The Local Paper

Why does underwear come with ironing instructions? If Richard Pryor was right that cocaine is God’s way of telling you that you have too much money, then surely ironing your undershorts is God’s way of telling you that you have too much time.

When you’re walking down the street it’s uncommon for strangers to come up and want to talk to you, but it occasionally happens.  Could be Greenpeace, the ASPCA, a political candidate or a panhandler.

So today I’m walking down the street in a little bit of a crowd and there’s such a guy up ahead of me that’s looking to talk to people as they pass by.

Guy:  “Can I ask you a question?”

Passerby:  “You just did,” as he keeps walking.

The fact that the mortgage market and the GSEs are screwed up is not a new story, but these requests for repurchases from Fannie, Freddie and the mortgage insurers is  surely one to keep an eye on particularly if you are an investor in bank stocks.  (I am an involuntary investor in bank stock as a result of receiving a good chunk of my compensation in the form of unvested restricted bank stock.  If it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t touch these stocks with my worst enemy’s money, owing to the lack of transparency on the marking of assets.

One little-discussed aspect of this is that Freddie doesn’t do at the time of purchase (or at least didn’t as of 14 months ago when I last cared about this topic).  They rely on the automated approval engines at the time of purchase, then once a mortgage defaults, they go back and figure out if they should have bought it in the first place.  If it fails that test, they seek reimbursement from the party that sold them the mortgage.  Unfortunately for us taxpayers, there are many originators that are no longer in business, so there’s no one to put the defaulted mortgage back to.  In the case of the big bank mortgage shops, these levels of repurchases are, theoretically, being reserved against in current earnings figures, but those reserves are only as good as their current default estimates and reliant upon an expost facto review of the original underwriting.  Many articles have pointed out, the underwriting being done during the go-go days was often quite shoddy, both in terms of creditworthiness of borrowers and documentation.    Original loan and underwriting documentation was either lost, faked or never existed.  These practices, from which very few sellers are immune, make it pretty easy pickings for Fannie and Freddie to argue that the defaulted mortgage their holding should be repurchased.

These doors don't exist at Newark Liberty or other airports. An outrage.

A guy walks into Terminal C at Newark Liberty through the exit, disappears into the masses, resulting in the entire airport being put into lock-down, grounding flights for six hours.  If you’ve never been there, the exit is no different than it is in many other airports in this country.  It’s nothing more than a doorway that’s the size of the hallway (i.e., no threshold, no barrier) that’s “guarded” by a distracted TSA employee.  Wide open access.

In a world where every major building in the United States has some kind of gating mechanism before you can get to the elevators, why WHY are these hallways still accessible?  For all them money they spent upgrading the screening area at LaGuardia in the last couple years, no one thought to make the exit from the terminal inaccessible to people trying to swim upstream.  The same is true at O’Hare and, apparently, Newark Liberty.

This is outrageous.