Banks all in on buying back real estate that they foreclosed on earlier, Matt taibbii

 Wow another great article by Matt Taibbi on the mortgage industry. Banks are jumping back into the housing industry to buy property in bulk at huge discounts.  It looks a little like the back end of a scam as the banks get to buy up homes they foreclosed on already.  It looks like the big players are still working on shutting out the little guy in real estate.  This seemed like it was the major goal on Wall Street when they housing bubble was created.  It was the last opportunity for the long term investor that started with no cash to make their millions.  The years of consistent real estate values seemed to great an opportunity for the big players to let stay in the hands of main street.  Hopefully this will not end up being the case and once again the opportunities will be there for the little guy to create their fortune starting with very little. 

Here's yet another form of hidden bailout the federal government doles out to our big banks, without the public having much of a clue.
This is from the WSJ this morning:

Some of the biggest names on Wall Street are lining up to become landlords to cash-strapped Americans by bidding on pools of foreclosed properties being sold by Fannie Mae...
While the current approach of selling homes one-by-one has its own high costs and is sometimes inefficient, selling properties in bulk to large investors could require Fannie Mae to sell at a big discount, leading to larger initial costs.

In con artistry parlance, they call this the "reload." That's when you hit the same mark twice – typically with a second scam designed to "fix" the damage caused by the first scam. Someone robs your house, then comes by the next day and sells you a fancy alarm system, that's the reload.
In this case, banks pumped up the real estate market by creating huge volumes of subprime loans, then dumped a lot of them on, among others, Fannie and Freddie, the ever-ready enthusiastic state customer. Now the loans have crashed in value, yet the GSEs (Government Sponsored Enterprises) are still out there feeding the banks money through two continuous bailouts.
One, they continue to buy mortgages from the big banks (until recently, even from Bank of America, whom the GSEs were already suing for sales of toxic MBS), giving the banks a permanent market for home loans.
And secondly, they conduct these quiet bulk sales of mortgages, in which huge packets of home loans are sold to banks at a "big discount."
By now we've come full circle. Banks create the loans, make money selling them off on the market at high prices, then come back and buy them again when they're low. When the GSEs are in the middle of this transaction, it makes mortgage lending a basically risk-free proposition: Banks get paid for creating home loans and they end up owning valuable property on the cheap, but in between, they offshore the market risk to a government entity and/or to the idiot individual who bought the home mortgage in the first place.
Even better, many of the banks/investors who buy these home loans back from Fannie/Freddie will rent out their properties instead of reselling them, which can vastly increase their revenue streams. From the WSJ:

Economists at Goldman Sachs estimate the annual yield on an investment on rental property nationwide averages about 6.3%, but can exceed 8% in cities that were hit hard during the housing bust, including Las Vegas, Detroit and Tampa. By contrast, mortgage bonds have average yields of just over 3%, and investment-grade corporate bonds are yielding about 3.5%, according the Barclays Capital U.S. Investment-Grade Index.

It gets better:

Warren Buffett, considered a sage investor and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., said in an interview with CNBC-TV last month that he would buy up "a couple hundred thousand" single-family homes if he could do so easily, given the high yields on rental investments.

Another potential buyer, according to the article, is John Paulson, the pillaging hedge-fund billionaire who was behind Goldman's notorious "Abacus" deal (in which Goldman allowed Paulson to pack a portfolio full of loser mortgages he was shorting before those same mortgages were dumped on a pair of Euro banks).
So congratulations, America, your quasi-governmental housing entity is about to subcontract out mass-landlording/slumlording jobs to the likes of John Paulson and Warren Buffett, so that they can add to their bottom lines collecting rent payments in the middle of a nationwide housing slump.
As one hedge fund analyst put it to me this morning: "Help inflate the bubble, create a foreclosure crisis, buy homes in bulk, and rent them out to the same average homeowner."
Is this what we had in mind when we created the "ownership society" – helping billionaires collect your rent?

