After Schumer's shabby treatment of Oregon (and Novick) I definitely think he's an idiot, but I have to say he's not guilty here ... if you've been following the real estate bubble blogs at all you knew Indy was going down a long time ago.

Congressman shouldn't be in the business of publicly asking regulators to takeover a specific bank.

What if one of his Wall Street buddies was shorting Indymac Bank and whispering into his ear the whole time.

It's hard for a hedge fund manager to move a stock just by "talking his book": that's just what former Fed Governor William Poole did when he declared the Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac were insolvent on Thursday.

http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssFinancialServicesAndRealEstateNews/idUSN0148713620080701

...If Fannie and Freddy are nationalized, the U.S. Dollar will drop like a rock and William Poole's "hard currency" fund will fly!

When you serve on the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, (which Sen. Schumer does) you have a responsibility to legislate and oversee banking regulators, that doesn't give you the power to act like a banking regulator.

I think the consensus is that if an idiot like Schumer can figure the bank is going ot hell, then a person of normal intelligence should get a clue.

My issue with Schumer is like with Al Gore, they need to create a crisis to be seen as the savior when they don't really have a solution. Considering their background is not that much beyond a CoP commissioner, its scary that we trust theri judgment to run things.

Schumer did the right thing by blowing the whistle.

IMB was toast and should have been taken over months ago. There are many other banks that are still open only because Bush political appointees at OTS and FDIC are fucking things up as badly as "brownie" at FEMA.

The largest financial crisis in 80 years being managed by the most incompetent administration in history. LOL!

Your high home price is treated as "wealth" is it not? As if it itself were a store of real "value." Both by the home "owner" and by any lender . . . and most importantly from a public policy perspective in the eyes of local government hacks that rely on dreamy visions of valuation so as to rationalize imposition of property taxes to engage in all manner of gifting of a fraction of that perceived wealth to favored groups.

Any economist that would simply assert that the maximum price for any given home should be roughly 3 times the income for any buyer that has limited savings would not find one single political group to embrace such a crazy notion. It is just a reference point from which to measure the significance of public policy induced distortions.

The bubble is like 1925 Florida, on a national scale.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_land_boom_of_the_1920s

I say let the speculator excesses (and home prices) flush quickly so that we can begin another round of speculative excess sooner rather than later. The politics associated with the arbitrary government selection of who should, after the fact, be immunized from their own private investment folly is even uglier and arbitrary (i.e., inequitable) than the bubbling process itself.

In a way sir knighted Alan Greenspan help create two bubbles in the first decade of the 21st century. First he pumps large amounts of new cash into the banking system in 1999 in prepartion for the feared Y2k event which never materialized. The stock market went crazy, mostly new tech stocks, with folks using margin to bid up prices. And of course, in the aftermath of the economic slowdown in 2000 through 2002, he manufactures a recovery by dropping short term interest rates down to 1%. He then holds them there well past an economic recovery, feeding a new frenzy in second homes and trophy like homes. At one point, Greenspan even advises folks to take out adjustable rate mortgages instead of 30 year fixed rate conventionals.

Now Congress seems to want to get housing construction going again even before the market is worked off the current excess inventories. It doesn't make much sense to me to subsidize home construction in the form of second homes when U.S infrastructure needs a lot of rehabilitation.

Indymac was like an accused murderer in a small town, and Schumer was the county judge who promised them a fair trial and a fair hanging.

Then, after the jury selection, he called the undertaker and asked him to take the accused measurements. While the jury watched.