Tony Rand

Countrywide CEO Gets Lucky Grantitis

Didn't Angelo once say something about it being hard to raise a family on a salary of $350,000 a year??? I'm sure there are a lot of us that would like to see just how difficult it really is.

Countrywide Financial: Who Didn't See It Coming?

The statement "nobody saw this coming", is an absurd and obtuse claim. Everyone new this was coming, especially if they had more than five years experience/exposure to the market. All of this was caused by greed, pure and simple. We should have had a normal market cycle in or around 2003; we had the first glimpse that it was coming in 2001. However, Wall Street continued to feed the demand for mortgage backed securities.

The demand continued past the time of prudence and senility began to set into the market. Had Wall Street not loosened loan quality standards to maintain ample supply of mortgage backed securities, the demand for MBS's would have diminished and those investment dollars would have gone elsewhere -- and it is because of these efforts that we are in this so called perfect storm, caused by an artificially grown and sustained housing market.

I agree that Mozilo knows what he's doing and he deserves all of the respect of the industry. Those who don't like him and the value that he has brought to his shareholders are either jealous or just don't know him well enough to make a qualified judgment.

The current market crisis (that should have only been a cycle) is far from over. The tightening of the purse strings on lending criteria is a long overdue correction to something that should have never happened to begin with. Remove greed from the equation and you will remove all of the entities and individuals who contributed to this perfect storm.