[IWE] For homeowners, Econ types or not

[Ashton Brown]

For those Noticing the precariousness of their own home investment, the 
impossibility today of deciphering any trend-lines remotely of the sort 
which had anchored such transactions.. since about 1850? -- those 
vaguely aware of such cute now toys as "Synthetic CDO's" (and the 
jackals who spawn, milk then liquidate such sucker-bait) ... Salon 
brings us:

"The Mortgage Bomb"

http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2007/02/20/cdo/index.html?source=newsletter


And for the flavour of such skirmishes -

1) A letter linked at end of article (and about the article.. shades of 
The Index of All the Books in the Library - listed within the Index.)

http://tinyurl.com/29n3el

2) Another letter, re. Gretchen Morgenson + yan fine Kunstler quote, within:

> Gretchen Morgenson
>
> Continues to be one of the principle reasons I pay the Times Select 
> subscription:
>
> "Consider how torrid the issuance of these securities has been in 
> recent years. In the last three years, for example, big banks and 
> brokerage firms almost doubled the amount of residential loans they 
> issued, going to $1.1 trillion last year from $586 billion in 2003. 
> Many of these loans have been packaged into collateralized debt 
> obligations and sold to pension funds, hedge funds, banks and 
> insurance companies. For example, 81 percent of the $249 billion in 
> collateralized debt obligation pools in 2005 consisted of residential 
> mortgage products.'
>
> The scale is simply staggering. Now there are scary new instruments 
> called 'Synthetic CDO's' and these should have 'systemic risk' 
> flashing in giant pulsing letters.
>
> 'Finance has been trending away from economic reality since the Ronald 
> Reagan era on an accelerating basis. By this I mean the role of 
> finance no longer represents sets of mechanisms and institutions 
> designed to raise legitimate capital for investment in legitimate 
> productive activities. Finance is now an end in itself, essentially a 
> racket.' - Jim Kunstler
>
> “The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look 
> respectable.” - John Kenneth Galbraith


http://letters.salon.com/tech/htww/2007/02/20/cdo/view/index.html


(It seems that The Gipper's Greed-is-Good Repo mob + the modrin-MBA 
fellow travellers out of that slime-mold Petri dish -- have finally 
succeeded in creating 'instruments' of such unreality; have hatched 
schemes of such transcendent obfuscation.. as to have successfully 
rendered the word 'value' [Itself] ... fit to join 'innovation', on the 
extinct species word list.)
ie.


'Be Careful out there'