The Solution of New Century Financial Corporation

The Federal Government needs to make sure to enforce strict guidelines on who can and cannot be accepted for a home loan, and not allow big investors to borrow excessive money at low interest rates to inflate the investor’s financial advantage. If the government starts allowing lower standards on mortgages, we are going to end up in the same catastrophe once again. In an article written by U.S. News and World Reports entitled Should the Federal Government Provide Support to the Mortgage Market?, the Federal government and the President attempted to get involved with the housing market. The passage implicated that Obama wanted to do away with federally funded conglomerates Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and implement another type of government assisted program ("Should the Federal Government"). The program would prevent the mistakes made by Fannie and Freddie which created the original “housing bubble burst” ("Should the Federal Government"). One of the Senate bills suggests the government create “a new agency, the Federal Mortgage Insurance Corporation to replace Fannie and Freddie” ("Should the Federal

In the lead up to the current recession, when the real estate market began to fall, there were so many investors shorting stocks and securitized mortgage packages that were already falling, that the market simply fell further. There were no buyers at the bottom, and the professional investors made millions off of the losses of others. Beyond this, there was no real federal regulation for securitized mortgages, since there was no real way to gauge the mathematical risk of any given package. This allowed the investors to take advantage of the system and to short loans on real people’s homes. Once these securities were worthless, many of the homebuyer’s defaulted on their mortgages and were left penniless. No matter from which angle this crisis is looked at, the blame rests squarely with the managers who began the entire cycle, the ones who pursued the securitization of mortgages. Their incompetence not only led to the losses of Americans who have never invested in the stock market, but to losses for their shareholders.

In 2007, the U.S. economy experienced one of the greatest downturns since the Depression era, and furthered by the collapse on a global scale. The bubble burst on the housing market and the house of cards called the mortgage industry tumbled down, no longer able to sustain charade of success. This caused the collapse of some of the largest financial institutions, once thought to be immortal. This rippled into a massive tightening of the belts of many companies, as they found themselves without lines of credit, lack of business, and the daisy-chain collapse of their support networks. Who paid the final price? Companies cut costs through pay cuts, layoffs, and closings. While this may have saved jobs for many, the feeling of loss and

The Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) were to central semi-public organizations that assisted buyers with qualifying for mortgages. The both the company failed during the year 2008 when they were left with no money and were bankrupt. Like every company they were unable to pay back the money and they were in the looking for the help of government via taxpayer’s money. Hence, after the bankruptcy of 2008, the government has utilized huge amount of the taxpayer’s money for not letting them to shutdown and recovering them.

An individual that played a part in the crisis include Banker Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide, his stated goal was to lower the barriers for American’s to own homes. Though intentions in such a goal are admirable, it created an environment of failures as homeowners defaulted on loans. Countywide was purchased by Bank of America in 2008. Banker James Cayne of Bear Stearns faced criticism as his institution crumbled under his leadership. He was accused of being absent as hedge funds collapsed. As an example as poor leadership during the period he stepped down, and Bear Stearns was purchased by JP Morgan in 2007. Richard Fuld Jr., Banker of Lehman Brothers Holding Inc., moved his institution in the commercial real-estate market years prior to the 2008 collapse of the market. 2008 after filing for bankruptcy Lehman’s was also sold. These are just a select few of the institutional leaders that had an impact during the crisis, but they represent how different personal and organization ethics can impact a company. Other key players involve elected officials that made key decisions to share the nation of financial depression. Henry Paulson, a policy maker with the Department of the Treasury, refused to save Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. from bankruptcy. Paulson was involved in the Troubled Asset Relief Program that was used for the bailout of banks, auto companies, and other financial institutions. Ben Bernanke, a policy maker with the Federal Reserve, was a key player in approving the funding for J.P. Morgan to purchase Bear Sterns Co.

During the financial crisis of 2007-2009 the government bailed out several financial institutions two of the most notorious financial institutions the government bailed out was Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These two companies were one of the biggest mortgage lenders that suffered from the subprime mortgage disaster. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were both on the barge of bankruptcy if it weren’t for the help of the government, which granted each company $100 billion dollars in cash credit to bail them out (according to Investopedia). The government bailed them out since Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were both considered to be two on the giant mortgage lenders at the time and they were “too big to fail”.

