Mark-to-market

Simply stated, the mark-to-markdown rule states you must assign the value of your bank’s assets according to what the market says they are worth at the time. When the market value of a home drops, the buyer has defaulted on the mortgage, the artificially created demand for homes all across the board has collapsed and years worth of supply has to be worked through, there is no value to the property the bank holds since there are all sellers and no buyers. The value is zero according to the market value. Plain and simple, if you are not willing to make significant concessions to rid yourself of the property in order to keep the defaulting party in the home or find a new buyer (doubtful) at a steep loss, you are required to carry the property at the total loss of mark-to-markdown. Similarly, a third-party will never buy the mortgage which has failed. Banks and investors are not in the business of home ownership and maintenance until the housing supply is exhausted and the mortgage purchaser can recoup the price of the home plus carrying costs on the original mortgage terms acquired by the third-party!

Suspension of the mark-to-markdown rules would be a return to the over leveraging of capital that created the mess in the first place. One, it allows the banks to create a subjective value for an asset (the mortgage and underlying price of the physical asset of the home) which the market says is worthless and the bank has failed to find a buyer for (at any price). Two, this is the same situation which infected Freddie and Fannie since it encouraged them to by theses assets on the faulty assumption the home market would be climbing, the underlying mortgages were payable on reasonable terms, mortgage payments would be made and values maintained in perpetuity. NOT! Finally, the suspension of the accounting rules would be a market ruse which essentially permits the bank to again over leverage by over valuing assets for more cheap Fed money. And, lacking confidence on how any other bank has subjectively valued its unsaleable assets, no bank is going to loan another bank money or issue new loans into a market which has been artificially created.

As the L.A. Times reported,. "Accounting purists say a rule change would raise the risk that the banks would resort to fantasy accounting -- "mark to make-believe" -- that would overstate the value of their assets to investors. The Center for Audit Quality, an advocacy group for the accounting industry, issued a statement Tuesday urging Congress to reject any suspension of mark-to-market rules, saying that would undermine investor confidence by allowing companies "to mask the actual value of financial assets at a given point in time."

No one can say the investment banks, which effectively started the dominos tumbling, were not part of and fueling the mortgage problem. And yet, it was in 2004 that the same investment banks petitioned an obtained SEC approval to allow them special status to leverage their assets up to 40 times compared to the previous 12 times applicable to themselves and banks. This was known as the "Alternative Net Capital Requirements for Broker-Dealers That Are Part of Consolidated Supervised Entities" and which allowed investment banks, including Goldman Sachs being run by Paulson, to subjectively determine "net capital to include securities for which there is no ready market". Now, the proposal is to allow every financial institution to make its own determination of market value! Talk about not learning from a mistake.

As an relevant aside, everyone should be calling for Paulson to step aside from participation in the execution of this plan - whatever the final terms. In February 2006, at the latest, Paulson’s Goldman Sachs Group began using an internal and copyrighted Powerpoint presentation entitled "A Primer on the Sub-Prime Market" by the "Goldman Sachs Structured Products Strategy" division. That document indicates how to sell the securities and then states, "Given the belief that house prices in the U.S. are too high, there are several trades that can be executed to short house prices". In the Spring, Goldman Sachs thereafter sold mortgages tronches, totaling $496 million, to the unwitting clients who lost an estimated 300 million. Goldman however handsomely profited again on the failure of these securities by shorting the market and sales!! See, Sloan article in Washington Post. Instead, notables like PIMCO Investment founder Gross, and David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital, are knowledgeable about the debacle and the house of cards on which it was built. In fact, Mr. Gross stated on CNBC he would run the program for free!

A more appropriate response to the "mark-to-markdown" rule would be allow a limited waiver of the rule for any mortgage renegotiated with the "primary residence" homebuyer which puts them back in the foreclosed or abandoned home. As a result, the home would be sold, the home occupied, a simplified mortgage based upon actual ability to pay in place, renegotiation taking place at the local level with knowledge of local markets, federal intervention avoided, excess supply removed from the market, a bottom up approach utilized and liquidity enhanced. The changed mortgage could the be valued at the new market as reasonably estimated by the bank. The "Plan" would then be buying assets which tend to both create and re-establish the fair market value, and others are more likely to step in when the toxicity is removed. Liquity through FDIC or "Plan" buying is promoted. The plan is not overpaying for the asset. Note the proposed rule waiver would only be applicable to a primary residence. Sorry, no help for flippers and speculators.

For any one interested in an examination of the greed in sub-prime mortgage the NY Fed noted the overreaching of the effects of the usurious terms " begs the question why such a loan was made in the first place." Please search, read and digest: "Understanding the Securitization of Subprime Mortgage Credit", Staff Report No, 318, by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, March 2008

Sorry, we were so rude as to inject a comment on the issue of "mark to market" and its application.

Lance Free & Jay Dee
Lance Free Consulting