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/another-hidden-bailout-helping-wall-street-collect-your-rent-20120319#ixzz1pciT278U

Multifamily Buildings to Lead U.S. Construction Gains: Economy - Bloomberg

Multifamily Buildings to Lead U.S. Construction Gains: Economy - Bloomberg

Construction of multifamily units will lead the U.S. building industry again this year, allowing housing to contribute to growth for the first time in seven years, according to economists Michelle Meyer and Celia Chen.
Work will begin on about 260,000 apartment buildings and townhouse developments in 2012, up 45 percent from last year and the most since 2008, according to Meyer, a senior economist at Bank of America Corp. in New York. Chen, an economist at Moody’s Analytics Inc. in West Chester, Pennsylvania, is even more optimistic, projecting a record 74 percent jump to 310,000.
Home ownership rates, which have declined to the lowest levels since 1998, may keep dropping as the foreclosure crisis turns more Americans into renters. In addition, household formation will probably accelerate as an improving economy and growing employment embolden more people to stop sharing residences and strike out on their own.
“Given the ongoing shift from owning to renting, there is increasing demand for multifamily construction,” Meyer said in an interview. “Foreclosures are transitioning people out of ownership.”
Stocks rose today as Greece approved austerity plans to secure rescue funds. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index climbed 0.3 percent to 1,346.58 at 10:45 a.m. in New York.
In Europe today, the Confederation of British Industry said the U.K. economy will escape a recession and the recovery will gain momentum this year, avoiding the need for more quantitative easing by the Bank of England.

Japan Contracts

Japan’s economy shrank an annualized 2.3 percent in the fourth quarter, more than economists estimated, as slumping exports undermined a recovery from last year’s record earthquake, other data showed today.
The projected increases in U.S. multifamily construction extend gains in that began with a 6.8 percent increase in 2010 and a 54 percent surge last year to 178,300 units, according to figures from the Commerce Department. That portion of the market reached a record-low of 108,900 units in 2009 after declining for four consecutive years.
By contrast, starts on single-family homes fell last year to 428,600, the fewest in five decades of data. Bank of America’s Meyer projects single-family construction will grow 5 percent this year.
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke last week highlighted the weakness in housing as limiting the economic expansion that began in June 2009.

Bernanke’s View

“The state of the housing sector has been a key impediment to a faster recovery,” Bernanke told the annual convention of homebuilders in Orlando, Florida, on Feb. 10. “Homebuilding remains depressed in most areas,” he said. “In contrast to the situation for owner-occupied homes, rental markets around the country have strengthened somewhat. Rents have been increasing and the construction of apartment buildings has picked up.”
A lack of investment in residential real estate subtracted 0.03 percentage point from economic growth last year, the smallest decline since the industry last expanded in 2005.
A report later this week may show housing starts opened the year on a positive note. Builders broke ground on 675,000 houses in January, up 2.7 percent from the prior month, according to the median forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News before Commerce Department data on Feb. 16.
One reason why multifamily units may rebound faster than single-family houses is the drop in demand. The homeownership rate fell in the fourth quarter to 66 percent, according to Commerce Department data. It peaked at 69.2 percent in the second quarter of 2004 and fell to a 13-year low of 65.9 percent in the second quarter of 2011.

More Foreclosures

An increase in foreclosures may push the rate down even more. Lenders had slowed the pace of home seizures as they negotiated with attorneys general in all 50 states for more than a year over allegations of faulty and fraudulent paperwork used to repossess homes. That delayed the clearing of the market necessary to any recovery and increased demand for rental units.
The rental vacancy rate fell to 9.4 percent in the last three months of 2011 from 9.8 percent in the previous three months, according to data from the Census Bureau. It reached a nine-year low of 9.2 percent from April through June of last year.
Rental payments climbed 2.5 percent in 2011, the biggest gain since 2008, Labor Department figures showed.
Apartment real estate investment trusts such as AvalonBay Communities Inc. (AVB) have profited from the turn to rentals. It’s up 235 percent since its recession low on March 2, 2009, through Feb. 10. During the same period, the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index is up 92 percent.

Strengthening Demand

“Apartments should benefit once again in 2012 from a combination of gradually improving labor market, a weak for-sale market, favorable demographics and modest levels of new supply,” Tim Naughton, chief executive officer at AvalonBay, said on a Feb. 2 earnings call. “We expect that demand will outpace supply again this year, which would propel operating performance and result in another strong year for AvalonBay.”
The jobless rate dropped to 8.3 in January, the lowest level in three years, and employers in the world’s largest economy add 243,000 workers to payrolls, according to a Labor Department report this month.
The improvement will contribute to an increase in the number of households being formed, further stoking demand for rental housing, according to economists like Patrick Newport at IHS Global Insight in Lexington, Massachusetts.
“We will see a surge in household formation because of pent-up demand as people move away from their parents,” Newport said. “We will see a pickup in housing where there is a much stronger pickup in multifamily.”
IHS forecasts 1.5 million households will be formed in the 12 months through March 2013 from an estimated 972,000 in the year through March 2012.

