Signs of the Apocalypse

Signs of the Apocalypse, I Agree With Paul La Monica, who I generally find trite and relentlessly upbeat, when he says that mark to market is not a problem, but rather that the problem is that the banks made sh$% loans and created sh%$ derivatives, and did not hold enough capital.

That being said, he is not as inventive in his lede as David Reilly, who says that, "Elvis Lives, and Mark-to-Market Rules Fuel Crisis," and notes that even now, only a fraction of the big sh$%pile is marked to market:

Of the $8.46 trillion in assets held by the 12 largest banks in the KBW Bank Index, only 29 percent is marked to market prices, according to my analysis of company data. General Electric Co., meanwhile, said last week that just 2 percent of assets were marked to market at its General Electric Capital Corp. subsidiary, which is similar in size to the sixth-biggest U.S. bank.

What are all those other assets that aren’t marked to market prices? Mostly loans -- to homeowners, businesses and consumers.

Loans are held at their original cost, minus a reserve that banks create for potential future losses. Their value doesn’t fall in lockstep with drops in market prices.

Yet these loans still produce losses, thanks to the housing meltdown and recession. In fact, bank losses on unmarked loans are typically bigger than mark-to-market losses on securities like bonds backed by mortgages.

They both make the point that mark to model to a large created this crisis, by encouraging banks to create risky pieces of crap that no one wants to buy, though this reality is not preventing Congress from pressuring regulators to relax the rules on mark-to-market.

This stuff is worth pennies on the dollars, and the banks are insolvent. Let's recognize reality and move on.