Commercial Bank Chickens Come Home to Roost
2024-06-24
The FDIC added 11 new banks to its Problem List in the first quarter of 2024, bringing the total to 63. The specific banks on this are kept confidential, but the endemic, underlying issues in the commercial banking sector are increasingly obvious.Interest Rate Risk and LiquidityThe FIDC reported that “Unrealized losses on securities totaled $516.5 billion in the first quarter, an increase of $38.9 billion (8.2 percent) from fourth quarter 2023.
The State Wants to Nationalize Second Mortgages. What Possibly Can Go Wrong?
2024-06-21
Recently, Freddie Mac, a government-sponsored enterprise, sought approval from its oversight agency, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), to purchase and guarantee second mortgages in the United States.While the business case for this proposal is deficient (for an excellent perspective on that, see the article by R. Christopher Whalen), I will discuss the economic and political premises behind this move and its possible consequences.What Does It Mean to “Nationalize Second Mortgages”?Understanding the single-family mortgage market in the US means realizing that there is no market in the real sense of that term. A whopping 70 percent of home mortgages in the US are owned or guaranteed by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the two government-sponsored enterprises created by Congress to