The day Bear Stearns fell was one of the worse financial upsets of our time. As a major American investment company, they ran out of money. Bear Stearns was definitely one of the most exposed to the subprime mortgage crisis after being hit hard in the summer of 2007 when two of its hedge funds crashed. The Federal Reserve and JP Morgan Chase orchestrated an extraordinary rescue attempt that allowed Bear Stearns to borrow emergency money to stay alive and steady. Consequently, in an effort to prevent a crisis on Wall Street.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are government sponsored enterprises (GSE) that purchase mortgages, buy and sell mortgage-backed securities (MBS), and guarantee nearly half of the mortgages in the U.S. A variety of political and competitive pressures resulted in the GSEs ramping up their purchase and guarantee of risky mortgages in 2005 and 2006, just as the housing market was peaking.[258][259] Fannie and Freddie were both under political pressure to expand purchases of higher-risk affordable housing mortgage types, and under significant competitive pressure from large investment banks and mortgage

In 2008 Fannie and Freddie lost a combined $47 billion in their single-family mortgage businesses, forcing the companies to dig deep into their capital reserves. By late summer in 2008—about a year after the start of the housing crisis—Wall Street firms had all but abandoned the U.S. mortgage market, while pension funds and other major investors throughout the world continued to hold large amounts of Fannie and Freddie securities. After the housing market collapsed, Fannie and Freddie needed a $200 billion bailout. If Fannie and Freddie were allowed to fail, experts agreed that the housing market would collapse even further, paralyzing the entire financial system. The Bush administration in September 2008 responded by placing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into government conservatorship, where they remain today.

In October of 2008 Congress, passed a $700 billion rescue bill to bail out, and possibly save, the doomed U.S. and global financial systems from collapsing. This decision was only a piece to the $1 trillion government plan to level off the stock market and unfreeze the credit which was needed after the collapses of the financial institutions of Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual. The government also stepped in and federally took over such institutions as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which together hold about $5.4 trillion in mortgage loans; 45 percent of the national total. The governmental firms were heavily burdened because of bad investments in subprime mortgages and

Before 1938, depository institutions made home loans with their deposits and held the liquidity risk, the market risk, and the credit risk on their portfolios. Yet, the baneful results of the Great Depression led the US government agency to intervene in the mortgage market so as to beget home mortgage lending (Dodd, 2007). A corollary of the new legislation was the creation of Fannie Mae in 1938; as a

With all that being said, the mortgages that were rated as excellent were actually bad for homebuyers. To the homebuyers’ surprise, the interest rates rose and they could no longer afford to pay their mortgages. This meant that the investors lost their money and subsequently stopped buying these mortgage-backed securities. This sent housing prices falling by thirty percent and the stock market falling by fifty percent, and also led to nine million jobs being lost. Some of companies involved in the mortgages, such as AIG, almost went bankrupt as a result. AIG lost all their money because they insured these bad mortgages and had no money to pay for all the mortgages they insured. These companies did this because they knew the Fed would always have their backs. Because the Fed bailed these businesses out, they were essentially allowed to keep making money off of these bad banking practices. According to Mike Collins, an editor at Forbes Magazine, the actual bailout of these businesses turned out to cost $7.7 trillion, about the same as the US national debt at the time. Without the Fed, the free market would have let these businesses collapse, allowing new and better businesses to take their place, or even better, keep companies from using these bad practices in the first place.

During the recent financial crisis, in the autumn of 2008, the Lehman Brothers bank collapsed. It was the biggest bankruptcy in history

In March 2008, the government of the United States was abruptly confronted with the first signals of what later became the greatest financial crisis in U. S. history since the Great Depression. The beginnings of the financial crisis began with the government intervention or bailout of Bear Sterns, the smallest of the five giant Wall Street investment banks, but the first one known to be in financial trouble. After the government’s rescue of Bear Sterns, more major financial institutions were found to be financially unstable as the meltdown of the financial markets continued, and the U.S. government was confronted with the dilemma to let the other Wall Street investment banks and businesses fail, or to rescue them since they were thought to be too big to fail (Sorkin, 2009).

Another New York Times tells that financial institutions that are dependent on mortgages, like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, have not been able to pay back the money they owe to the federal government.2 They are still asking for more money because of the continuing real estate crisis. Instead of simply giving these mortgage giants money to stay afloat, the federal government would be more effective if it were to support them by putting the money directly towards the root of the problem.