re: #169 OhCrapIHaveACrushOnSarahPalin

I don’t think so. Fraud is supposed to be illegal.

At least, when the little guy does it.

That said, I have very little sympathy for the keep-up-with-the-jones suburb and exurbities with something to prove, showing off their refi possessions.

Neither do I, they signed on the dotted line. It’s the ARM’s and refi’s with inflated values, IIRC that caused most of the problems…

I read in one of the articles on my piles that the majority of subprime loans made to those the Fannie and Freddie target buyers are not in default —oh wait. I think I remember which one …

But the affordability mission does not explain the vast majority of the GSEs’ credit woes. (See Figure 3)
The $100 billion of subprime securities in portfolio, while astonishing in nominal terms, is roughly 2% of the combined firms’ $5 trillion credit ex- posure. And within the guaranty business, subprime exposure is actu- ally quite modest. At Freddie, for example, only 4% of the single-family mortgage credit book is tied to borrowers with FICO scores below 620.
Moreover, the very worst performing GSE loans (that is, the loans where losses are the greatest multiple of original forecasts) were made to prime borrowers, not subprime. Again using Freddie as an example, both the “Alt-A” and “Inter- est Only” portfolios are already facing serious delinquencies of 11% and 16%, respectively, despite having solidly prime average borrower FICO scores of 722 and 720.5 These were market share-driven loans made to people with good credit; they were not mission-driven loans made to people with bad credit.