Countrywide

Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism has a post on Countrywide’s borrowing from a Federal Home Loan bank, which, as he points out, is “tantamount to borrowing at the Fed’s discount window, without the high profile and accompanying stigma.”

Atrios covers it more succinctly:

So apparently Countrywide, a big contributor to big shitpile, has gotten the Atlanta Federal Home Loan Bank to lend them $25 billion over the last few months, on top of the $25 billion they’d already gotten. The collateral for these loans is… you guessed it… Countrywide’s portion of big shitpile.

This is about 37% of the Atlanta FHLB’s entire loan portfolio.

FHLB’s are government sponsored enterprises but are not explicitly taxpayer financed. One can imagine who might get left holding the bag.

But I think we already knew that the taxpayer is going to be socked for a chunk of the bill somewhere along the way.

And just for grins, if you’re interested in who the CEO of Countrywide donates money to, that information is here. I bet it would be interesting to go through the list of CEOs of the companies that created what Atrios calls the shitpile and see where they’ve been donating their money for the past decade.