to feel sheepish. This may not be entirely comforting, but your confusion is shared by many people who are in the middle of the crisis.
“We’re exposing parts of the capital markets that most of us had never heard of,” Ethan Harris, a top Lehman Brothers economist, said last week.
Robert Rubin, the former Treasury secretary and current Citigroup executive, has said that he hadn’t heard of “liquidity puts,” an obscure kind of financial contract, until they started causing big problems for Citigroup.
I spent a good part of the last few days calling people on Wall Street and in the government to ask one question, “Can you try to explain this to me?” When they finished, I often had a highly sophisticated follow-up question: “Can you try again?”
I emerged thinking that all the uncertainty has created a panic that is partly unfounded. That said, the crisis isn’t close to ending, either. Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, won’t be able to wave a magic wand and make everything better, no matter how many more times he cuts rates. As Mr. Bernanke himself has suggested, the only thing that will end the crisis is the end of the housing bust.
So let’s go back to the beginning of the boom.
It really started in 1998, when large numbers of people decided that real estate, which still hadn’t recovered from the early 1990s slump, had become a bargain. At the same time, Wall Street was making it easier for buyers to get loans. It was transforming the mortgage business from a local one, centered around banks, to a global one, in which investors from almost anywhere could pool money to lend.
The new competition brought down mortgage fees and spurred some useful innovation. Why, after all, should someone who knows that she’s going to move after just a few years have no choice but to take out a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage?
As is often the case with innovations, though, there was soon too much of a good thing. Those same global investors, flush with cash from Asia’s boom or rising oil prices, demanded good returns. Wall Street had an answer: subprime mortgages.
Because these loans go to people stretching to afford a house, they come with higher interest rates — even if they’re disguised by low initial rates — and thus higher returns. The mortgages were then sliced into pieces and bundled into investments, often known as collateralized debt obligations, or C.D.O.’s (a term that appeared in this newspaper only three times before 2005, but almost every week since last summer). Once bundled, different types of mortgages could be sold to different groups of investors.
Investors then goosed their returns through leverage, the oldest strategy around. They made $100 million bets with only $1 million of their own money and $99 million in debt. If the value of the investment rose to just $101 million, the investors would double their money. Home buyers did the same thing, by putting little money down on new houses, notes Mark Zandi of Moody’s Economy.com. The Fed under Alan Greenspan helped make it all possible, sharply reducing interest rates, to prevent a double-dip recession after the technology bust of 2000, and then keeping them low for several years.
All these investments, of course, were highly risky. Higher returns almost always come with greater risk. But people — by “people,” I’m referring here to Mr. Greenspan, Mr. Bernanke, the top executives of almost every Wall Street firm and a majority of American homeowners — decided that the usual rules didn’t apply because home prices nationwide had never fallen before. Based on that idea, prices rose ever higher — so high, says Robert Barbera of ITG, an investment firm, that they were destined to fall. It was a self-defeating prophecy.
And it largely explains why the mortgage mess has had such ripple effects. The American home seemed like such a sure bet that a huge portion of the global financial system ended up owning a piece of it. Last summer, many policy makers were hoping that the crisis wouldn’t spread to traditional banks, like Citibank, because they had sold off the underlying mortgages to investors. But it turned out that many banks had also sold complex insurance policies on the mortgage debt. That left them on the hook when homeowners who had taken out a wishful-thinking mortgage could no longer get out of it by flipping their house for a profit.
Many of these bets were not huge, but were so highly leveraged that any losses became magnified. If that $100 million investment I described above were to lose just $1 million of its value, the investor who put up only $1 million would lose everything. That’s why a hedge fund associated with the prestigious Carlyle Group collapsed last week.
“If anything goes awry, these dominos fall very fast,” said Charles R. Morris, a former banker who tells the story of the crisis in a new book, “The Trillion Dollar Meltdown.”
This toxic combination — the ubiquity of bad investments and their potential to mushroom — has shocked Wall Street into a state of deep conservatism. The soundness of any investment firm depends largely on other firms having confidence that it has real assets standing behind its bets. So firms are now hoarding cash instead of lending it, until they understand how bad the housing crash will become and how exposed to it they are. Any institution that seems to have a high-risk portfolio, regardless of whether it has enough assets to support the portfolio, faces the double whammy of investors demanding their money back and lenders shutting the door in their face. Goodbye, Bear Stearns.
The conservatism has gone so far that it’s affecting many solid would-be borrowers, which, in turn, is hurting the broader economy and aggravating Wall Streets fears. A recession could cause credit card loans and other forms of debt, some of which were also based on overexuberance, to start going bad as well.
Many economists, on the right and the left, now argue that the only solution is for the federal government to step in and buy some of the unwanted debt, as the Fed began doing last weekend. This is called a bailout, and there is no doubt that giving a handout to Wall Street lenders or foolish home buyers — as opposed to, say, laid-off factory workers — is deeply distasteful. At this point, though, the alternative may be worse.
Bubbles lead to busts. Busts lead to panics. And panics can lead to long, deep economic downturns, which is why the Fed has been taking unprecedented actions to restore confidence.
“You say, my goodness, how could subprime mortgage loans take out the whole global financial system?” Mr. Zandi said. “That’s how.”
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Michael Brandl on Bear Stearns Fallout:
http://www.youtube.com/McCombsBSchool
| Quote: |
Numerous Countries Have Recently Dropped The Dollar as Their Reserve Currency
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
http://georgewashington.blogspot.com/2008/03/numerous-countries-have-recently.html
In the past couple of years, the following countries have stopped using the dollar as their reserve currency or have dropped their currency's peg against the dollar:
* China
* Japan
* Kuwait
* Syria
* Iran
* Libya
* Russia
* Malaysia
* Brazil
* Argentina
* Ecuador
* Switzerland
* Norway and some other Scandinavian countries
* Some Balkan countries
* Many East European currencies
The following countries are rumored to be considering dropping the dollar as their reserve currency or terminating their currency's peg against the dollar:
* The arab Gulf States
* Saudi Arabia
* South Korea
* Venezuela
* Sudan
As Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, and the "Father of Reagonomics", recently said: "The dollar’s reserve currency role is drawing to an end".
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| Quote: |
Small companies on 'survival alert' as sterling falls further
http://www.independent.ie/business/irish/small-companies-on-survival-alert-as-sterling-falls-further-1321147.html
By Brendan Keenan
Wednesday March 19 2008
AS sterling fell to parity with the old Irish pound, the Small Firms Association (SFA) warned that many small export companies are struggling to survive.
Yesterday, the British pound fell further, to reach 78.2p to the euro, despite high inflation figures which suggested the Bank of England will find it difficult to cut interest rates much further. The Irish pound converted into euro in 1999 at an entry level of 78.76p. It is the first time that sterling has approached these levels since.
The assistant director of the SFA, Avine McNally, warned of "devastating effects" on exporters if sterling fell as low as 74p to the euro, as some forecasters have suggested.
"It is unrealistic to expect small Irish companies to compete at such a rate against sterling," McNally said.
There were already cases of firms moving to Britain or Northern Ireland, or thinking of doing so, she added.