Washington's Blog with another great story

Underneath the Happy Talk, Is This As Bad as the Great Depression?
From Washington's Blog December 29, 2010

The following experts have - at some point during the last 2 years - said that the economic crisis could be worse than the Great Depression:

• Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke

• Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan (and see this and this)

• Former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker

• Economics scholar and former Federal Reserve Governor Frederic Mishkin

• The head of the Bank of England Mervyn King

• Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz

• Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman

• Former Goldman Sachs chairman John Whitehead

• Economics professors Barry Eichengreen and and Kevin H. O'Rourke (updated here)

• Investment advisor, risk expert and "Black Swan" author Nassim Nicholas Taleb

• Well-known PhD economist Marc Faber

• Morgan Stanley’s UK equity strategist Graham Secker

• Former chief credit officer at Fannie Mae Edward J. Pinto

• Billionaire investor George Soros

• Senior British minister Ed Balls

How could that possibly be, when the stock market has largely recovered? (Let's forget for a moment that the stock market rallied after 1929, but then crashed in a double dip).



To find out, we'll look at a couple comparisons to get an idea of what is going on in the rest of the economy. And then we'll compare the government's efforts in the 1930s to today.

Housing Crisis Rivals Great Depression

As I noted last month, the current real estate slump rivals the Great Depression:

Zillow's Stan Humphries said:

The length and depth of the current housing recession is rivaling the Great Depression’s real estate downturn, and, with encouraging signs fading, will easily eclipse it in the coming months.

During the Great Depression, home prices fell 25.9 percent in five years. The U.S. housing market is now down around 25 percent from its peak in 2006.



As housing price expert Robert Shiller pointed out in September 2008:

Home price declines are already approaching those in the Great Depression, when they plunged 30% during the 1930s [i.e. over a 10-year period]. With prices already down almost 20%, it's not a stretch to think we might exceed that drop this time around.

As I wrote in December 2008:

In the greatest financial crash of all time - the crash of the 1340s in Italy .... real estate prices fell by 50 percent by 1349 in Florence when boom became bust.

How does that compare to 2001-2007? The price of Southern California homes is already down 41% [that was before the first-time homebuyer credit, Hamp and other governmental programs temporarily boosted prices]. Southern California hasn't fallen as fast as some other areas, and we're nowhere near the bottom of the market.

Moreover, the bubble was not confined to the U.S. There was a worldwide bubble in real estate.

Indeed, the Economist magazine wrote in 2005 that the worldwide boom in residential real estate prices in this decade was "the biggest bubble in history". The Economist noted that - at that time - the total value of residential property in developed countries rose by more than $30 trillion, to $70 trillion, over the past five years – an increase equal to the combined GDPs of those nations.

Housing bubbles are now bursting in China, France, Spain, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Eastern Europe, and many other regions.

And the bubble in commercial real estate is also bursting world-wide. See this.

In addition, the percentage of Americans who owned houses during the 1930s was much lower than today, which means that a larger portion of the public is being hurt from falling home prices today as compared to the Great Depression.

Meredith Whitney, Nouriel Roubini (and here), Zillow, Case-Shiller and even S&P have been calling a double dip in housing.



States and Cities In Worst Shape Since the Great Depression



States and cities are in dire financial straits, and many may default in 2011.



California is issuing IOUs for only the second time since the Great Depression.



Things haven't been this bad for state and local governments since the 30s.



Loan Loss Rate Higher than During the Great Depression



In October 2009, I reported:

In May, analyst Mike Mayo predicted that the bank loan loss rate would be higher than during the Great Depression.

In a new report, Moody's has just confirmed (as summarized by Zero Hedge):

The most recent rate of bank charge offs, which hit $45 billion in the past quarter, and have now reached a total of $116 billion, is at 3.4%, which is substantially higher than the 2.25% hit in 1932, before peaking at at 3.4% rate by 1934.

