Chris77

The Countrywide Charges: Yes, They Could Have Kept Housing from Imploding, But They Weren't the Only Ones

ANYONE that didn't know just how much BS went into a no-doc loan shouldn't be writing about financials. EVERYONE knew that the whole point of the no-doc loans was for people to buy WAY more house then they could actually afford. Most of the loans were used by speculators for buy rental properties that they could not afford without the renters. These loans were really only intended for people that owned their own small businesses and had trouble documenting their income, but did anyone really believe that people working for companies they didn't own couldn't produce a copy of their checks?

The same can be said for the no down payment loans. WOW what a surprise that someone with no skin in the game would walk away when things turned sour. That's like letting me invest 100% on margin with no equity of my own.

Finally, option-arms. LOL "I can afford this house and loan, but I know I won't be able to afford it some months so I got a higher interest rate option-arm for those month" YEAH, OK, that's what good credit risk borrower would say.

When these loans first started coming out everyone knew they are garbage loans and that's why they carried such a high interest rate compared for conventional loans. As greed and competition rolled in, they offered these loans with much smaller rate deltas to conventional loans, which effectively guaranteed they would deteriorate for the lenders with the lack of risk/return increase.

It should also be noted that the first lenders to start these type of loans were the small local lenders to help them compete with the big boys. They actually KNEW their borrowers and the properties and could rate the risk properly. When the bigboys got in the game, they didn't know the borrowers or the properties, I don't know how they could have expected these loans to perform.

The data on the degree of borrower fraud is staggering. We all knew that people were fudging but I had no idea that it was as widespread as Countrywide’s numbers would suggest. Furthermore, one would think that variances of 50% would have been somewhat evident simply by the application of common sense by underwriters.

Sirius Call Options May Not Indicate Bullish Sentiment

Clearly someone is writing calls for a profit, but this article misses the point that someone else is BUYING them. It doesn't necessarily mean the call writer doesn't expect the stock to hit $1.00, it means they would be happy selling at that level, which from the current share price is a triple bagger! If the stock doesn't rise above the strike, they sell again and lower their cost basis. A .05 cent return for the call is a 15% profit based on a stock price of .33 cents, wither called away or not. ANYONE that owns this stock and is planning on keeping it long term should be writing these options on their shares. The author of this article can't invest his way out of a paper bag based on this article.

Sirius XM A La Carte Radios Closer than We Thought

It is based on the life of the receiver as far as I know.


On Jun 05 06:28 PM matty3000 wrote:

> dumb question, is a lifetime subscription based the life of the
> company or the subscriber? Also, how will they know I am dead?

Sirius XM A La Carte Radios Closer than We Thought

These receivers are NOT capable of receiving content off of both satellite systems, and the ala carte "invention" has been available to siri since the beginning. Siri channels are currently setup as different tiers, and depending on what you pay for is the tier you are activated on. Ala carte just requires the number of tiers be increased along with a firmware update for the receivers. (Any time you have had to turn your receiver off and than back on for an update was siri updating the firmware.)

The best of XM is broadcast over the Siri satellites, and best of Siri is broadcast on the XM birds. They receivers are not capable of receiving the other frequencies.