"One involves a company in Roscommon which exports all its products to the UK and employs 24 people and is moving to England. According to the owner, the loss of 24 jobs will be devastating in one of the country's unemployment blackspots," she said.
Another company, 12 miles from the border, was operating almost entirely in sterling and said it might as well be located across the border.
She said specific measures would have to be taken to reduce employment costs for the most vulnerable and exposed companies.
"Significant rebalancing will have to take place to reduce our transport, energy and service costs," McNally said.
Some of the most-promising new export companies were on "survival alert".
"It will be an absolute tragedy if they fail to survive because of a problem which is outside their control," she said.
The SFA says that Britain accounts for one-third of all the exports from small firms. With 70pc of all small exporters selling into the UK market, around 60,000 jobs are dependent on UK trade links.
"There are a whole series of negatives for the economy flowing from the current situation.
Further increases in the value of the euro will have a devastating effect on our competitiveness.
"The reluctance of the ECB to cut interest rates because of eurozone inflationary pressures, will further compound the competitive pressures already impacting on small exporting countries." |
_________________
"The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education".
Albert Einstein |
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Fintan
Site Admin
Joined: 18 Jan 2006
Posts: 3890
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| Posted: Wed Mar 19, 2008 4:24 pm Post subject: Bear Stearns & Dollar Death |
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 Bear Stearns & Dollar Death
Guest: Don Harrold http://www.youtube.com/user/donharrold
As Bear Stearns collapses and the dollar dives to new international lows,
stock analyst Don Harrold joins us to discuss the decidedly dark financial
future of the USA; high financial skullduggery; investing tactics; and the
role of mass media hacks who serve as the marketing arm of Wall Street.
The Next Level Show - 19th March, 2008
LISTEN:
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http://www.BreakForNews.com/audio/NextLevel080319a.mp3
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Greg Palast Connects up
the Spitzer+Subprime dots:
| Quote: | The $200 billion bail-out for predator banks and Spitzer charges are intimately linked
Greg Palast 3/14/08 - Reporting for Air America Radio’s Clout
While New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was paying an ‘escort’ $4,300 in a hotel room in Washington, just down the road, George Bush’s new Federal Reserve Board Chairman, Ben Bernanke, was secretly handing over $200 billion in a tryst with mortgage bank industry speculators.
Both acts were wanton, wicked and lewd. But there’s a BIG difference. The Governor was using his own checkbook. Bush’s man Bernanke was using ours.
This week, Bernanke’s Fed, for the first time in its history, loaned a selected coterie of banks one-fifth of a trillion dollars to guarantee these banks’ mortgage-backed junk bonds. The deluge of public loot was an eye-popping windfall to the very banking predators who have brought two million families to the brink of foreclosure.
Up until Wednesday, there was one single, lonely politician who stood in the way of this creepy little assignation at the bankers’ bordello: Eliot Spitzer.
Who are they kidding? Spitzer’s lynching and the bankers’ enriching are intimately tied.
How? Follow the money.
The press has swallowed Wall Street’s line that millions of US families are about to lose their homes because they bought homes they couldn’t afford or took loans too big for their wallets. Ba-LON-ey. That’s blaming the victim.
Here’s what happened. Since the Bush regime came to power, a new species of loan became the norm, the ‘sub-prime’ mortgage and it’s variants including loans with teeny “introductory” interest rates. From out of nowhere, a company called ‘Countrywide’ became America’s top mortgage lender, accounting for one in five home loans, a large chuck of these ‘sub-prime.’
Here’s how it worked: The Grinning Family, with US average household income, gets a $200,000 mortgage at 4% for two years. Their $955 a month payment is 25% of their income. No problem. Their banker promises them a new mortgage, again at the cheap rate, in two years. But in two years, the promise ain’t worth a can of spam and the Grinnings are told to scram - because their house is now worth less than the mortgage. Now, the mortgage hits 9% or $1,609 plus fees to recover the “discount” they had for two years. Suddenly, payments equal 42% to 50% of pre-tax income. Grinnings move into their Toyota.
Now, what kind of American is ‘sub-prime.’ Guess. No peeking. Here’s a hint: 73% of HIGH INCOME Black and Hispanic borrowers were given sub-prime loans versus 17% of similar-income Whites. Dark-skinned borrowers aren’t stupid – they had no choice. They were ‘steered’ as it’s called in the mortgage sharking business.
‘Steering,’ sub-prime loans with usurious kickers, fake inducements to over-borrow, called ‘fraudulent conveyance’ or ‘predatory lending’ under US law, were almost completely forbidden in the olden days (Clinton Administration and earlier) by federal regulators and state laws as nothing more than fancy loan-sharking.
But when the Bush regime took over, Countrywide and its banking brethren were told to party hardy – it was OK now to steer’m, fake’m, charge’m and take’m.
But there was this annoying party-pooper. The Attorney General of New York, Eliot Spitzer, who sued these guys to a fare-thee-well. Or tried to.
Instead of regulating the banks that had run amok, Bush’s regulators went on the warpath against Spitzer and states attempting to stop predatory practices. Making an unprecedented use of the legal power of “federal pre-emption,” Bush-bots ordered the states to NOT enforce their consumer protection laws.
Indeed, the feds actually filed a lawsuit to block Spitzer’s investigation of ugly racial mortgage steering. Bush’s banking buddies were especially steamed that Spitzer hammered bank practices across the nation using New York State laws.
Spitzer not only took on Countrywide, he took on their predatory enablers in the investment banking community. Behind Countrywide was the Mother Shark, its funder and now owner, Bank of America. Others joined the sharkfest: Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and Citigroup’s Citibank made mortgage usury their major profit centers. They did this through a bit of financial legerdemain called “securitization.”
What that means is that they took a bunch of junk mortgages, like the Grinnings, loans about to go down the toilet and re-packaged them into “tranches” of bonds which were stamped “AAA” - top grade - by bond rating agencies. These gold-painted turds were sold as sparkling safe investments to US school district pension funds and town governments in Finland (really).
When the housing bubble burst and the paint flaked off, investors were left with the poop and the bankers were left with bonuses. Countrywide’s top man, Angelo Mozilo, will ‘earn’ a $77 million buy-out bonus this year on top of the $656 million - over half a billion dollars – he pulled in from 1998 through 2007.
But there were rumblings that the party would soon be over. Angry regulators, burned investors and the weight of millions of homes about to be boarded up were causing the sharks to sink. Countrywide’s stock was down 50%, and Citigroup was off 38%, not pleasing to the Gulf sheiks who now control its biggest share blocks.
Then, on Wednesday of this week, the unthinkable happened. Carlyle Capital went bankrupt. Who? That’s Carlyle as in Carlyle Group. James Baker, Senior Counsel. Notable partners, former and past: George Bush, the Bin Laden family and more dictators, potentates, pirates and presidents than you can count.
The Fed had to act. Bernanke opened the vault and dumped $200 billion on the poor little suffering bankers. They got the public treasure – and got to keep the Grinning’s house. There was no ‘quid’ of a foreclosure moratorium for the ‘pro quo’ of public bail-out. Not one family was saved – but not one banker was left behind.
