Financial Institutions

Just How Dead Is the Private-Label MBS Market?

02/02/15

Pretty darn dead.  In 2014, there were all of 22 private-label RMBS deals.  These deals provided $5.67 billion in financing for 7,342 mortgages.  Let that sink in for a second.  The private-label market financed fewer home mortgages than were made in the District of Columbia last year.  

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Antonio Weiss Nomination Post-Mortem

01/17/15

There've been a bunch of post-mortems of the Antonio Weiss nomination in the press the last few days (see, e.g., here, here, and here).

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A Good Question

01/08/15

In today's Short View Column, Dan McCrum examines falling oil prices and the futures market, and then concludes:

But the point of this story is not that some think they know what will happen next. Rather, it is that the price of one of the most widely used and heavily traded commodities has been able to halve in a matter of months.

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Safe Banking

12/31/14

Just in time for the new year, I've got a new article called Safe Banking up on SSRN. The article is a first principles reexamination of the industrial organization of financial services. It identifies the institutional combination of deposits and lending as the key problem in our financial system.

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For the Soul of the Party: the Budget Showdown and Financial Reform

12/10/14

Will we have an appropriations bill before a government shutdown? The fight over the 2015 Appropriations Bill is now focused on one of the non-appropriations measures stuck onto the bill by the House GOP. That provision would repeal section 716 of the Dodd-Frank Act, which prohibits bailouts of swap entities and pushes certain types of particularly risky swaps out of insured depositories. Section 716 might be thought of as the "Banks Aren't Casinos" provision of Dodd-Frank.

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What Qualifies an Investment Banker to be a Regulator?

12/04/14

As the Antonio Weiss nomination contest heats up, I'd like to pose a question that seems to be taken for granted by Weiss's supporters, namely that he's obviously qualified for the job.  As far as I can tell, Weiss's chief qualifications are that (1) he's an investment banker and (2) he's a major Obama donor, who (3) professes Progressive sympathies.

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Local and State Treasurers Can Build Wealth in Struggling Communities

11/05/14

Sometimes you can beat the door down with efforts to get Federal and State officials to tackle problems, but at the end of the day, locals can best get the job done, quietly and quickly.

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QRM's Missed Opportunities for Financial Stability and Servicing Reform

10/24/14

There are three major new regulations shaping the housing finance market:  QM (qualified mortgage), QRM (qualified residential mortgage) and Reg X.  QM is a safe harbor from the statutory ability-to-repay requirement that applies to all mortgages.  QRM is a safe harbor from the statutory risk retention requirement that applies to mortgage securitization.  And Reg X are the new mortgage servicing regulations.  It's important to understand how these three regulations interact and how they're going to affect the housing finance market.

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Are You Sure That's Your Testimony?

10/22/14

Yves Smith has had some great coverage of the AIG bailout trail over on Naked Capitalism.  While the litigation, as Yves has characterized it, is a bit like a brawl between the ugly stepsisters, it's telling us all kinds of stuff we didn't know (or at least couldn't document) about the 2008-09 bailouts.   

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Unseal the Doomsday Book!

10/14/14

When I first heard about the NY Fed's Doomsday book, my initial thought was, "Wow, they've got a comprehensive survey of land titles, so MERS really isn't an issue!" Then I realized it was a Doomsday book, not a Domesday book. Apparently the Doomsday book is some sort of "in case of emergency" do-it-yourself bailouts manual that outlines the steps the NY Fed believes it can legally take to stave off economic Armageddon. 

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