And see this.

Here's a chart summarizing the findings:



(click here for full chart).

Indeed, top economists such as Anna Schwartz, James Galbraith, Nouriel Roubini and others have pointed out that while banks faced a liquidity crisis during the Great Depression, today they are wholly insolvent. See this, this, this and this. Insolvency is much more severe than a shortage of liquidity.

Unemployment at or Near Depression Levels



USA Today reports today:

So many Americans have been jobless for so long that the government is changing how it records long-term unemployment.



Citing what it calls "an unprecedented rise" in long-term unemployment, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), beginning Saturday, will raise from two years to five years the upper limit on how long someone can be listed as having been jobless.



***



The change is a sign that bureau officials "are afraid that a cap of two years may be 'understating the true average duration' — but they won't know by how much until they raise the upper limit," says Linda Barrington, an economist who directs the Institute for Compensation Studies at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations.



***



"The BLS doesn't make such changes lightly," Barrington says. Stacey Standish, a bureau assistant press officer, says the two-year limit has been used for 33 years.



***



Although "this feels like something we've not experienced" since the Great Depression, she says, economists need more information to be sure.

The following chart from Calculated Risk shows that this is not a normal spike in unemployment:

As I noted in October:

It is difficult to compare current unemployment with that during the Great Depression. In the Depression, unemployment numbers weren't tracked very consistently, and the U-3 and U-6 statistics we use today weren't used back then. And statistical "adjustments" such as the "birth-death model" are being used today that weren't used in the 1930s.

But let's discuss the facts we do know.

The Wall Street Journal noted in July 2009:

The average length of unemployment is higher than it's been since government began tracking the data in 1948.



***



The job losses are also now equal to the net job gains over the previous nine years, making this the only recession since the Great Depression to wipe out all job growth from the previous expansion.

The Christian Science Monitor wrote an article in June entitled, "Length of unemployment reaches Great Depression levels".

60 Minutes - in a must-watch segment - notes that our current situation tops the Great Depression in one respect: never have we had a recession this deep with a recovery this flat. 60 Minutes points out that unemployment has been at 9.5% or above for 14 months:



Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David M. Kennedy notes in Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (Oxford, 1999) that - during Herbert Hoover's presidency, more than 13 million Americans lost their jobs. Of those, 62% found themselves out of work for longer than a year; 44% longer than two years; 24% longer than three years; and 11% longer than four years.

Blytic calculates that the current average duration of unemployment is some 32 weeks, the median duration is around 20 weeks, and there are approximately 6 million people unemployed for 27 weeks or longer.

Moreover, employers are discriminating against job applicants who are currently unemployed, which will almost certainly prolong the duration of joblessness.

As I noted in January 2009:

In 1930, there were 123 million Americans.

At the height of the Depression in 1933, 24.9% of the total work force or 11,385,000 people, were unemployed.



Will unemployment reach 25% during this current crisis?



I don't know. But the number of people unemployed will be higher than during the Depression.



Specifically, there are currently some 300 million Americans, 154.4 million of whom are in the work force.



Unemployment is expected to exceed 10% by many economists, and Obama "has warned that the unemployment rate will explode to at least 10% in 2009".



10 percent of 154 million is 15 million people out of work - more than during the Great Depression.

Given that the broader U-6 measure of unemployment is currently around 17% (ShadowStats.com puts the figure at 22%, and some put it even higher), the current numbers are that much worse.

But it is important to look at some details.

For example, official Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers put U-6 above 20% in several states:

• California: 21.9

• Nevada: 21.5

• Michigan 21.6

• Oregon 20.1

In the past year, unemployment has grown the fastest in the mountain West.

And certain races and age groups have gotten hit hard.

According to Congress' Joint Economic Committee:

By February 2010, the U-6 rate for African Americans rose to 24.9 percent.

34.5% of young African American men were unemployed in October 2009.

As the Center for Immigration Studies noted last December:

Unemployment rates for less-educated and younger workers:

• As of the third quarter of 2009, the overall unemployment rate for native-born Americans is 9.5 percent; the U-6 measure shows it as 15.9 percent.

• The unemployment rate for natives with a high school degree or less is 13.1 percent. Their U-6 measure is 21.9 percent.

