Financial Crisis Monitor

WASHINGTON – The government says the number of troubled banks kept growing last quarter even as the industry as a whole had its best quarter in two years.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. says the number of banks on its confidential “problem” list leaped to 775 from 702 in the January-March period. But banks overall posted [...]

This week Moodys Investment Service downgraded its ratings on a total of $42.2 billion of residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) made up of subprime home loans.
The agency said the downgrades are a result of “continued performance deterioration in subprime pools,” which is likely to worsen further as still-falling home prices and high unemployment trigger more [...]

This is the quote of the week at Mortgage Blues: “”People have been celebrating that we’re through the financial crisis, but the underlying issues are all still there,” said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “We’ve lost trillions of dollars in housing wealth, and consumption’s going to be weak. [...]

Big job losses and a spike in early retirement claims from laid-off seniors will force Social Security to pay out more in benefits than it collects in taxes the next two years, the first time that’s happened since the 1980s. It is just another case of fallout from greedy lenders and bad mortgages. [...]

The problem went far beyond mortgages and opportunists. Greed almost stopped the American economy. Too many unemployed, too many reduced credit limits, and too many homeowners are upside down in the value of their homes.
Total U.S. consumer credit fell by a record $21.6 billion in July, Federal Reserve data showed on Tuesday, the [...]