Gretchen Morgenson is Today's NYTimes 'Mortgages May Be Messier Than You Think'

[snip]

"Loss-mitigation practices grew out of the significant losses incurred by big lenders in the real estate collapse of the late 1980s. Because lenders were experiencing losses of 30 percent to 60 percent of the outstanding home loans in foreclosures, they started identifying ways to keep borrowers in their homes.

Some plans allow a delinquent borrower to add missed payments to the mortgage and pay them over time. Others extend the life of the loan, or allow the suspension of payments temporarily, bringing the mortgage current by using an interest-free loan from the Federal Housing Administration.

While it is a splendid idea to do whatever is necessary to try to cure a sick borrower, it is worth remembering that the rollover of nonperforming loans was central to what made the savings and loan mess of the early 1990s so disastrous. And it is well worth asking: are loss-mitigation practices predatory since they give lenders an opportunity to squeeze the last ounce of blood out of a terminally ill patient?

Aggressive approaches to loss mitigation, Mr. Rosner said, mean that less than half of mortgages that in prior years would have been foreclosed no longer are. Unfortunately, how many of these workouts actually succeed is a question for which investors and even regulators have no answer."

[snip]

'Financially, the US economy has degenerated into a sort of cargo cult, where people feel that they can continue to attract recycled petrodollars by dancing around piles of internet servers with their cell phones and their laptops.' - Dmitri Orlov

This new trilogy quite obviously develops themes KSR touched on in his Mars ( Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars) as earthly background for the terraforming of Mars.

I was disappointed that those themes, particularly over-population; extreme gerontocracy arising from life extending genetic treatments available to Earth's plutocratic elite; the wresting of power from governments by trans-national corporations which simply bought countries outright; and the dislocations from global sea-level changes, were not explored more fully but I see now that it would take something on the order of a complete new set of writings to do justice to the situations.

It's a mistake to be dismissive of sci-fi. The best writers in the genre have consistently raised important themes about our current societies and what these characteristics mean as they play out into the future. And many are markedly and frankly dystopian, which makes the Star Trek types who insist that science and tech will magically give us a rosy future despite our species manifest self-destructive proclivities.

"The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet." - William Gibson

the universe and human stupidity, and I am not sure about the former."

- Albert Einstein

Just the thing for a corporation with its nose so deeply in the public money trough...and none of that pesky scrutiny of CEO pay.

The tax advantages alone...

They've probably been working the 'transfer pricing' tax dodge pretty heavily anyway. But the Congress was going to take a look at that since it costs the Treasury several hundred billion per year.

Oh, Andrew, I have a little mp3 file of "Houston, we have ..." tucked away somewhere - I used it an alert back under OS8 and 9 - if you'd like to have sent.

"The move to Dubai could save Halliburton (and CEO Dave Lesar) some money on foreign taxes, though. (With operations in 100 countries, Halliburton had to pay out $289 million to foreign governments last year.) The United Arab Emirates government may have sweetened the deal with favorable real-estate terms or other incentives. Dubai's Jebel Ali Free Zone, which already houses more than 5,000 foreign-owned businesses, doesn't impose corporate or personal income taxes and has a robust workforce with no minimum wage.'

And, yes, the personal income tax savings to Dave Lesar is quite enough motive for this particular move at this particular time. I've seen comparable contortions.

Worked for a telecom in the 90's which allowed a EVP to move his office so as to minimize any possibility of his missing a tee time on the golf behind his newly purchased home. Problem was that he was the only corporate office who could sign lease contracts. So now I'd send have to send the contracts to from New orleans to his former location in Norcross because the power hungry (and utterly incompetent) senior attorney had to have them physically cross her desk.

Then Norcross would Fed-Ex to exec's new private office suite which would forward - not back to me - the originator - but again through Norcross.

We had multi-million dollar co-locations abandoned because it now took 8 days or more to get contracts executed.

`When you talk about no documentation loans, you can't have any less of a standard than that,'' said Martin Fridson, chief executive officer of high-yield research firm FridsonVision LLC in New York. The lenders ``lower their standards and say `Well, we can put them into CDOs.' Like that's somehow burying that it's toxic waste.''

Quoted By Caroline Salas and Darrell Hassler - CDOs May Bring Subprime-Like Bust for LBOs, Junk Debt

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aCITz8HS6ewk&refer=home

“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.” - John Kenneth Galbraith

http://agonist.org/markets_drop_mortgage_market_in_crisis

'Finance is the art of passing currency from hand to hand until it disappears.' - Robert W. Sarnoff

I know a lot of people have been scoffing at my 'Wiley Coyote' analogy but...