Inside the Head of a Bank CEO (Down The Rabbit Hole-Must Read)

Fox Business ^ | February 13, 2009 | Elizabeth MacDonald

[khnyny]

In covering the hearing of the nine bank chief executives on Capitol Hill, it didn’t take long for me to see that Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf was having a hard time of it, valiant effort though he did make to defend his bank’s lending practices.

Because to look inside Wells Fargo, you will find the worst of the mortgage lenders housed in this bank, Wachovia, which Wells Fargo bought last fall for $15.4 bn, and housed within Wachovia is Golden West Financial, which Wachovia bought for a stupefying $25 bn, Golden West, the purveyor of some of the worst junk mortgages in the country.

Wachovia Corp.’s disastrous $25.5 bn acquisition of Golden West Financial in May 2006, two months before the peak of the housing bubble (see blog “Dumb Bubble Deals”), is a portrait of the housing crisis in miniature.

At bottom you will find a revealing–and impenetrably absurd–transcript of a presentation given by Wachovia management defending the Golden West deal at an analyst-investor conference a week after Wachovia made this disastrous acquisition in May 2006.

The transcript provides a roadmap for why this country is facing the worst housing and banking crisis since the Great Depression. And watch how obsequious Wall Street analysts behave, the smartest guys in the room who are supposed to catch the fire engine red flags. Kudos to footnoted.org for catching this one, the best footnote digging site in the country.

Golden West was a mom and pop shop that went berserk rubberstamping reckless loans for the worst of California’s borrowers, as the country’s biggest purveyor of the option ARM, which lets borrowers set which payments they want to make, in many cases, interest-only payments on no-doc loans.

These ARMs are the worst of the lot...

[Wisconsinlady]

Yes, the 60 minutes segment was good, but I remember correctly, they could not reach the sandlers for comment. Sandler sent them some limp letter, but that was it. So, they just walk with their 2.4 billion dollars because wachovia was dumb enough to buy the bad debts?

[Nuc1]

The Sandlers are prominent lefties, I hear.

Yes that fits in so well with what they are, thieves!

[Arizona Carolyn]

Herb and Marion Sandler are the two Saturday night live included in a scathing skit a few months ago leading to NBC pulling the skit on some pretext and scrubbing the Sandler portion... They are Obamakins.

[Arizona Carolyn]

Oh, this was the part I found so interesting:

as the country’s biggest purveyor of the option ARM, which lets borrowers set which payments they want to make, i

[Arizona Carolyn]

The very one... and NBC pulled it for some scrubbing.

[Arizona Carolyn]

Buffett sunk a hunk of change in it ... and GE... and Harley... the former gets TARP and the latter stimulus.

[srmorton]

I thought it was pretty good considering it was 60 Minutes , but I was thinking as I watched it that they were leaving out an important part of the story. CBS was trying to make it appear that the lenders were the only guilty parties, absolving (or at least not mentioning) the politicians that passed the laws which gave the lenders the incentive to make these bad loans.

[Ghost of Philip Marlowe]

Yes, it is about the Federal Reserve and the banking cartel that it is. Was the rest of your post facetious?

[javachip]

Be careful when following Buffett.

He owns Wells Fargo common stock both personally and with Berkshire Hathaway.

The GE and Harley investments were made by Berkshire Hathaway. 10% preferred stock in GE and 15% bonds in Harley - neither issue is publicly traded.

An individual investor could follow his lead with Wells Fargo common stock, but can’t duplicate what he did with GE preferred and Harley Davidson bonds.

[Notary Sojac]

This is why the talk in DC about how we have to "properly value the toxic assets", is pure, ripely scented, Barbra Streisand.

These banks have a very good idea EXACTLY what the assets are worth.

They are desperately trying to keep the world from finding that out. At least, until they have managed to unload their sacks of crap onto the US Treasury.

This was true in September of last year and it's true today.

[Arizona Carolyn]

and Berkshire Hathaway stands to benefit greatly from both GE and Harley, thanks to perks to these companies in the bailout... isn’t that something like insider trading when Immelt sits on Obamas special economic board and GE through MSNBC and NBC has been manipulating public opinion for over a year? At this point our whole system is poisoned and it is people like Buffett or Soros who are pulling the strings and personally benefiting from the string-pulling.

[SisterK]

No, the rest of my post was not idle recreation or for public amusement, but a simple summary of our dire straits. Upon studying the last 100 years, I have concluded that the enemy is within. That the Council on Foreign Relations has done more damage than you can possibly imagine.
My tiara is not tin foil as much as my government has betrayed the republic.

[Liz]

The money-hungry Sandlers invented the “Pick-A-Pay” mortgage-- borrowers paid less than interest due each month---which increased the total amount owed. While most legit mortages are paid down (and off) over time ---the Sandler's toxic mortgages increased over time. Analysts place the blame on the near-failure of Wachovia on the “Pick-A-Pay” garbage acquired from the Sandler’s firm----from which the toxic duo walked away with $2B.

SNL backed off satirizing them; CNBC mentioned “Pick-A-Pay” mortgages in "House of Cards"--the epic 2-hr documentary on the housing collapse----but protected the Sandler's identity.

The self-absorbed, left-loving Sandlers. Thanks to these two---we are stuck with:

ACLU
Moveon.org
ProPublica
America Votes
ACORN
Center for American Progress
Human Rights Watch

CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS:

Sandler, Marion O, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94111 $2,300 08/30/2008 P OBAMA FOR AMERICA - Democrat

Sandler, Marion O, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94111 $-2,300 08/30/2008 P OBAMA FOR AMERICA - Democrat

Sandler, Marion O, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94111 $2,300 08/30/2008 P OBAMA FOR AMERICA - Democrat

Sandler, Marion O, SAN FRANCISCO, CA, 94111 $2,300 08/18/2008 G OBAMA FOR AMERICA - Democrat

Sandler, Marion, OAKLAND, CA 94612 World Savings & Loan Assoc./Executi $2,300 05/30/2007 P NANCY PELOSI FOR CONGRESS - Democrat

Sandler, Marion, OAKLAND, CA, 94612 World Savings & Loan Assoc./Executi $2,300 05/30/2007 G NANCY PELOSI FOR CONGRESS - Democrat

[Just mythoughts]

This reads about like the scientific methodology the leftist in Congress passed on to US last Friday the 13th...

‘Pick-A-Pay’ stimulus model. Kinda of like ‘Agent Orange’ was used to defoliate ‘green’ the government now spreading a toxic defoliant across what is left of free market ‘capital’.

Sure have to wonder if the Sandlers were among the lobbyists who penned that thousand page + stimuli.

Are we yet equalized with the rest of the world, as was the Clintons stated public policy in the 90’s or is there still more to be taken from US?