Navigant Consulting is sponsoring a webcast today entitled “The Subprime Boomerang: After the Writedowns Comes the Litigation” that will examine the landslide of subprime litigation that is now upon us.
It’s been two years since concerns over subprime mortgages threw off the early sparks that eventually grew into the current global credit crisis. The crisis has given rise to unprecedented losses, which in turn have led to unprecedented levels of litigation.
Please join panelists Veronica Rendon and Richard Swanson, partners with Arnold & Porter LLP, and Jeff Nielsen, a Managing Director with Navigant Consulting, Inc., as they discuss these developments as well as your questions in a free, one-hour webcast.
To attend this webcast scheduled for today, March 11, at 2 pm Eastern, please sign up below.
After 34+ years as mortgage banking industry counsel and executive, I believe that it is clear that no reasonable investment banker or investor could have seen the work of Professor Robert Shiller, the noted Yale Economist and housing industry expert, (S&P Case Shiller, Home Price Indexes etc.) re. the housing bubble and concluded that anything other than a disaster was in store. When Wall Street Investment Bankers entered the subprime game the housing bubble already was in a position to would collapse in the same manner as the 70’s and 80’s housing bubbles collapsed. Wall Street used uninvested global capital to provide rocket fuel to an already super heated US housing market on the clearly false premise that housing prices would continue to climb indefinitely. The so-called Wall Street subprime, alt-A etc. was not the traditional subprime mortgages that had been issued in the past, making any projections of performance unfounded. It will be interesting to see the litigation approach to this problem. The economics of the marketplace can be used quite easily to show the folly of all Wall Street subprime – and the main housing economist projected a disaster growing out of the Irrational Exhuberance demonstrated by Prof. Shillers book and related writings on the subject.