With the zoftig and still mutitative Big, Beautiful Bill stumbling through an unseemly Congressional favor-trading lollapalooza, one is reminded of Ms. Pelosi’s famous quip, “We’ve got to pass this bill to know what’s in it.” That made me think about
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James Carville Was Right: It’s Good to be King – Life as the Puissant Bond Market
Those Bond villains got it so wrong. All the time and energy they spent trying to control the world through complex and nefarious schemes involving laser beams, atom bombs, Fort Knox gold, exploding satellites and whatever the malefactor was trying to…
We Are All Aflutter in the Henhouse
It’s been a tough couple of months in the henhouse. My domesticated fowl friends and I are in a foul mood. (We’ll use “them” here, albeit I think I have a pretty good idea of how to distinguish the hims from the hers, but my…
How Do You Solve A Problem Like Billy Pulte’s (with apologies to Oscar Hammerstein…I Just Couldn’t Make It Rhyme)
Mr. Pulte is now the great poohbah of Fannie and Freddie supervising the Twins from his seat at FHFA and also now acting as chair of their respective boards. What is he going to do (assuming he has any agency here)? …
The Huge, Enormous, Cosmic Problem with All These Adjectives
Have you noticed the explosion of adjectival (and adverbial) usage? President Trump, perhaps our Adjectiver-in-Chief, never says someone is doing his job, it’s always a fantastic job. No one in the White House is ever in discussions, they’re always in serious and important discussions (I suspect an…
The Perils of Magical Thinking

I just finished a book by Richard Overy called The Twilight Years analyzing the dying throes of the exceptionalism of the British Empire (American clerisy, please take note). There was a fascinating discussion about the peace movement in the UK between the wars…
What Just Happened?
The political adventure in self-abuse that we call an election is now well behind us. I planned to write this commentary last November, hence the “Just” in the title. My inability to even assay an answer to that question which would pass my relatively…
Even If We Don’t Want To, We Should Still Talk About REMIC More
As regular readers of CrunchedCredit will know, I recently pitched the idea of amending our hoary old REMIC statute to allow additions of collateral after the startup date window to allow modification to performing loans (and to clarify any uncertainty about eligibility…
Let’s Fix REMIC Now!
This title may be a bit ambitious, a triumphalist embrace of hope over experience? But it’s time for the effort to be made.
With the help of my former colleagues at Dechert, notably Will Cejudo (me being the former, not him),…
Time to Fix REMIC: Grand Bargain Part II
Last week I talked about the Grand Bargain to fix our business. If we’re fixing to fix our business now, we’ve got to talk REMIC. The Real Estate Mortgage Investment Conduit (REMIC) created as part of the Tax Reform Act of 1986…