Recent content by Hal3

t's certainly a bill full of unintended consequences. Very nice analysis. It is the unintended consequences that get you every time. I have another thread on that but I have to go to w**k right now.

And let's not forget poor Maria! And let's not forget poor Maria! Everything was going great at first. She had a mortgage with negative amortization and low monthly payments of $99 for the first 24 months. Then the rate increased to 11.9% and her payments jumped to about $6,000 per month with...

In a way, they are victims as much as everyone else. If it hadn't been for Maria Ochoa in San Diego buying that $500,000 dollar house even though she made only $25,000 per year and being behind five payments none of this would have happened. No one could have predicted this. The firm would...

A little bit of clarification may be in order here. Cayman Brothers, LLC sold about 100 of these policies for one billion each. The price was not that bad, 1% of face value. No one really had any doubts about the firm because they made 100 billion in 2004 when these were first issued. The...

The only thing to do is pay off the swaps I have addressed this elsewhere, as you know, but you do not pay off the "swaps" If you do ... I have a stack of "Toxic Debt" I would like the Fed to buy. I'm fairly certain it is toxic because I printed it up on my old ink jet. Ye Olde Credit...

Indeed! The 100 Million in bonuses makes good press but it's the trillions that have been dumped into someones black hole that really gets me riled.

I'm not taking my CLK 500 to the car wash as often. :(

but the leverage and derivatives DERIVE from the sour mortgages that are not performi Correcto-mundo! Credit Default [-]Scams[/-] Swaps are insurance policies. Companies that write them collect a premium when they sell them. Then they use the premium income to pay [-]co-conspirator[/-]s...

All I know is that every time Obama speaks.. That should give us some insight about "the market". My copy of "Security Analysis - Sixth Edition" By Benjamin Graham, et al. arrived from Amazon yesterday. It is an imposing tome but so many experts regard it highly that I thought I should at...

I guess that just proves that if you go fishing in a pool of toxic waste you are likely to catch - toxic waste.

I have no idea how they/I'm doing. If you go to Yahoo Finance and enter the symbol for your fund you can get some of the information you desire. Yahoo charts are nice because there is a little slider at the bottom so you can adjust your start and end points. This will give you a chart of what...

What is the most amazing, low fare intercontinental ticket price you have seen?

OK, so fees bring it up to $457. Does anyone have enough money to take advantage of cheap flights to Europe?

Wasn't Hank Paulson's firm a big investor in AIG? A.I.G. Lists Firms It Paid With Taxpayer Money By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH Among the biggest recipients were Société Générale, Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs, all of which were owed money from credit default swaps...

I did this once with some raw land that I owned outright. I guess this is more like seller financing although the principle is the same. It worked out very well for us. We earned much more than we would have earned selling for cash or a buyer/bank financed loan and putting the money into CD's...