SoCalsurfbum

Scary Foreclosure Numbers, Scarier Prospects

$49 mm to help Riverside County, CA!?!?!!!

Talk about a drop in the bucket... That will allow them to buy 200 homes at $250k a piece (below the current market price)... those 200 are a fraction of what is available and many more homes for sale will be coming on the market real soon...

What a waste of money...

Note to NYT: Dick Syron is Not Clairvoyant

I worked in this industry during this period... and late 2005 was not when bad underwriting began. If I was to put a date on it I would say about 2003-2004 is when we started seeing questionable deals at questionable pricing, etc... It just became overly apparent in late 2005 because the volume ballooned, and writing bad loans became Standard Operating Procedure for some companies.

The government lifted capital restrictions because the company lobbied heavily to take on more loans so that they could make more money even though they were undercapitalized even at that time.

Syron's 'Foresight' comment is about as believable as Mozillo's "No one saw this coming"... a lot of people saw it coming in 2003-4 when housing was overpriced then... and we prepared for the end of the mania appropriately.

If Syron truly believed a 3 standard deviation move in housing price and volume was sustainable and appropriate... his resume might have a lot of pretty titles on it but he obviously didn't have enough real world experience to hold that job.