Every mortgage sharking operation shot up in value. Mozilo’s Countrywide stock rose 17% in one day. The Citi sheiks saw their company’s stock rise $10 billion in an afternoon.
And that very same day the bail-out was decided – what a coinkydink! – the man called, ‘The Sheriff of Wall Street’ was cuffed. Spitzer was silenced.
Do I believe the banks called Justice and said, “Take him down today!” Naw, that’s not how the system works. But the big players knew that unless Spitzer was taken out, he would create enough ruckus to spoil the party. Headlines in the financial press – one was “Wall Street Declares War on Spitzer” - made clear to Bush’s enforcers at Justice who their number one target should be. And it wasn’t Bin Laden.
It was the night of February 13 when Spitzer made the bone-headed choice to order take-out in his Washington Hotel room. He had just finished signing these words for the Washington Post about predatory loans:
“Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which he federal government was turning a blind eye.”
Bush, said Spitzer right in the headline, was the “Predator Lenders’ Partner in Crime.” The President, said Spitzer, was a fugitive from justice. And Spitzer was in Washington to launch a campaign to take on the Bush regime and the biggest financial powers on the planet.
Spitzer wrote, “When history tells the story of the subprime lending crisis and recounts its devastating effects on the lives of so many innocent homeowners the Bush administration will not be judged favorably.”
But now, the Administration can rest assured that this love story – of Bush and his bankers - will not be told by history at all – now that the Sheriff of Wall Street has fallen on his own gun.
A note on “Prosecutorial Indiscretion.”
Back in the day when I was an investigator of racketeers for government, the federal prosecutor I was assisting was deciding whether to launch a case based on his negotiations for airtime with 60 Minutes. I’m not allowed to tell you the prosecutor’s name, but I want to mention he was recently seen shouting, “Florida is Rudi country! Florida is Rudi country!”
Not all crimes lead to federal bust or even public exposure. It’s up to something called “prosecutorial discretion.”
Funny thing, this ‘discretion.’ For example, Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, paid Washington DC prostitutes to put him diapers (ewww!), yet the Senator was not exposed by the US prosecutors busting the pimp-ring that pampered him.
Naming and shaming and ruining Spitzer – rarely done in these cases - was made at the ‘discretion’ of Bush’s Justice Department.
Or maybe we should say, 'indiscretion.'
http://peaceandjustice.org/article.php/20080314092812540 |
This is Eliot Spitzer's swansong article
in the Washington Post last month:
| Quote: | Predatory Lenders' Partner in Crime
How the Bush Administration Stopped the States From Stepping In to Help Consumers
By Eliot Spitzer - Thursday, February 14, 2008; A25
Several years ago, state attorneys general and others involved in consumer protection began to notice a marked increase in a range of predatory lending practices by mortgage lenders. Some were misrepresenting the terms of loans, making loans without regard to consumers' ability to repay, making loans with deceptive "teaser" rates that later ballooned astronomically, packing loans with undisclosed charges and fees, or even paying illegal kickbacks. These and other practices, we noticed, were having a devastating effect on home buyers. In addition, the widespread nature of these practices, if left unchecked, threatened our financial markets.
Even though predatory lending was becoming a national problem, the Bush administration looked the other way and did nothing to protect American homeowners. In fact, the government chose instead to align itself with the banks that were victimizing consumers.
Predatory lending was widely understood to present a looming national crisis. This threat was so clear that as New York attorney general, I joined with colleagues in the other 49 states in attempting to fill the void left by the federal government. Individually, and together, state attorneys general of both parties brought litigation or entered into settlements with many subprime lenders that were engaged in predatory lending practices. Several state legislatures, including New York's, enacted laws aimed at curbing such practices.
What did the Bush administration do in response? Did it reverse course and decide to take action to halt this burgeoning scourge? As Americans are now painfully aware, with hundreds of thousands of homeowners facing foreclosure and our markets reeling, the answer is a resounding no.
Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal government was turning a blind eye.
Let me explain: The administration accomplished this feat through an obscure federal agency called the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). The OCC has been in existence since the Civil War. Its mission is to ensure the fiscal soundness of national banks. For 140 years, the OCC examined the books of national banks to make sure they were balanced, an important but uncontroversial function. But a few years ago, for the first time in its history, the OCC was used as a tool against consumers.
In 2003, during the height of the predatory lending crisis, the OCC invoked a clause from the 1863 National Bank Act to issue formal opinions preempting all state predatory lending laws, thereby rendering them inoperative. The OCC also promulgated new rules that prevented states from enforcing any of their own consumer protection laws against national banks. The federal government's actions were so egregious and so unprecedented that all 50 state attorneys general, and all 50 state banking superintendents, actively fought the new rules.
But the unanimous opposition of the 50 states did not deter, or even slow, the Bush administration in its goal of protecting the banks. In fact, when my office opened an investigation of possible discrimination in mortgage lending by a number of banks, the OCC filed a federal lawsuit to stop the investigation.
Throughout our battles with the OCC and the banks, the mantra of the banks and their defenders was that efforts to curb predatory lending would deny access to credit to the very consumers the states were trying to protect. But the curbs we sought on predatory and unfair lending would have in no way jeopardized access to the legitimate credit market for appropriately priced loans. Instead, they would have stopped the scourge of predatory lending practices that have resulted in countless thousands of consumers losing their homes and put our economy in a precarious position.
When history tells the story of the subprime lending crisis and recounts its devastating effects on the lives of so many innocent homeowners, the Bush administration will not be judged favorably. The tale is still unfolding, but when the dust settles, it will be judged as a willing accomplice to the lenders who went to any lengths in their quest for profits. So willing, in fact, that it used the power of the federal government in an unprecedented assault on state legislatures, as well as on state attorneys general and anyone else on the side of consumers.
The writer is governor of New York.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/13/AR2008021302783_pf.html
Correction: The writer WAS governor of New York. |
| Quote: | Some Questions About the Spitzer Incident
Jane Hamsher - Monday March 10, 2008
ABC is reporting that Eliot Spitzer came under the attention of the Feds because his bank reported "suspicious money transfers" to the IRS. The Justice Department brought it to the FBI's Public Corruption Squad, who looked into it and found that payments were made to a company called QET, which did business as The Emperor's Club.
All kinds of questions arise here:
1. Why would the bank tell the IRS and not Spitzer himself if there was a suspicious transfer? Spitzer is a longtime client, a rich guy and the governor. We're talking thousands of dollars here, not millions. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense that they spotted a "suspicious transfer" made by the governor, and that this is how things began. It's possible it was just ordinary paperwork the bank had to file with the government whenever some particular flag was raised, but if that's the case, why did the DoJ go to DefCon 3?