• The unemployment rate for natives with less than a high school education is 20.5 percent. Their U-6 measure is 32.4 percent.

• The unemployment rate for young native-born Americans (18-29) who have only a high school education is 19 percent. Their U-6 measure is 31.2 percent.

• The unemployment rate for native-born blacks with less than a high school education is 28.8 percent. Their U-6 measure is 42.2 percent.

• The unemployment rate for young native-born blacks (18-29) with only a high school education is 27.1 percent. Their U-6 measure is 39.8 percent.

• The unemployment rate for native-born Hispanics with less than a high school education is 23.2 percent. Their U-6 measure is 35.6 percent.

• The unemployment rate for young native-born Hispanics (18-29) with only a high school degree is 20.9 percent. Their U-6 measure is 33.9 percent.

No wonder Chris Tilly - director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at UCLA - says that African-Americans and high school dropouts are experiencing depression-level unemployment.

And as I have previously noted, unemployment for those who earn $150,000 or more is only 3%, while unemployment for the poor is 31%.

The bottom line is that it is difficult to compare current unemployment with what occurred during the Great Depression. In some ways things seem better now. In other ways, they don't.

Factors like where you live, race, income and age greatly effect one's experience of the severity of unemployment in America.

In addition, wages have plummeted for those who are employed. As Pulitzer Prize-winning tax reporter David Cay Johnston notes:

Every 34th wage earner in America in 2008 went all of 2009 without earning a single dollar, new data from the Social Security Administration show. Total wages, median wages, and average wages all declined ....

And see this, this, and this.



Food Stamps Replace Soup Kitchens



1 out of every 7 Americans now rely on food stamps.



While we don't see soup kitchens, it may only be because so many Americans are receiving food stamps.



Indeed, despite the dramatic photographs we've all seen of the 1930s, the 43 million Americans relying on food stamps to get by may actually be much greater than the number who relied on soup kitchens during the Great Depression.



Inequality Worse than During the Great Depression



I recently reported that inequality is worse than it's been since 1917:

Most mainstream economists do not believe there is a causal connection between inequality and severe downturns.

But recent studies by Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty are waking up more and more economists to the possibility that there may be a connection.

Specifically, economics professors Saez (UC Berkeley) and Piketty (Paris School of Economics) show that the percentage of wealth held by the richest 1% of Americans peaked in 1928 and 2007 - right before each crash:



As the Washington Post's Ezra Klein wrote in June:



***

Krugman says that he used to dismiss talk that inequality contributed to crises, but then we reached Great Depression-era levels of inequality in 2007 and promptly had a crisis, so now he takes it a bit more seriously...

Robert Reich has theorized for some time that there are 3 causal connections between inequality and crashes ....

Reuters wrote an excellent piece on the issue of inequality and crashes (discussing the first three factors) last month:

Economists are only beginning to study the parallels between the 1920s and the most recent decade to try to understand why both periods ended in financial disaster. Their early findings suggest inequality may not directly cause crises, but it can be a contributing factor.

***

Inequality is actually worse now than it's been since 1917.

The War Isn't Working



Given the above facts, it would seem that the government hasn't been doing much. But the scary thing is that the government has done more than during the Great Depression, but the economy is still stuck a pit.



Specifically, many economists credit World War II with getting us out of the Depression. (I disagree, but that's another story).



This time, we've been at war in both Iraq and Afghanistan far longer than we were in World War II. But our economy is still stuck in a rut.



Moreover, the amount spent in emergency bailouts, loans and subsidies during this financial crisis arguably dwarfs the amount which the government spent during the New Deal.



For example, Casey Research wrote in 2008:

Paulson and Bernanke have embarked on the largest bailout program ever conceived .... a program which so far will cost taxpayers $8.5 trillion.



[The updated, exact number can be disputed. But as shown below, the exact number of trillions of dollars is not that important.]



So how does $8.5 trillion dollars compare with the cost of some of the major conflicts and programs initiated by the US government since its inception? To try and grasp the enormity of this figure, let’s look at some other financial commitments undertaken by our government in the past:







As illustrated above, one can see that in today’s dollar, we have already committed to spending levels that surpass the cumulative cost of all of the major wars and government initiatives since the American Revolution.



