“Alarmed by weakness in the housing market and rising foreclosures, investors who buy loans and securities backed by mortgages have fled the market for almost any loan that isn’t guaranteed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, Doug Duncan [chief economist of the Mortgage Bankers Association] and others said… For other types of loans, Mr. Duncan said, ‘there is no market.'” –The Wall Street Journal
“France’s biggest listed bank, BNP Paribas , froze 1.6 billion euros ($2.2 billion) worth of funds on Thursday, citing the U.S. subprime mortgage sector woes that have rattled financial markets worldwide… ‘The complete evaporation of liquidity in certain market segments of the U.S. securitization market has made it impossible to value certain assets fairly, regardless of their quality or credit rating,’ it said in a statement.” –New York Times
“The investment-grade corporate bond market has ground to a halt, making it difficult for companies to access capital and hard for investors to find a place to put their money to work… ‘The market is just frozen up,’ said Jim Cusser, a portfolio manager at Waddell & Reed in Overland Park, Kan.” –The Wall Street Journal
“I’ll put it bluntly: if you operate a non-depository mortgage firm (lender or servicer) and don’t have a deep-pocketed parent or hedge fund as a sugar daddy you’re likely to be out of business by year-end, probably sooner. In the 20-plus years that I’ve been covering residential finance I haven’t seen a financial meltdown this swift since the S&L crisis of the mid-to-late 1980s. One subprime executive who closed his shop a few months ago told me, ‘This is a liquidity crunch the likes I have never seen.'” -Paul Muolo, National Mortgage News
Is this what Cramer means by, “Armageddon?”
LIV