Regardless of your opinions on the necessity of the bank bailouts aka TARP, let us all agree they haven’t worked. I am not sure any other industry knows this better than ours, the default industry because, we still see the direct effects of frozen credit markets, the shadow inventory and bank failures throughout this country.
At the quarterly report of the Special Inspector General’s office, Neil Barfosky warned our country in a report to Congress that TARP only made things worse because ultimately it never addressed the underlying problems that created the financial crisis from the start. Think of it like this, let’s say you break your leg and you are rushed to the Emergency Room for treatment. You get the x-ray and the diagnosis is, your leg is broke. The doctor prescribes some really good pain medicine and says, “Take 2 of these and call me in the morning” however, he never re-sets the leg or even puts it in a brace or cast. In other words, the doctor is just covering up the pain hoping you won’t notice your leg still looks like the golden arches outside your local McDonalds. The worse part of this whole story is, instead of raising hell and getting a new doctor, one that can fix the problem, you end up riding a wheel chair out of the ER, a leg contorted like a Chineese Acrobat smiling and saying, “The pain medicine is necessary to prevent amputation; it will help me walk again”. Ok, so…..the story is a bit absurd however, it really is what we did as a country, oh wait a minute, I forgot to add this part of the story.
So, it’s 2 weeks later…..all you have been doing is popping pain pills left and right and, in fact, the pain seems to be getting worse. You start to notice you can’t feel anything in your pinky toe so, it scares you and you go back to the Emergency Room but, this time you go to a different hospital because, deep down inside you’re not to sure that other doctor knew what he was doing.
The new doctor is dismayed, shocked, stunned, repulsed and even angry at what the ignorant, incompetent, doctor did to you. He goes on to tell you, that now, the bone has started healing, in the shape of an arch and to fix the problem, they will have to re-brake it, do surgery to fix nerve and vessel damage and potentially, you could loose the leg due to infection setting in. The doctor explains to you that the broke leg was never “fixed” and now the damage has had time to fester and cause more damage than originally. So, the cure is going to be worse than if it was all handled correctly the first time.
Pay special attention to that last line, “The cure is going to be worse than if it was all handled correctly the first time.”…………..this line is very important because, we were all told by our leaders in Washington that the financial crisis would have been another Great Depression, double digit unemployment (oh wait, we have that now), bankers jumping from their windows (haven’t heard of this yet) and soup kitchens with lines three blocks down (maybe sooner than I thought). So, if that is what we averted by simply taking pain pills (TARP) and now it’s potentially worse than before because the problems were never fixed…………………….AAGGHHHH! ARMAGEDDON!?!?
Well, I don’t know if it will be Armageddon but, as I have always maintained, TARP was never a fix…..it was just a pain pill and, it seems our leadership in Washington is now a prescription drug addict with a couple TRILLIONS dollar habit and is looking for their next fix!
Make no mistake America, we did this to ourselves……go all the way back and Google the Community Reinvestment Act, see how Barney Frank and the GSE’s screwed this country so bad that now we poo sideways. Make no mistake, plenty of blame to go around. Democrats are the only party guilty of this. Progressivism is the problem, this idea we can move beyond our Constitution, this concept of wealth re-distribution but, I digress.
Here is the reality. We never fixed the problems with the banks, all we did is momentarily stop the pain. Now, the pain pills are loosing their effectiveness and either we go and get better pain pills or we head into surgery, re-brake, re –re-set and fix the problem once and for all however, I have one question to ask you….just one.
ARE YOU SURE THE DOCTORS WE HAVE ADDRESSING THE BREAK ARE UP TO THE JOB?
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Thanks for reading.
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For the past 3 years my life has consisted of one thing - researching REO. Every aspect of REO that is. When you have thousands of members and clients that depend on your company for results it can be a daunting thing. Especially when the government makes over 20 changes to the TARP program within 9 months!The past 3 weeks have been dedicated to the development of our new levels of training (2 and 3) which are going to be geared towards the REO Masters Network directors. The way that this network is being designed resembles an undergraduate and graduate program. With the REOM being the "graduate" program I had to step it up a little bit with content. So, with that end in mind I began with a "State of the Market" initial presentation, ended with a "Future Projections" summary and then sandwiched some cutting-edge REO stuff in between. I should have given myself 3 MONTHS!I can say that I've learned a lot, which is always a great thing. I was kind of waiting-out the whole government involvement of real estate until the dust settled so as not to fry any of my mental circuitry. I watched from September 08 through March of 09 as colleagues were trying to decipher the realities of the real estate market, TARP, the Financial Stability Plan, "Making Home Affordable", HOPE NOW, and the mergers of banks left and right. In my little universe I was telling myself the whole time, "just keep track of everything, but don't try to figure it out yet". Whew! Glad I made that decision and stuck with it.Fellow professionals I'm here to say that this market is absolutely, undoubtedly one of the craziest markets in American history. Go watch some of the real estate market videos on YouTube of Mark Zandi of Moody's or Glenn Beck (whatever your personal opinion may be, these guys toss out some pretty indisputable stats).Oh, and if you have a couple of minutes, check out the Wall Street Journal's take on the history of the meltdown (there are 3 parts, but I'm only embedding part 1):OK, back to the think tank.Sincerely,Dan Waterman
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