Aren't Geithner and Bernanke eerily quiet about the Foreclosure Crisis?
Sunday, October 10, 2010 at 10:31PM Maybe I'm missing something, but it strikes me there's been a deafening silence emanating from Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, and Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke, on the foreclosure front. It’s as if they a) don’t read the news or b) are afraid someone will notice their incompetence. While Senator Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and other Congress people are dispensing irate pre-election sound-bites, Attorney Generals across the country are gearing up for investigations and lawsuits, and banks are announcing foreclosure moratoriums because it’s quarterly earnings season and uncertainty is bad for stock prices, (plus they are afraid their REO customers (private equity funds, asset managers, etc) will fear future legal repercussions, so they’ll have nowhere to dump all the properties they can’t sell), Geithner spent last week defending TARP (again) and talking up the merits of global economic coordination and the dollar. Meanwhile, the Fed is gearing up to buy more Treasuries (in addition to its $300 billion program) because no one else wants them, like some kind of alien that spawns offspring so it can eat its own progeny.
Foreclosure fraud is not new, many sane people and organizations have been talking about it for years, plus you don’t manufacture $14 trillion worth of mortgage backed securities in all their permuted and over-leveraged glory out of $1.4 trillion worth of subprime loans in 5 years without cutting a lot of corners. But the reason this situation is hairy for Geithner and Bernanke is that the government owns or is backing trillions of dollars worth of assets predicated on the same suspicious loans that were defaulting into the 2008 crisis period they did nothing to stop, while lavishing the banks that promulgated them with the biggest bailout and subsidization in US history.
The Fed owns nearly $1.5 trillion toxic assets that already have no bid (actual buyer), and will have less of a bid the more uncertainty there is about the loans that fill them. The Treasury is directly backing $400 billion of GSE securities, and is behind another $6.8 trillion of indirect backup to the GSE's. Both entities are desperately hoping the financial market doesn't seize up (yes the market, they don’t seem to be bothered about individuals and their homes), so they don't become the only bid again (well, actually still) behind any securitized asset. That would ruin their story – that the bailout worked even though it did absolutely nothing to help borrowers at the loan level, or by extension the general economy.