2. What is a USA doing prosecuting a prostitution case? This isn't normally what the feds spend their time with.
3. Mike Garcia is a Chertoff crony. Sources familiar with the investigation say that he sent a prosecution memo to DC two months ago asking for authority to indict a public figure (Spitzer). Which means they had their case made long before the wire tap of February 13. Why did they then include this line from that conversation in the complaint?
| Quote: | | LEWIS continued that from what she had been told "he" (believed to be a reference to Client-9) "would ask you to do things that, like, you might not think were safe -- you know -- I mean that...very basic things...."Kristen" responded: "I have a way of dealing with that...I'd be like listen dude, you really want the sex?...You know what I mean." |
This salacious detail does not seem like it's necessary to make their case, and appears to be added for no other purpose than to destroy Spitzer's career.
4. How did Spitzer's name get leaked to the media, and who did it? Didn't happen to Dave Vitter.
5. Why did Mike Bloomberg suddenly start talking about running for governor recently? And why did he give $500,000 to Joe Bruno? He's good buddies with Mike Mukasey. What did he know and how did he know it?
6. The Mann Act? Are you kidding?
7. Spitzer's been in the line of fire of the GOP hit squad for a while. Roger Stone, Roger Stone, Roger Stone.
There are all kinds of things about this that just don't pass the smell test.
http://firedoglake.com/2008/03/10/some-questions-about-the-spitzer-incident/ |
Here's the article mentioned just above
in those Roger Stone references:
| Quote: | Political Consultant Resigns After Allegations of Threatening Spitzer’s Father
By DANNY HAKIM and NICHOLAS CONFESSORE
Published: August 23, 2007
ALBANY, Aug. 22 — The Senate majority leader, Joseph L. Bruno, forced one of his top political consultants to resign on Wednesday after allegations that he left a threatening telephone message at the office of Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s father.
The consultant, Roger J. Stone Jr., continued to insist that the recorded message — which was made public by lawyers representing the governor’s 83-year-old father, Bernard Spitzer — was not authentic. He said allies of the governor had plotted against him, though an alibi he offered in a statement on his Web site appeared to be problematic.
The episode has inflamed the already poisonous political atmosphere here, just weeks after Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo issued a report that found the Spitzer administration had misused the State Police as part of an attempt to discredit Mr. Bruno.
Mr. Bruno, a Republican, cut short questions during a news conference after vowing that the allegations against Mr. Stone would not divert attention from efforts by Senate Republicans to investigate the Spitzer administration. Democrats called for a new investigation into the phone call and chided Mr. Bruno for not apologizing.
“I don’t know what Roger Stone did,” Mr. Bruno said. “Roger no longer has a relationship with the Senate, based on the allegations.”
“Whether it’s true or not,” he said, “we are, until there’s clarity, severing our relationship.”
Mr. Stone, 55, has been a controversial figure in state and national political circles for decades. He cut his political teeth as a teenager in the campaign of Richard M. Nixon, working for the Committee to Re-elect the President, and later was a partner of Lee Atwater, one of the highest-profile political consultants of the 1980s.
Aside from some notable political victories, Mr. Stone has left behind a trail of short-lived campaigns, feuds with former friends and clients, and, above all, rumors of dirty tricks. As he once put it in an interview, “if it rains, it was Stone.”
He oversaw Ronald Reagan’s campaign operations in New York but was on the outs in some Republican circles after backing the upstate billionaire Tom Golisano’s third-party bid against Gov. George E. Pataki in 2002. A dossier about Mr. Stone’s past exploits prepared by a former opponent and still circulating among New York Republicans runs to 74 pages.
During the Florida recount in 2000, George W. Bush’s campaign enlisted Mr. Stone and his wife, Nydia, who is of Cuban ancestry, to rally support among Cuban exiles in Miami, according to Jeffrey Toobin’s “Too Close to Call,” a book about the recount battle. Mr. Stone was also instrumental in organizing the so-called Brooks Brothers Riot, the book said, when hundreds of Republican activists stormed a county election office in Miami and demanded that workers there cease recounting presidential ballots.
Mr. Stone had an unlikely political relationship with the Rev. Al Sharpton during his 2004 run for the presidency, and some of Mr. Sharpton’s aides said Mr. Stone played a central role in the campaign. But Mr. Stone says his role has been greatly overstated.
Mr. Stone, who mostly does corporate consulting work now, has also been an adviser to the real estate developer Donald J. Trump, especially during Mr. Trump’s efforts in the late 1990s to prevent the expansion of gambling in New York. In 2000, Mr. Stone and Mr. Trump were fined by state lobbying regulators after an investigation revealed that the developer had secretly financed newspaper ads opposing Mr. Pataki’s plans to approve new casinos in the Catskills.
Mr. Stone’s reputation for hard-edged political tactics appeared to be a selling point for the Senate Republicans, who after Mr. Spitzer’s election last fall were facing an aggressive Democratic governor eager to wipe out the state’s last redoubt of Republican strength.
Mr. Stone was hired near the end of the legislative session in June and was paid $20,000 a month. In a closed-door meeting last month, Mr. Stone presented a road map for aggressively defending and rebuilding the party.
“When you’re in kind of a war posture or an under-attack posture, that’s certainly appealing,” said a senior Republican aide in the Senate. The aide said that Mr. Stone had had little contact with rank-and-file members, aside from the July meeting, and that opinion about his presentation had been mixed.
The Senate Republicans appeared newly emboldened in the weeks after Mr. Stone’s arrival, which coincided with the emergence of more aggressive Web-based activity opposing Mr. Spitzer. Reporters and others around the capital began receiving e-mail messages from addresses like SpitzerFile.com and NYFacts.net, most of them reprinting newspaper stories critical of Mr. Spitzer or containing political cartoons attacking him. Those two services are run by Michael Caputo, a Buffalo-area Republican who has worked with Mr. Stone in the past but who has said he is working on his own now.
The phone message left at the office of Bernard Spitzer, who is suffering from Parkinson’s disease, said that Mr. Spitzer, a wealthy real estate developer, would be “compelled by the Senate sergeant-at-arms” to testify about “shady campaign loans” he made to his son during his unsuccessful campaign for attorney general in 1994. (Senate Republicans have said they might investigate those loans.)
The message, left just before 10 p.m. on Aug. 6, went on to say that the elder Spitzer would be “arrested and brought to Albany” if he resisted. It also used profanities in referring to the governor.........
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/23/nyregion/23stone.html?_r=1&oref=login |
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Minds are like parachutes.
They only function when open.
Last edited by Fintan on Wed Mar 19, 2008 6:55 pm; edited 4 times in total |
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jose
Joined: 23 Jan 2007
Posts: 23
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| Posted: Wed Mar 19, 2008 4:58 pm Post subject: LTM- check your sources! |
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Numerous Countries Have Recently Dropped The Dollar as Their Reserve Currency
List is not correct.
I have no idea where that data comes from.
1. Colombia's reserves are in dollars, they never dropped them, otherwise they would not be getting US aid.
2. Ecuador's currency IS the dollar! |
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Wu Li
Joined: 20 Feb 2007
Posts: 576
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| Posted: Wed Mar 19, 2008 6:25 pm Post subject: The Audio |
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I liked it!
More with that guy!
I just bought Bear Stearns at upward five cause I heard it may go up to 100 by friday 
Although I thought you may have took him to task about Ron Paul or explain that he is in the know at least? You didn't! Well I still like Ron Pauls words but I understand the idea of words and actions. so I let that go. NO matter!
