Saturday, September 6, 2008

More Sheila

Hey, it’s ‘The Blogs Are Out of Control’ Sheila again!

"By the fall and winter 2006, we were looking at this market pretty hard," [Sheila] said. There were very low down payments, loans that never verified the borrower's income, poor disclosure and huge payment shocks. "It was pretty eye-popping, some of the stuff we were seeing. We couldn't believe it."

Um, Sheila, I think you were in a position to do something about 'it'.

"If the agency gets through the credit mess, having handled the bank failures that are to come, she is going to be widely seen as the person who prepared the agency for this," said Jaret Seiberg, a financial policy analyst for the Stanford Group, in Washington. "If the cycle is worse than expected - and if the agency insurance fund isn't big enough or they didn't have enough examiners - she will become the fall guy."

Sheila Bair anticipated the mortgage crisis long before most other regulators. But she never dreamed it would wreak so much havoc on so many banks. More than a year after the credit crisis first flared, Bair, the chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., warned last week that the outlook for the ailing banking industry was bad - and getting worse.

Sheila is pretty dumb for saying that she was studying the housing market closely at the end of 2006.

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