8-Alpha-Zulu

What Should Top Executives of Corporations Have to Disclose About Their Personal Lives?

Don Bowey is as right as rain on this one. A required legitimate format through which we force transparency and cause management to support their decisions is brilliant. Who gives a flip who's sleeping with whom or who smokes a little chronic or whatever, unless it affects the company in some material way?

-8-Alpha-Zuu

Ken Lewis and BAC's Shareholders Got Hosed by the Feds

Fiduciary is fiduciary is fiduciary and Lewis should have disclosed all risks and potentially detrimental matters to those that entrusted him with the "duty" to do so. The heavy handed government pressure to do the wrong thing should have been exposed and in a very detailed fashion and disclosed along with his messages to the stakeholders; all. Bernanke and Co., are pawns anyway; no intestinal fortitude. The combination of those folks in a room under phenomenal duress making world reaching strategic decisions absolutely nauseates me. We BAC stakeholders were duped and so was America.... shameful

-8Alpha-Zulu, holding at one-niner thousand waiting for vector,

The Reality of Real Estate and the Economy

What a great piece and following string. Agreed, mortgage professionals "including appraisers" should be required to operate under a fiduciary with the mortgagee (especially in the CMBS issues). The loosy-goosy relationship between all of the participants in the process is ridiculous, especially with "appraisers" and the mortgage issuer(s). In the commercial side of things (office, retail, industrial assets) this is a huge and much overlooked area of back-room dealing, nod-nod, wink-wink, etc. I have witnessed this for all of my 28 years in the business and it sickens me to see the lenders stressed to the brink (again, ref. RTC) because of the game played between valuation (appraisal) and the total capitalization of the debt side of deals done over the last decade or so. The entire process of moving money from raw capital/debt to the marketplace (in the form of mortgages( is ridden with impropriety and bias and there are there are billionaires (many) that made their fortunes by exploiting and successfully manipulating this inefficiency in the mortgaging system/process.

Obama's Windfall Profits Proposal Is Dangerous

good piece Mike...... Obama will certainly bring out the "John Galt" in all of us if left unchecked.

JPM Evaded Subprime, But Not Construction Loans [Housing Tracker]

thanks Judy, lots.

Worst of Credit Storms Is Over for U.S. Banks - Fitch

good grief! what a joke, an absolute joke.

Lack of Integrity: 10th Bank Failure of 2008 on Poor Risk Management

Haskell is right, the whole developer-lender-appra... industry there in Atlanta revolves around who prays the hardest. Integrity isn't the only one exposed in the ATL; more to follow I predict. Wanna see something to pray about, look at the Jesus network of appraisers and their appraisals that supported so many of these loans! Jesus forgot to warn the bank's BoD's of the ridiculous exposure that they created for their equity stakeholders. Lord Help Them.