I liked his analysis on Gold because I agree and have been saying this since around 400 as well and agree that now(although Gold is important in any portfolio) it may be just a median in which to stabilize your portfolio.
Once again this forum has placed links of someone I may watch or listen to for opinions. I can respect that  Always great stuff so you may decide for yourself.
I feel that my comments of times past place me firmly in the ideas expressed within this audio.
Lets hope these discussions may remain above board like this audio.
Cheers 
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bardobeing
Joined: 14 Feb 2008
Posts: 56
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| Posted: Wed Mar 19, 2008 8:32 pm Post subject: |
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I didn't think my first post would be in the form of a confession, but I wrote the first desktop sub-prime loan origination software program in the U.S. back in 1987 in Southern California and I'm wondering if I owe the world some sort of apology. It was written in dBase II, ran in MS-DOS, and we printed docs on an IBM strike printer because laser printers didn't yet exist. I can't help but feel responsible. 
Back then my client targeted blacks, latinos and white trash. They charged a 21% loan origination fee plus about $5000 worth of other miscellaneous fees. The investors who bought the paper earned about 28% annually in combined yield from the interest rates and pre-payment penalties. Six months after the loan was issued the borrowers were targeted monthly by phone and weekly by mail to refi the loan the just took out. The prepayment penalty was huge and a whole new round of origination fees would be earned.
Back then this was the best investment in town. 28% yields and LTV's averaged 30% and appreciation was good so you could roll them suckers every 18 months like clockwork with no risk to the investor. You never had to foreclose on anyone. You simply refinanced their second mortgage to include all the missed payments plus a slew of interest and penalties plus all the new fees. You did this repeatedly until it was no longer safe to do so. Rarely did they ever have to take a home, when they did they made money off it. It was mostly second mortgages back in the day.
There were no asset-backed securities on wall street back then. It was this huge success to the private investor that had other investors drooling over the opportunity to get in on the action. Thus was born the mortgage pooling and securitization of home mortgages. In the beginning, even the types of funds that are failing today were hugely profitable in the late-80's early 90's. Over tiime, the originators simply pushed the parameters as far as the investors would allow them to be pushed, which turned out to be pretty damn far.
The most outrageous act of "sanctioned" fraud was the "stated income loan". Essentially, if the applicant didn't earn enough to qualify for the loan the loan officer would calculate how much they would have to earn and then added a bit to that and wrote the amount in on the application, then checked a box that says he is applying for a "stated income" loan. The borrower would receive an extra 1/2 percent in the mortgage rate, but would qualify. 99% of the time these loans are/were done to pay off large sums of credit card debt. I've seen people with a 20-page credit report and hundreds of credit cards.
I'll finish by pointing out that it is good to remember at times like this (i.e. Bear Stearns crisis) that all these loans are back by real assets (residential homes). Just because the borrower can't pay doesn't mean that the person holding the paper loses 100% of it's value. Often, nothing is lost. Often, a profit is made in rolling the house through bankruptcy. Even up until a year ago the average loan-to-value of subprime loans issued in California by a friend of mine who's all over the state was about 70%. What does this mean? It means the borrower can default, you take the home 90 days later and put it on the market. Home values could drop 25% and the asset pool would receive, upon sale, all it's back-payments plus interest plus penalties and this would all flow through to the investor as good news.
Lost in the hype of borrower default is the fact that the loans are backed by valuable collateral. The number of defaults is meaningless if there are others who will agree to finance the purchase of the same home. A certain amount of default and foreclosure is written into the fund prospectus from the get-go. This is a clever way for JP Morgan to take title to millions of American residential homes. This could be the play they are after,- to accumulate title in millions or tens of millions (eventually) of American homes.
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Fintan
Site Admin
Joined: 18 Jan 2006
Posts: 3890
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| Posted: Wed Mar 19, 2008 9:17 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | bardobeing: but I wrote the first desktop sub-prime loan
origination software program... It was written in dBase II... |
Nice 1 dude. I cracked my first programming teeth on dBase.
With compilation it was a neat and quite flexible language.
Dude, you were just doing a job. If you built cars you wouldn't be
responsible for people speeding in 'em. There is nothing intrinsically
wrong with sub-prime. With proper regulation it's a valuable way of
allowing people on the margins to get themselves into a decent home
of their own at a couple of percent above the standard mortgage rate.
| Quote: | bardobeing: The number of defaults is meaningless if there are
others who will agree to finance the purchase of the same home. A
certain amount of default and foreclosure is written into the fund
prospectus from the get-go..... |
Excellent point.
I did try to raise with Don the actual value of the subprime paper
which Bear Stearns is sitting on, but we didn't get into an answer on that.
What you are saying seems to confirm my feeling that it's wrong to paint
this paper as totally worthless...
As you say a default rate is built in anyway, and even in a bad market
it's still possible to recover against a 70% target. Ok we all know that
some of the subprime written was fraudulent junk, but most of it is not,
and those kind of figures don't match the "worthless" hype. Hmmm...
Thanks for posting, bardobeing.
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atm
Joined: 16 Apr 2006
Posts: 2695
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| Posted: Thu Mar 20, 2008 12:32 am Post subject: |
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| Quote: |
SEC probes rumours over Lehman and Bear Stearns
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/banking_and_finance/article3583918.ece
From Times Online
March 19, 2008
Suzy Jagger, New York
Wall Street's regulator has launched a formal inquiry into whether hedge funds and other market participants sought to deliberately circulate false rumours about Lehman Brothers over the last few days in order to profit from short-selling shares in the investment bank, The Times has learnt.
On Monday, shares in Lehman Brothers fell by as much as 40 per cent amid panic that another Wall Street bank was experiencing severe funding problems. While all investment banking stocks tumbled on Monday, Lehman's rivals were broadly down around just 10 per cent.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is now investigating whether hedge funds and other dealers in the equity market had sought to drive down Lehman's stock price by disseminating unfounded rumours about the bank's liquidity position.
As the rumours gained pace, and Lehman's stock declined, Richard Fuld, the bank's chairman and chief executive, sought to quash the speculation on Monday by issuing a statement insisting the group had $35 billion (£17.5 billion) of cash and liquid assets and a further $160 billion of unencumbered assets that could be sold to generate cash.
Yesterday, Lehman's shares were trading up 1 per cent at $47 each, having recovered from the severe fall on Monday when the stock hit $22.
While it is difficult to prove that a market participant deliberately started a false and damaging rumour to profit from a falling share price, any trader found to have done so would have breached Wall Street's market manipulation rules.
The SEC has already launched a formal investigation into trading in Bear Stearns shares leading up to its rescue acquisition by JP Morgan Chase on Sunday night.
In an unusual move, the SEC issued a written statement yesterday outlining the remit of its inquiry into information that was disseminated in the market about Bear Stearns in the last two months.
The SEC said its enforcement division wrote a letter as JP Morgan Chase was negotiating to take over Bear. The letter addressed to JP Morgan concerned "investigations and potential future inquiries into conduct and statements by Bear Stearns before the public announcement of the transaction with JP Morgan".
