BlackRock and U.S. hedge fund form company to buy distressed mortgages

[flashl]

BOSTON: The money management firm BlackRock and a hedge fund, Highfields Capital Management, said Monday they were forming a new company that would buy up distressed U.S. mortgages, betting that investors were ready to snap up bargains in the beaten down sector.

The new company, Private National Mortgage Acceptance, which will be known as PennyMac, will be run by Stanford Kurland, who spent 27 years at Countrywide Financial, the largest U.S. mortgage provider.

Kurland will be chairman and chief executive, and another industry veteran, David Spector, who used to oversee global residential mortgages at Morgan Stanley, will be the chief investment officer.

...

BlackRock, based in New York, made the announcement on the same day it was tapped by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to manage a roughly $30 billion portfolio of assets that were once owned by Bear Stearns. Both pieces of news helped send BlackRock's share price soaring Monday. In early afternoon trading the company's stock was up $25.22, or 12.2 percent, at $231.32 on the New York Stock Exchange.

The $11 trillion market for home mortgages in the United States needs about $1 trillion in new investment to halt a slide in prices for loans and related bonds that began last year and continued as banks and investment funds shed assets to pay off debt, according to a report this month from Friedman, Billings, Ramsey, an investment bank.

IHT

[JDPriestly]

1. This is the real payoff. If you think about the S&L scandal

and how it ended, you will realize that somewhere in the backs of their minds, this is where these criminals were headed the whole time. You run up the market, let it crash, pick up the bargains and start all over -- owning a big chunk of America that you purchased at bargain basement prices. That is how this game is played. This is how we are losing our country to the scum of the earth. It's a scam, and Americans, especially Republican Americans fall for it over and over.

They will tell you that this is just the business cycle. There really is a business cycle, but these extreme swings are engineered to take money out of the pockets of ordinary Americans and put them in the pockets of the CEOs and MBAs and ordinary crooks that run the scams.

And, if you don't believe me, this scam is played all the time on stock sales. You get a letter in the mail hawking stock in some supposedly up and coming company with some incredible invention or, in the '90s, if you recall, technology stock. A lot of suckers fall for the well written direct mail pieces that promise the moon and stars and offer to put the "investors" on the cutting edge. The sucker "investors" buy a few shares, and as more and more suckers join them, the price of the shares rises. Upon seeing the rise in the stock, the suckers "invest" more and more until the crooks who are controlling the game and quite possibly controlling the supposed company selling the stock pull the plug and start taking their money out. Whamo! The suckers are caught. And the guys running the game are very, very rich. They then turn to the government for a bail out. After all, can't let the economy or the stockholders suffer can we? Nonsense, the stockholders will not see much from the bailout.

That is what the mortgage companies did with these worthless mortgages. They sold them down the food chain to unsuspecting banks and hedge funds and, of course, when the interest rates went up -- which they inevitably did, the homebuyers could not pay and fell into foreclosure. Now we are being asked to pay. Meanwhile the scoundrels who ran this scam are walking away with their millions. That is dirty money, and at the very least the millionaire scam-runners, otherwise known as the heads of these mortgage companies and hedge funds and banks who devised and ran this scam should be required to give their money back to the taxpayers and others who will suffer as they live in luxury. This is simply criminal.

And, as a post-note, remember, the little guys who fell for the scam and the taxpayers suffer either way, bailout or no bailout. Don't think for a minute that any significant amount of the bailout money will go to the people who are losing their homes. A few will be rescued, but only if they can afford their homes anyway. No, this is yet another giveaway -- scam -- for the profit of a few very, very rich crooks.

So this is what Bush learned at Harvard Business School.

[CanonRay]

2. You are right. I worked for RTC in the late 80's

and it was totally set up for the big players to pick up bargains at the expense of the taxpayer. The sales were arranged so that only those with millions could even bid. Forget about the individual schmuck buying back his own mortgage! This will wind up the same way, I guarantee it. We are such suckers.

[Lance31]

3. Wow Where can I buy some of their stock?

Talk about making a killing!