...has its own understanding and framework of ethics. Accounting applications of ethical reasoning can become a common dilemma faced by auditors, internal auditors and all others who work in the business field. For example, The American Institute of Public Accountants (AICPA) Code requires CPAs to place the interest of the public first. To place the interest of the public first means that CPAs should not place themselves, their client or their employer’s interest above the public. Many business dilemmas involve managers, CPAs, and/or top management who have placed their interest above the public’s interest. An example of an accounting and business dilemma where the public interest was not placed first is Fannie Mae accounting scandal in 2001. Fannie Mae is the Federal National Mortgage Association, a government supported entity that assist lower and middle income Americans to buy homes. The Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) also assists lower and Middle Americans to buy homes. Both supported entities gain special treatment and “aimed to increase home ownership by decreasing the cost for homeowners to borrow money.” In order for the entities to decrease the cost for homeowners to borrow money they purchased home mortgages from banks. The home mortgages are then guaranteed and then sold to investors. The treatment of the mortgages helped minimize the credit and interest risk. Fannie Mae “makes money by buying, guaranteeing, and...
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...______________________________________________ Signature: ______________________________________________ Date: ______________________________________________ Comments: ______________________________________________ ______________________________________________ _______________________________________________ _______________________________________________ Abstract The need to encourage house or homeownership has been in the government’s strategic plan since 1934, however, the current financial policies and practices in the housing finance and the mortgage market has characterized by minimum flow of capital in the secondary mortgage market, confusion on the main control authority and various ill practices. This fact has necessitated various changes in the house and homeownership financial. This study collected both primary and secondary data, and found out that the government must set the right policies that will empower house and home consumers to circumvent biased practices and practice informed decision making, these sentiments. There must be improvement in the foreclosure processing and mortgage servicing, notably, from the beginning of the last financial crisis, foreclosures and NAR tried to work with administrators and regulators to formulate criteria for decreasing the risk of foreclosure. There should be increased...
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...Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are private corporations that were established by Congress and are referred to as government sponsored enterprises or GSEs. They are the largest “packagers” of individual mortgages into mortgage backed securities (MBS) which they guarantee against loss. We will be addressing the following threats to your financial institutions stability. Counterparty risk. Internal and external vulnerability and threats. Stemming the tide of losses from overly aggressive practices in lending continues to retard the marketplace and has yet to reach equilibrium. The use of macro measures is of critical importance in returning the company to profitability. \ The use of Macroeconomic Measures, Using Aggregate Data. These measures approach threats to financial stability from the top down: Is aggregate credit growing too fast? Are credit underwriting standards falling? Are asset prices too high relative to fundamentals? “In an internal boom-bust cycle, an initial market upswing entices new investors and rising prices until additional capital or investors’ nerves are exhausted.”(Evanoff, Kaufman, and Malliaris, 2012). “This process can be amplified by capital rules that encourage banks to increase leverage when the economy is expanding and loan losses are low.” (Hanson, Kashyap, and Stein, 2011). “In the ensuing bust, a credit crunch can occur as participants switch from lending too much to lending too little.” (Brunnermeier, 2009). A selling...
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...Patrick Overby Overby41@gmail.com/ 915-540-1267 Spring 2 2015 INTRODUCTION The Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act or the Dodd-Frank Act was signed into law in 2010 due the financial collapse of the economy. It provided regulatory protection for the consumer and oversight on how banks issued loans. It provided a blueprint for how to approach to resolving the challenges that the financial markets can create. The framework of the law resembles The New Deal in the 1930s because of the Great Depression. The reforms implemented by the Dodd-Frank Act will have far-reaching effects on the financial system and our economy. The Dodd-Frank Act allows company stockholder to determine the type of compensation packages of that management receive. Businesses must create a committee to assess and decide the amount awarded to their leaders. There are myriad of viewpoints towards Dodd-Frank from the detractors and proponent of the law. Individuals who are against the law believe that it is inflexible and will hurt businesses. The supporters of the law understand that this will limit the power of the financial institution. Dodd-Frank Act In 2008, the country was going through one of the worst financial crisis in history that resembled the Great Depression of the 1930’s. It not only affected the U.S. but also threatened the total collapse of large financial institutions around the world. Banks began engaging in dangerous business practices that was encouraged by investors...
