Even the normally level-headed Buce—who knows better and lets us know he knows better—tries to give Tyler Cowen’s broadside at Fannie and Freddie the benefit of some (contrived) doubt.  I’ve already screamed about the legerdemain of Cowen’s post elsewhere, so let’s go for the philosophical underpinnings. Let’s give some ground first.  Buce is spot-on with: […]

Anyone who was in the MBS market and not working for a primary originator can tell you that the MBS securitization market ended around Halloween 2006. (Those of us who were at places with origination go a few more months, but had no flow by February.) Only economists were fooled by what I’ve been calling […]

Via Benzinga, L. Randall Wray notes more of the same for socializing the costs of our financial woes: In truly depressing news, Secretary Treasury Geithner announced he was funneling $2.8 billion more bail-out funds to Bank of America. In the deal, Fannie and Freddie would agree to abandon claims that they had been sold trash […]

Max Sawicky, on his Twitter feed, sends us to this classic piece from Donald Luskin Believe me, if we raise taxes on hedge-fund managers we’ll get fewer hedge-fund managers. Today, with lots of hedge-fund managers trading all the time and keeping markets efficient, stocks are at record highs around the globe and markets are deeper, […]

During the discussions about the Fannie Mae project I still regret having turned down, one of the topics was which security would be better for a portfolio (assuming their risk-adjusted prices provided the same value): a four-year-old MBS or a seven-year-old MBS? I noted that the four-year-old MBS provided more potential upside but came gradually […]