Recently, the Congressional Research Service estimated the cost of all of the major wars our country has fought in 2008 dollars. The chart above shows that the entire cost of WWII over four to five years was less than half the current pledges made by Paulson and Bernanke in the last three months!



In spite of years of conflict, the Vietnam and the Iraq wars have each cost less than the bailout package that was approved by Congress in two weeks. The Civil War that devastated our country had a total price tag (for both the Union and Confederacy) of $60.4 billion, while the Revolutionary War was fought for a mere $1.8 billion.



In its fifty or so years of existence, NASA has only managed to spend $885 billion – a figure which got us to the moon and beyond.



The New Deal had a price tag of only $500 billion. The Marshall Plan that enabled the reconstruction of Europe following WWII for $13 billion, comes out to approximately $125 billion in 2008 dollars. The cost of fixing the S&L crisis was $235 billion.

CNBC confirms that the New Deal cost about $500 billion (and the S&L crisis cost around $256 billion) in inflation adjusted dollars.



So even though the government's spending on the "war" on the economic crisis dwarfs the amount spent on the New Deal, our economy is still stuck in the mud.



Given that the government has done so much, but we are still mired in a situation which in many ways is comparable to the Great Depression, it is not a very radical statement to say that the government is doing the wrong things to address the downturn.



I hope that the economy recovers. But the above comparisons are worrisome, indeed.



Note: Happy talk cannot fix the economy. If it could, I would write with a more optimistic spin.

creation of a society indebted to creditors. By design?

Stoller: A Debtcropper Society



By Matt Stoller, a blogger-turned Congressional staffer. He was a policy advisor to Rep. Alan Grayson on financial policy issues. Cross posted from New Deal 2.0.


From the Article published at Naked Capitalism  "A lot of people forget that having debt you can’t pay back really sucks. Debt is not just a credit instrument, it is an instrument of political and economic control."


"Today, we are in the midst of creating a second sharecropper society. I first heard the term “slaves to the bank” from a constituent fighting a fraudulent foreclosure.......... we should recognize that what the creditor class wants is what they’ve always wanted: total dominance of our culture." Find the complete Article Here



Stoler makes some very interesting points.  It is very true that creditors have always wanted to your personal finances at stake any time you take a loan.  We are seeing the perfect example now as we go through the foreclosure crisis.  People have always been forced take out loans in there name rather than in a business name or LLC.  This has been the banks way of locking borrowers in for life, regardless of changes in the economy or employment. 

Today we have millions of Americans underwater with there mortgages with little hope of ever having the home regain its original value.  The large too big to fail banks and insurers have already been bailed out and were given opportunities to "write down" their debt.  The home owner, however, has not only lost their nest egg for retirement, possibly their home, and credit score because the banks are looking to cash in again on this mortgages.  They seem to feel entitled to treat borrows with contempt because they have punitive powers that will take away the rights of citizens. 

What would a creditor do if they had take a major loss because of an economic downturn?  Consider something other than the usual response of milking tax payers to pay their debt.  They would file bankruptcy and restructure, hold their head high, be treated as responsible business people who just hit a rough patch.  The would not be shamed or berated by the media, politicians or the public.  They would likely survive the downturn with out losing any of their personal assets.  Donald Trump has filed bankruptcy for his businesses on more than one occasion but we never hear any say he is "deadbeat" or that he brought it on himself by "buying what he couldn't afford". 

Read more on  how lenders manipulated social views so much that people have been brainwashed into thinking it is much more shameful to default on your home loan than it is to default on a loan or your business.

Obama and administration getting abused by bankers.

The economy is not healing as well as the administration has spin doctors the bank story repeatedly. Obama, after calling for more responsibility from everyone, has let the bankers throw around foolish and unsubstantiated claims about earnings with no objections from the White House. No one would say anything as long as the stock market was in a mini rally mode. It is interesting to see the banks come out this weekend and already start saying that March was slower than January and February. My opinion is that most of what the banks were saying about profits was not true. Geithner comes on television today saying several banks will need substantial capital even after the billions stuffed into their vaults already. There is no outcry from the public or congress as of yet either. Where is Jon Stewart? The banks are just abusing the government by refusing to write down their assets and the administration is just getting bitch slapped by the ‘too big to fail’ top brass. The government is essentially allowing the banks to just keep digging a deeper hole by handing over billions and not requiring write down of the toxic assets.