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...Padmanabhan IES Management College and Research Centre Mumbai, India | Executive summary: “If war is God’s way of teaching geography to the world, recession is His way of teaching everyone a little economics”. The global financial crisis has questioned the efficacy of the existing institutional framework and forced us to rethink on how our financial systems are regulated. It has also posed an important question whether the root cause of this global crisis has been the highly praised ‘Open Market Approach’. The inter linkages in the global economy has ensured that no country remains isolated and unhindered by the crisis. With the economic crisis looming over the people at large, unemployment seems to be at all time high and the whole world having a pessimistic view of the future, capitalism seems to be at loss of reason for this crisis, let alone a find solution for it. There was a time when being a capitalist economy was a matter of pride and people were excited to be part of the “free” economy but somewhere down the line the excitement seemed to have vanished. What was thought to be an epitome of equality, turned out to be the cause of inequality. In an article by Joseph E. Stiglitz “Of the 1%, By the 1%, For the 1%”, 1 percent of the people in USA take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income. He further adds that the top 1% of Americans control nearly 40% of the country’s income. The income disparity...
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...Reaction Phase Toxic Assets Removal: Banks were assessed for their long-term viability. Viable banks sold ‘bad loans’ to the Central Bank, with a repurchase agreement. Most banks used this facility to the tune of $5 billion. Liquidity Enhancement Central Bank’s Secured and subsidized Loans on Collateral: Government provided secured loans (using bank assets as collateral) to troubled institutions to allow them to recapitalize. These "repos" had conditions attached, including a provision that the shareholders could not take profits out of the company until the loan was repaid. Eliminate Weak Banks: Non-viable banks were intervened and liquidated. The government intervened directly in two banks, wiping out shareholders, removing management and...
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...Lebanese American University School of Business Economics Department Advanced Topics in Economics Midterm Paper Perspective on the Financial Crisis of 2007-2008 Fatima Sobh 200903216 By early 2007, the crisis started in the U.S. with the collapse of the subprime mortgage market and by reaching the end of a major booming housing era. It occurred just after two years of raising the interest rates policy. Not only had it affected mortgages, it reached the banking sector in the U.S. and across the world as well. It had spilled over into the real economy through a dangerous credit clash and collapsing equities’ market which more likely produced a significant recession. The Fed and other central banks have responded in a classical way by flooding the financial markets with liquidity. As for the fiscal authorities, they dealt with the decline in solvency in the banking system by following the template of earlier bailouts like the Reconstruction Finance Corporation in the 1930s, Sweden in 1992 and Japan in the late 1990s. In August 2007, to be specific, the financial system started to crack. Banks realized that they held considerable amounts of mortgage-backed securities that were difficult to rate. Sadly, after experiencing large losses, banks’ balance sheets could not put up with additional lending. (Cecchetti, 2008) As a result, some financial intermediaries began to face difficulties in finding the short-term financing that was necessary for them to carry on their...
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...Focus THE CAUSES OF THE FINANCIAL CRISIS1 MARTIN HELLWIG* Introduction For the media in Germany, the cause of the financial crisis is obvious: Blinded by greed, bank managers thought only about their bonuses and miscalculated badly in betting on American subprime mortgages when the very name of these securities should have alerted them to their risks. If an economist suggests that the matter might be more complicated, he is denounced as a homo exculpans, a person who will excuse anything that managers do.2 If we look at the numbers, however, we see that there is something more to be explained. According to the Global Financial Stability Report of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) of October 2008, losses on non-prime mortgage-backed securities in US residential real-estate amount to some 500 billion dollars. This figure is both too small and too large. The figure is too small in the sense that losses of 500 billion dollars by themselves cannot explain why the financial system worldwide has been so devastated by the crisis. Around 1990, losses of savings and loans institutions in the United States were said to amount to some 600 to 800 billion dollars. A decade later, losses on NASDAQ and on the New York Stock Exchange amounted to 1.6 trillion dollars in the calendar year 2000, 1.4 trillion dollars in the calendar year 2001, and again 2.7 trillion dollars in the calendar year 2002. Neither episode caused a worldwide financial crisis. At the same time, the figure of 500...
