THE Dow soared 200 points in a Christmas rush on Friday that belied emerging details that US banking, mortgage companies and credit rating faced collapse while the nation’s mortgage insurance industry plunged into chaos.

Nearly 180,000 US local councils were placed on credit watch, with the credit agency Fitch releasing another $US5.3 billion in credit downgrades involving 27 mortgage companies. The news emerged on Friday night, when the nation’s newspapers, even if they were following the story, would miss it.

Read more…

WASHINGTON, Dec 17 (Reuters) - A program unveiled by U.S. President George W. Bush in August that is trying to save tens of thousands of homeowners from foreclosure has aided just 266 borrowers so far, according to government data released on Monday.

The initiative, which helps high-risk or low-income borrowers win better loan terms by insuring mortgage payments, targets recent homeowners whose loans have a built-in interest-rate spike that made them miss a payment.

Read more…

So it was that Henry Paulson came up with an idea… the ‘teaser freezer‘ plan. The ARM teaser freezer is being sold to the public as a way to protect homeowners. But it has another purpose, says a reporter from the San Francisco Gate, to help save the banks from their own bad judgment.

Read more…

It was Charles Mackay, the 19th-century Scottish journalist, who observed that men go mad in herds but only come to their senses one by one.

We are only at the beginning of the financial world coming to its senses after the bursting of the biggest credit bubble the world has seen. Everyone seems to acknowledge now that there will be lots of mortgage foreclosures and that house prices will fall nationally for the first time since the Great Depression. Some lenders and hedge funds have failed, while some banks have taken painful write-offs and fired executives. There’s even a growing recognition that a recession is over the horizon.

Read more…