It added: "Among the things the Division looks for are potential indications of insider trading or manipulation of markets through the dissemination of false or misleading information to investors by companies or other market participants."
The SEC declined to comment.
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| Quote: |
FSA to probe trading over the past week
http://www.financialnews-us.com/?page=ushome&contentid=2450117042
Tom Fairless
19 Mar 2008
The Financial Services Authority, the UK's market regulator, is investigating the possible manipulation of trading in financial shares over the past week, after its US counterpart yesterday launched a similar probe for the period leading up to and after Bear Stearns' sale.
The Financial Services Authority said it was looking at trading in UK financial shares in "recent days."
Sally Dewar, FSA managing director in charge of wholesale and institutional markets, said: "There has been a series of completely unfounded rumors about UK financial institutions in the London market over the last few days, sometimes accompanied by short-selling.
"We will not tolerate market participants taking advantage of the current market conditions to commit abuse by spreading false rumors and dealing on the back of them."
A source close to the FSA said one rumor claimed that Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, declined to go to the Far East in order to be in London, the spokesman said. In fact, King turned down the invitation in order to go to West Bromwich.
A spokeswoman for the FSA said the inquiry is more about intense monitoring of the market than about specific action against culprits.
Dewar said: "We remind market participants of the need to take extra care, in this market climate, to adhere to the market code of conduct."
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BSC has been investigated by the SEC before. They're no angels on Wall Street:
| Quote: |
SEC Settles Fraud Charges with Bear Stearns for Late Trading and Market Timing Violations
Firm To Pay $250 Million in Disgorgement and Penalties
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
2006-38
http://www.sec.gov/news/press/2006-38.htm
Washington, D.C., March 16, 2006 - The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced a settled enforcement action against Bear, Stearns & Co., Inc. (BS&Co.) and Bear, Stearns Securities Corp. (BSSC) (collectively, Bear Stearns), charging Bear Stearns with securities fraud for facilitating unlawful late trading and deceptive market timing of mutual funds by its customers and customers of its introducing brokers. The Commission issued an Order finding that from 1999 through September 2003, Bear Stearns provided technology, advice and deceptive devices that enabled its market timing customers and introducing brokers to late trade and to evade detection by mutual funds.
Pursuant to the Order, Bear Stearns will pay $250 million, consisting of $160 million in disgorgement and a $90 million penalty. The money will be paid into a Fair Fund to be distributed to the harmed mutual funds and mutual fund shareholders. Bear Stearns will also undertake significant reforms to improve its compliance structure. Simultaneously, NYSE Regulation, Inc. censured and fined Bear Stearns, and imposed compliance with these undertakings. The fine imposed by the NYSE will be deemed satisfied by the payment of the $250 million pursuant to the Commission's Order.
Linda Chatman Thomsen, SEC Enforcement Division Director, said, "For years, Bear Stearns helped favored hedge fund customers evade the systems and rules designed to protect long-term mutual fund investors from the harm of market timing and late trading. As a result, market timers profited while long term investors lost. This settlement will not only deprive Bear Stearns of the gains it reaped by its conduct, but also require Bear Stearns to put in place procedures to prevent similar misconduct from recurring."
Mark K. Schonfeld, Director of the Northeast Regional Office, said, "Bear Stearns was the hub that connected the many spokes of market timing and late trading - hedge funds, brokers and the mutual funds. Tape-recorded phone calls of its employees make plain the two roles played by Bear Stearns that were fundamental to mutual fund trading abuses. Bear Stearns made it possible for hedge funds and brokers to submit orders long after the 4:00 p.m. cut-off. Bear Stearns made it easier for the hedge funds and the brokers to engage in market timing, and harder for the mutual funds to detect and stop it."
Bear Stearns' Timing Desk
BS&Co. is an introducing broker dealer whose customers buy and sell securities. BSSC is a clearing firm for BS&Co., other introducing broker dealers and prime brokerage customers (i.e., hedge funds that clear trades directly through BSSC). From 1999 through September 2003, Bear Stearns facilitated late trading and deceptive market timing of mutual funds by its customers and customers of BSSC's introducing broker dealers. BSSC cleared all these unlawful mutual fund trades through its Mutual Fund Operations Department (MFOD).
In 1999, BSSC established a "timing desk" to manage the increasing flow of market timing trades through BSSC. The timing desk assisted customers to enter late trades and even to cancel unprofitable trades the following day. The timing desk also advised customers and brokers on how to evade the blocks and restrictions imposed by the mutual funds and how to negotiate BSSC's own blocking system. Some market timers expressed their appreciation for this assistance by giving timing desk employees gifts such as spa gift certificates, event tickets and meals.
Late Trading
Bear Stearns facilitated late trading. At BS&Co., certain brokers actively facilitated late trading by knowingly processing a large number of late trades for certain of their market timing customers. In some cases, BS&Co. brokers and MFOD employees falsified order tickets by recording that orders which were actually received after 4:00 p.m. had been received at 3:59 p.m. or 4:00 p.m. In a tape-recorded telephone call, an MFOD supervisor advised a BS&Co. broker:
Because you're sending trades down some days after what's considered a legitimate time, 4 o'clock New York time, we want, we want to make sure that you know that we need to populate a time prior to 4:00 p.m. New York time. What I'd like for you to do, we're going to populate either 4:00 p.m. or 3:59. … [Y]ou know, obviously, you should have them before 4 … Obviously, we aren't going to receive it most of the time before four, but it has to be written - the written time has to be before 4:00 p.m. New York time, so that if the auditors come to us, and, you know, they want to see something, we have that you took, you took the trade before 4:00 p.m.
On the clearing side, BSSC gave introducing brokers and prime brokerage customers with mutual fund trading business direct access to its mutual fund order entry system. This system permitted users to enter orders until 5:45 p.m. and processed all trades, regardless of when they were actually received, as if they had been received before 4:00 p.m. The effect, in the case of prime brokerage customers, was to put the order entry system directly in the hands of the ultimate customer who then used the system to trade at will without an intermediary broker. Thus, using the platform provided to them by Bear Stearns, certain prime brokerage customers had the ability to - and did - engage in unchecked late trading. BSSC also knowingly facilitated late trading by certain introducing broker dealers. In fact, BSSC assured at least two of its introducing brokers with significant market timing business that Bear Stearns would be able to accommodate their late trades.
In some cases, BSSC employees touted BSSC's abilities to assist timers - including the fact that BSSC's mutual fund order entry system permitted entry of orders after 4:00 p.m. - to potential market timing customers. In a tape-recorded telephone conversation, an MFOD supervisor stated to a well-known market timing broker who was being recruited by BS&Co., "Well, just to let you know - just to get you aboard - we probably do the best clearance there is on the Street on market timing…." Then, in response to a direct question by the broker about the cut-off time for trades, the MFOD supervisor responded, "You have plenty of time to do trades . . . pretty much a quarter to six, 5:45 to enter a trade."