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...Team #5: Fernando Puiggari, Afiya Williams, and Yu Tang MBAA 505: Economic Environment Of Business Prof. Victor Petenkemani Case 3: Due 10/30/2014 Quantitative Easing in the Great Recession. 1. You will consider the various impacts of QE1, QE2, and QE3. What accounts for the differences in the market reactions to these three policy actions? What the Fed did * On Sept. 8, 2008, the U.S. Treasury seized control of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and pledged a $200 billion cash injection to help the companies cope with mortgage default losses. * About a week later the government bailed out American International Group Inc with $85 billion. * The Fed refused to save Lehman Brothers and the company was forced to file for bankruptcy. Some of the largest financial institutions were on the verge of collapse as the mortgage market melted down. As the crisis hit the global market, the credit freeze spread. * The Treasury and the Federal Reserve began working on a $700 billion bailout plan. * President George W. Bush signed the bailout plan into law Oct. 3. * Weeks later, on Oct. 29, the Fed cut the key interest rate to 1 percent. What was expected? The government claimed the bailout was necessary to provide stability in the economy and prevent disruption in the financial system. The interest rate cut aimed to revive the economy, help free up credit and make loans cheaper to consumers and businesses. What happened The financial...
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...Abstract I will discuss taking as it pertains to a 356 acre fruit orchard owned by Johnny Appleseed. Mr. Appleseed’s orchard is located along a river frontage that is four miles downstream from a dam erected in the 1930’s by the state government. In 1996, the area experienced increased precipitation. By the spring, an emergency inspection of the dam by engineers concluded that water must be released or the valley could suffer a catastrophic flood. The engineers acknowledged that releasing the water in the recommended manner would cause some limited flooding. As a result, Mr. Appleseed’s fruit orchard was flooded and he lost his crop for that year and many trees on his property were permanently destroyed. I will present my argument that this temporary flooding was a taking as defined by our text and was done so under eminent domain. When a property is taken in this manner the owner is justly compensated for the loss according to the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Keywords: eminent domain, taking, temporary flooding The practice of taking by eminent domain is deeply rooted in history long before it was written about in the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The term itself was taken from the legal treatise De Jure Belli et Pacis, which was written by Hugo Grotius in 1625. Grotius, whose various texts are considered the foundations for international law, defined the power as follows: The property of subjects is under the eminent...
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...SUBPRIME MORTGAGE CRISIS The U.S. subprime mortgage crisis was a set of events and conditions that led to the late-2000s financial crisis, characterized by a rise in subprime mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures, and the resulting decline of securities backed by said mortgages. What is a subprime mortgage? A subprime mortgage is a type of loan granted to individuals with poor credit histories, who, as a result of their deficient credit ratings, would not be able to qualify for conventional mortgages. Because subprime borrowers present a higher risk for lenders, subprime mortgages charge interest rates above the prime lending rate. There are several different kinds of subprime mortgage structures available. The most common is the adjustable rate mortgage (ARM), which initially charges a fixed interest rate, and then converts to a floating rate based on an index, plus a margin. The better known types of ARMs include 3/27 and 2/28 ARMs. What lead to the US subprime mortgage crisis? ARMs are somewhat misleading to subprime borrowers in that the borrowers initially pay a lower interest rate. When their mortgages reset to the higher, variable rate, mortgage payments increase significantly. This is one of the factors that lead to the sharp increase in the number of subprime mortgage foreclosures in August of 2006, and the subprime mortgage meltdown that ensued. Many lenders were more liberal in granting these loans from 2004...
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...Brothers? America's fourth-largest investment bank Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc has filed the biggest bankruptcy petition known to mankind. The 158-year-old firm was founded by brothers Henry, Emanuel and Mayer Lehman, Jewish immigrants to the US from Germany, in 1850. Henry set up a general store in Alabama in 1844 and was later joined by his brothers. In 1850 they set up the merchant bank in New York after having made money in railway bonds. So what went wrong? Compiled by Rediff Business Desk Lehman Bros, which till June 2008 had not reported a quarterly loss even once, had earlier survived many an economic crises, like railroad bankruptcies of the 1800s, the Great Depression in the 1930s, and the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management in the 1990s. Thus the collapse of the giant investment bank came as a major shock for the entire world markets that plunged after Lehman filed a Chapter 11 petition with US Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan. The $613 billion (some estimates put the size at $639 billion) bankruptcy thus throws up the question: why did the Wall Street giant go bust? Here's why. . . Why did Lehman Brothers go bankrupt? The giant investment bank succumbed to the sub-prime mortgage crisis that has rocked the United States and the global economy. Lehman was strangled by a massive credit crisis and fast plummeting real estate prices. The gargantuan $60 billion loss in bad real estate loans forced the bank to file for bankruptcy. However, the fall of...
