not love "rumors"...
Many years ago, Tom Dickson, AA to the Sen Maj Leader, Jim Camel, Aty 2 SML, and we started "The Legislative Rumor of the Day".
To win you had to start your rumor after the session adjourned for the day, and your rumor must have spread completely through the Leg BEFORE the session convened the next day.
No points were added for the rumor being factually true, nor completely ridiculous. Obviously that would be irrelevant. Belief, too. All that mattered was that it was passed on, and spread out.
IF you appreciate That Little Game, you will - this is mandatory, not permissive - LOVE this "news/views report" by Linda.
As Paul Harvey oft said to U.S. - and now, the Rest of the Story.
Enjoy.
---------- Said Jim @ CR:Linda Lowell at HousingWire wrote a great piece chronicling the history of that ridiculous rumor last week of a massive bailout of underwater homeowners
"Slam Dunk Stimulus" – The Natural History of a Rumor
http://www.housingwire.com/
I'd like to thank Linda for mentioning my reaction ("nonsense"). I usually ignore these rumors, but this one was getting significant coverage and was obviously nonsense.
Linda's piece is excellent.
-----------
Lowell: "Slam Dunk Stimulus" - The Natural History of a Rumor
by LINDA LOWELL
Tuesday, August 10th, 2010, 4:01 pm
How I long for the days when MBS research was about dry, specialized stuff like prepayments and relative value, projecting cash flows, building data bases and models of prepayment and yield curve processes. Dull matters you would be careful not to mention at a dinner party or drinking with pals in a bar. Tedious topics that could put Main Streeters to sleep. Conversation stoppers.
That changed in 2008. Mortgages and houses and mortgage-backed securities have transmogrified into filthy politics. Nowadays, opinionating about mortgage markets is a free-for-all with no barriers to entry, in which unsupported theories and poorly reasoned malarkey are spewed by politicians, no-experience academics, economists with no mortgage experience, the dying print media, the new electronic media, the blogs and the social nitworks.
The idea is not to monetize good information, but to get attention, attract site traffic, raise great winds of popular response. To stir the pot.
Problem is, that little coterie of data-respecting nerdalysts of which I was once a member now must spend an inordinate portion of the work day dissecting government half-measures (Hope Now, HAMP, HARP and so forth ad infinitum) and weighing rumors of more on the horizon.
With increasing frequency, nervous institutional investors call on the professional analysts for a reality check on wildfire speculation, canards and outright lies about what the government intends to do to fix the housing-mortgage mess and, unintentionally, sabotage investment performance.
The worst patch yet, I think, has been seen in the last couple of weeks, thanks to deliberate rumormongering about a backdoor stimulus plan [1], in which the government compels the housing agencies to forgive principal on millions of underwater mortgages and refinance them into the lowest published mortgage rates on record. Rumor mongering intended to further confuse public discourse going into the elections.
=========That changed in 2008. Mortgages and houses and mortgage-backed securities have transmogrified into filthy politics. Nowadays, opinionating about mortgage markets is a free-for-all with no barriers to entry, in which unsupported theories and poorly reasoned malarkey are spewed by politicians, no-experience academics, economists with no mortgage experience, the dying print media, the new electronic media, the blogs and the social nitworks.
The idea is not to monetize good information, but to get attention, attract site traffic, raise great winds of popular response. To stir the pot.
Problem is, that little coterie of data-respecting nerdalysts of which I was once a member now must spend an inordinate portion of the work day dissecting government half-measures (Hope Now, HAMP, HARP and so forth ad infinitum) and weighing rumors of more on the horizon.
With increasing frequency, nervous institutional investors call on the professional analysts for a reality check on wildfire speculation, canards and outright lies about what the government intends to do to fix the housing-mortgage mess and, unintentionally, sabotage investment performance.
The worst patch yet, I think, has been seen in the last couple of weeks, thanks to deliberate rumormongering about a backdoor stimulus plan [1], in which the government compels the housing agencies to forgive principal on millions of underwater mortgages and refinance them into the lowest published mortgage rates on record. Rumor mongering intended to further confuse public discourse going into the elections.
Lowell: "Slam Dunk Stimulus" - The Natural History of a Rumor
http://www.housingwire.com/
=========
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