Deceptive Market Timing
Bear Stearns also helped its market timing customers evade detection by mutual funds that did not want market timing business. Upon detecting market timing trades, mutual funds often blocked further trading by market timers by reference to the available identifying information accompanying the trade, such as the account number, registered representative number or branch code. To evade these blocks, BS&Co. helped its market timing customers hide their identities from mutual funds by, for example, assigning multiple account numbers to customers so that the mutual funds could not identify them as customers whose trades the mutual funds had previously blocked, or by assigning multiple RR numbers to registered representatives at BS&Co. to conceal the identity of the traders.
BSSC likewise facilitated deceptive market timing by its prime brokerage customers and customers of its introducing brokers by providing them with deceptive devices, such as multiple account and RR numbers and alternative branch codes, to help them avoid detection by mutual funds. In an email, a BSSC manager explained the strategy:
many of the funds don't want market timers and bear stearns simply relays the message to the customer.
some ways in which we have "addressed" this to keep the customer happy is to change the rr number on the trades or to open additional acct numbers in the family since the mf companies target certain office ranges and rr #'s and classify them as timers.
Between 1999 and 2003, BSSC received thousands of letters or emails from mutual funds complaining about abusive trading or requesting that timing be stopped. In response to these complaints and stop notices, BSSC developed a system that was supposed to stop unwanted market timing. BSSC touted the blocking system to mutual funds. In reality, however, the system was designed to stop only the specific account that had been identified by a particular mutual fund as an unwanted market timer from trading in that fund. Thus, this system permitted the same timer to continue timing the same mutual fund simply by opening new accounts. Bear Stearns then assisted with the opening of the new accounts that were necessary for these customers to continue their unwanted mutual fund trading. Only if a mutual fund threatened to terminate its dealer agreement with Bear Stearns would Bear Stearns put a stop to all market timing in that mutual fund.
As a result of this conduct, the Order finds that: (1) BSSC willfully violated, willfully aided and abetted, and caused violations of Section 17(a) of the Securities Act of 1933; (2) BS&Co. willfully violated, willfully aided and abetted, and caused violations of Section 17(a) of the Securities Act and Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Rule 10b-5 thereunder; (3) BS&Co. and BSSC willfully violated, willfully aided and abetted, and caused violations of Section 15(c) of the Exchange Act and Rule 15c1-2 thereunder; (4) BSSC willfully violated Rule 22c-1(a) as adopted under Section 22(c) of the Investment Company Act of 1940; (5) BS&Co. willfully aided and abetted, and caused BSSC's violations of Rule 22c-1(a) as adopted under Section 22(c) of the Investment Company Act of 1940; and (6) BS&Co. and BSSC willfully violated, willfully aided and abetted, and caused violations of Section 17(a) of the Exchange Act and Rule 17a-3(a)(6) thereunder.
Pursuant to the Order, in which Bear Stearns neither admits nor denies the findings, Bear Stearns will pay $250 million consisting of $160 million in disgorgement and a $90 million civil penalty. The money will be paid into a Fair Fund to be distributed according to a plan to be developed by an independent distribution consultant. Bear Stearns has agreed to significant remedial undertakings designed to improve its compliance structure. The remedial actions include the retention of an independent compliance consultant to conduct a comprehensive review of BSSC's policies and procedures related to compliance and supervision in the areas of prime brokerage and correspondent clearing, and a review of BS&Co.'s policies and procedures in the area of mutual fund transactions. BSSC has agreed to maintain a Director of Compliance and establish an Internal Compliance Controls Committee, both of whom will report to a committee of The Bear Stearns Companies Board of Directors. BSSC will also provide training and education to its employees designed to minimize the possibility of future violations of the federal securities laws or New York Stock Exchange and NASD rules. Finally, Bear Stearns will establish a Compliance Hotline where employees can anonymously obtain answers to questions or report conduct that may be a cause for concern.
The Order censures BS&Co. and BSSC and directs them to cease and desist from committing or causing violations or future violations of the preceding provisions of the federal securities laws.
In determining to accept the settlement, the Commission considered the remedial acts undertaken by Bear Stearns and the cooperation afforded the Commission staff.
The Commission's investigation is continuing.
The Commission acknowledges the assistance provided by the New York Stock Exchange. |
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Bear Stearns Prepares To Lawyer Up
Carl Gutierrez, 03.19.08, 5:30 PM ET
http://www.forbes.com/markets/2008/03/19/bear-stearns-update-markets-equity-cx_cg_0319markets27.html
Bear Stearns insisted that nothing was wrong one day, only for everything to go wrong the next. Now, despite its insistence it was telling the truth throughout, the once-mighty Wall Street firm is readying itself for lawsuits.
In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday, Bear Stearns said it amended its bylaws to pay for potential lawsuits. The New York-based firm said the amendment allowed for costs, such as legal fees, to be paid or reimbursed by the company upon employee request.
The move comes as the SEC said it hadn't ruled out legal action over the comments Bear Stearns made about its financial health only days before the company's liquidity problems brought it to the brink of collapse and renewed jitters throughout the financial world.
As late as last Wednesday, Bear Stearns Chief Executive Alan Schwartz went on American television to confront doomsday rumors and reassure nervous investors that the firm had ample liquidity. He said he was "comfortable" that the brokerage would turn a profit in its fiscal first quarter. By Thursday, Bear Stearns' solvency was being called into question, and by Friday it told regulators it was ready to file for bankruptcy. (See: "Bear On The Bubble" and "Bear Throws In The Towel")
Shares of Bear Stearns fell 9.8%, or 58 cents, to $5.33, on Wednesday. That remained far above the $2.32 value of the all-stock bid, based on JPMorgan's closing price of $42.47.
The SEC's enforcement division has written a letter to JPMorgan Chase, saying the staff discussed "investigations and potential future inquiries into conduct and statements by Bear Stearns" before the announcement of the takeover. However, it added that the staff "would favorably take into account" the circumstances surrounding the takeover when considering whether to recommend enforcement action against JPMorgan for public statements made by Bear Stearns.
In a separate development, Reuters reported that British billionaire Joseph Lewis and Chairman James Cayne are looking for a better bidder to swoop in and pick up Bear Stearns for a better price than the measly $274.5 million it was sold for. Cayne and Lewis combined own almost 15% of the firm.
Cayne and Lewis were said to have sought out private-equity firms, including J.C. Flowers and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, as well as overseas banks Barclays, HSBC, Credit Suisse, and Royal Bank of Scotland.
Lewis has every reason to search. When he started buying into Bear Stearns last year, most thought he was bottom feeding; instead it turned out he was getting it near the top. Lewis holds 11.1 million shares of Bear Stearns, and paid about $1.2 billion for the stake, which is now worth just $57.6 million. (See: "A Billion-Dollar Loss For Lewis") Prior to the Bear Stearns meltdown, Forbes estimated Lewis was the world's 368th-wealthiest person, with a fortune worth $3 billion. (See: " Billionaire Lewis Bullish On Bear").