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...FINANIAL CRISIS 2008 AND CORPORATE GOVERNANCE The business world is questioning whether Corporate Governance has become a mere catchphrase, divorced from the contentious problems it is supposed to solve… MEMBERS: AYUSH KUMAR-030 NIPEKSH I MAHAJAN-082 PRABHAV MISHRA-0 PRATEEK KUMAR-096 VAIBHAV JAIN-164 “Why should a financial engineer be paid four, four times... to a hundred times more than the real engineer? A real engineer build bridges, a financial engineer build, build dreams. And when those dream turn out to be nightmares, other people pay for it.” - Andrew Sheng “Contrary to the vulgar belief that men are motivated primarily by materialistic considerations, we now see the capitalist system being discredited and destroyed all over the world, even though the system has given men the greatest material comforts” - Ayn Rand “In fact, there is ultimately a limit to how much regulation can do. In the final analysis, you could write all the rules you want, but there has to be a philosophy of ethical behaviour that comes from human beings operating in a professional way” – William H. Donaldson, CFA “The global crisis was caused by “the over-50s not knowing what the under-30’s were doing” – Johann Rupert, Remgro Chairman “The first casualty of a downturn is truth” - Financial Times Columnist 30 Sept 2008 Introduction- The banking crisis was triggered by largely unregulated trading of complex financial instruments, including mortgaged-backed...
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...Do you believe that the US government treated some financial institutions differently during the crisis? Was that appropriate? The issue faced by Lehman Brothers is just a consequence of bad decisions from many parties involved. The fact that this investment bank had been the only one that didn't receive any governmental help, begs the question why the US government did not struggle to let Lehman Brothers survive. Many issues were out of control. Merrill Lynch, another major investment bank, was also facing a similar situation. After an emergency meeting called by the Federal Reserve (Fed); Bank of America announced its decision to buy Merrill Lynch. The Investment banks Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, and Golden Sachs were called by the Fed to find a way to rescue Lehman; however, no bank was interested in investing in the firm (Ferguson 2010). Just one week before Lehman’s bankruptcy, Fannie Mae, and Freddy Mac had to bail out with the intervention of the US Treasury and the Fed. Two days after its bankruptcy, the Fed provided $85 billion loan to American International Group (AIG) as an insurance conglomerate to prevent its failure (Elteman et al 2011, 132 – 134). Both, Fed and Treasury, argued that while Lehman could not post sufficient security in affording reasonable assurance that a loan from the Fed would be repaid, the Fed credit was adequately secured by AIG’s assets (USNews 2008). Whether US government position was appropriate or not, depends on the interest of the parties...
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...grown and been amended since it first appeared in the December, 2008, issue of The Australian Journal of Management, as the editorial, under the title of “The Dominoes Fall: a timeline of the squeeze and crunch”. I include below the December preamble. The version of mid-May, 2009, will appear as the editorial of the June 2009 issue of the AJM, under the title “Anatomy of a Credit Crisis.” I include below the June preamble, in which I assay a framework for understanding the genesis of the crisis. December, 2008: IN ITS LEADER of October 13, 2008, the Financial Times characterized the western world’s banking system as suffering “the equivalent of a cardiac arrest.” The collapse of confidence in the system means that “it is now virtually impossible for any institution to finance itself in the markets longer than overnight.” This occurred less than a month after Lehman Brothers (LB) collapsed, without bailout. Six months earlier Bear Stearns (BS) had been bailed out after JP Morgan Chase (JPM Chase) had bought it for $10 a share, at the regulator’s urging. After LB fell, who would be next? And if LB, who was not at risk? Despite the earlier U.S. government bailouts of the erstwhile government mortgage originators (and still seen as government-sponsored enterprises, or GSEs), the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac), and the later bailout of the world’s largest insurer, American International Group (AIG), everything...
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