Sense on Cents

A few loyal readers have graciously shared video clips of interviews with former banking regulator, William K. Black. These interviews address the fact that a tremendous amount of mortgage originations at the core of our current economic turmoil were fraudulently underwritten.  The borrowers were never qualified only then to fall upon hard times.  The loans were often NINJA (No income check, No job check or asset check) and the fraud was more often committed by the lender than the borrower.

Why and how did this happen? Let’s briefly revisit my writing from November 12th:

At the turn of the century, the Wall Street model was a pure “originate to distribute” model with little to no residual risk on behalf of the originators or underwriters. When there is no residual risk, those who “WIN” are the players that can purely process the most volume. Well, how does one get volume? Lower the credit standards, put fewer restrictions on borrowers, little to no covenants (NINA Loans … no income, no asset check). WOW!!! What were we thinking?? Well Wall St. felt, “let’s worry about it tomorrow or maybe not at all because we are making too much money today.”

That money SUPPOSEDLY being made left tremendous risks on the books of the banks. The pursuit of ever greater SUPPOSED profits incorporated the use of CDS (credit default swaps) as synthetic collateral for structured deals. These CDS allowed for an enormous increase in volume and SUPPOSED profits. Don’t forget, though, at the core of the process a large percentage of the underlying loans were fraudulently underwritten.  (more…)