Bear Stearns shares rose above $8 on Tuesday on hopes for a better offer from angry investors, but because of the unconventional and truly dire circumstances of the deal, it's hard to see another bidder coming through. Bear Stearns creditors may be buying shares so that they can vote for the deal and protect the value of their holdings, even though they'll lose some money on the stock, according to TradeTheNews.com. Risk arbitrage traders, speculating that the deal won't go through, may also be bidding the stock up. (See: "JPMorgan Bears Itself Uptown") |
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SEC probes speculation about Bear Stearns
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-wrap19mar19,1,3696439.story
March 19, 2008
SEC probing Bear Stearns speculation
U.S. regulators are investigating whether traders illegally sought to force Bear Stearns Cos. shares into a tailspin last week by spreading false information about the firm's finances, two people familiar with the inquiry said.
The Securities and Exchange Commission probe is focusing on whether hedge funds or other investors bet on a drop in the company's shares while spreading rumors that the New York firm was nearing collapse, said the people, who declined to be identified because the inquiry isn't public.
The New York Stock Exchange's regulatory arm is also involved in the investigation, the people said.
Speculation about a cash shortage spurred customers and lenders to pull money from Bear Stearns last week, driving the shares down 57% throughout the week. Two days later, the fifth-largest U.S. securities firm was acquired by JPMorgan Chase & Co. for $2 a share.
The company's decline coincided with a surge in investor bets that the stock price would plunge. The SEC's probe is unusual because most of the agency's stock-manipulation cases focus on penny stocks.
The case underscores regulators' concern that malicious rumors have the potential to fuel market panic and exacerbate shareholder losses on financial stocks.
The SEC on Tuesday said it wouldn't rule out potential inquiries into the company's statements in the 60 days before the takeover by JPMorgan was announced.
Although it was "premature" to give assurances to JPMorgan about future probes, the SEC's enforcement division would "favorably take into account the circumstances" of the acquisition in considering any action, the agency said.
Visa's $17.9-billion IPO sets record
Visa Inc. raised $17.9 billion late Tuesday to complete the largest initial public offering in U.S. history and help prop up the wobbly financial services industry.
The world's largest processor of credit and debit cards sold 406 million shares at $44 apiece to easily eclipse the previous U.S. record IPO of $10.6 billion set by AT&T Wireless eight years ago.
If investment bankers exercise an option on an additional 40.6 million shares, Visa's IPO would end up raising $19.7 billion before expenses.
Visa shares, trading under the "V" ticker symbol, were scheduled to begin trading today on the New York Stock Exchange. The San Francisco company will debut with a market value of about $36 billion. |
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Last edited by atm on Thu Mar 20, 2008 1:11 am; edited 1 time in total |
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John Muir
Joined: 07 Feb 2006
Posts: 345
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| Posted: Thu Mar 20, 2008 12:37 am Post subject: |
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Fintan said:
| Quote: | There is nothing intrinsically
wrong with sub-prime. With proper regulation it's a valuable way of
allowing people on the margins to get themselves into a decent home
of their own at a couple of percent above the standard mortgage rate.
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I whole heartedly disagree. Sub-prime loans are a sign of massive concentration of wealth and predatory lending. It basically penalizes poor people. Risky loans such as these exascerbate recessions when their bubble goes pop. The people that this is "valuable" to is the superrich that end up own their foreclosed property. Sub-prime loans are a sign of an economy severly out of whack. The top 1% now control 38% of the wealth in America. In 1929 the number stood at 36.3%. There is a connection between such disparities and depressions. The United States has an affordable housing crisis. The freemarket is wholely unable to solve these problems. The USA needs what some western European nations call Social Housing. The some of the people caught up in the this mess are now living in tent cities. This is Grapes of Wrath type poverty in 2008. Redistribution of wealth is the only answer to these problems. Poor people should not have to pay more for housing. Subprime it seems to me is all about the war of the rich on the poor. |
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atm
Joined: 16 Apr 2006
Posts: 2695
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| Posted: Thu Mar 20, 2008 2:19 am Post subject: |
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Asia won't avoid the pain of US turmoil
Published on March 20, 2008
Thailand and other Asian countries cannot avoid the adverse effects of the financial turmoil in the US, experts warn.
At the same time, the Bank of Thailand said yesterday's reduction in the US Federal Reserve's benchmark interest rate by 75 basis points to 2.25 per cent had not triggered a flow of funds into the country.
"The difference between the Thai and the US rates is not the only factor driving capital flows," Bloomberg reported director Amara Sriphayak as saying.
Asian stock markets jumped within a range of 1-2 per cent yesterday, driven by the Fed's 75-basis-point rate cut. Only the Thai and Indonesian bourses bucked the trend.
"Fitch Ratings does not believe Asia has decoupled from the US economy, and the region's 2008 growth prospects are weaker," James McCormack, managing director for the Asia-Pacific at Fitch Ratings, said yesterday at the "Thailand Conference" seminar hosted by Kasikorn Securities.
Fitch Ratings has placed Singapore, Hong Kong and Vietnam at the top list of the Asian markets most vulnerable to the US turmoil.
These markets depend on a large share of exports destined to the US, which accelerates inflation, large net foreign-equity inflows and large exports to China of parts and components that are eventually destined for the US or the EU.
Thailand is almost at the bottom of the vulnerability rankings, in ninth place.
"Thailand is reasonably well positioned," said McCormack.
Vietnam's exports to the US are above 10 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP), while Thailand's exports to the US are about 10 per cent of GDP.
"The number is not small for Thailand," said McCormack.
As of last April, more than 40 per cent of Thailand's exports to China and Hong Kong were parts and components that would be re-exported to final consumers in the US and the EU.
This number is quite large, although parts and components as a share of exports to China by the Philippines, Taiwan and South Korea are far greater.
McCormack said lower foreign debts and government debt to GDP had contributed to Thailand's relatively strong fiscal position.
However, he said weak global economic growth could undermine government initiatives to support growth.
Risks in Thailand are political uncertainty, weak consumption and investment. McCormack warned that a short-lived coalition government would not be good for domestic or international investor confidence or the establishment of economic policy after two years of policies being kept on hold.
Fitch Ratings has forecast economic growth of 4.7 per cent this year for Thailand, against last year's 4.8 per cent.
Wichit Chaitrong,
Anoma Srisukkasem
The Nation
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Continuity
Joined: 16 Jul 2006
Posts: 1555
Location: Municipal Flat Block 18A, Linear North
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| Posted: Thu Mar 20, 2008 5:39 am Post subject: |
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Welcome to BFN, bardobeing - that's got to be one of the most interesting FP's in any forum I've ever read. Hope you stick around, dude. 
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Touch my tail, I shred your hand.
New rule tomorrow.
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bornfree
Joined: 28 Jan 2006
Posts: 509
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| Posted: Thu Mar 20, 2008 6:41 am Post subject: |
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| Continuity wrote: | | Welcome to BFN, - that's got to be one of the most interesting FP's in any forum I've ever read. Hope you stick around, dude. |
Yeah right. Perhaps if bardobeing hangs around long enough Continuity he can sell you a $100,000 home for 2 million dollars, then refinance it for another cool mill.
Yes he must stay by all means.
Why don't we invite Bill Gates to talk about computers and humanitarian goals while we're at it. |
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