“In a warped sense, one has to admire the cool way that Americans ? who save nothing, in aggregate ? tapped into the vast savings pool of thrifty Germans to finance their speculative excesses, and then left the creditors holding a chunk of the subprime losses.”

“I am endebted to Randall W.Forsyth from Barron?s for this delicious quote from a hedge-fund operator, recounting with disgust what happened this time in a letter to clients.

‘Real money’ (U.S. insurance companies, pension funds, etc.) accounts had stopped purchasing mezzanine tranches of U.S. subprime debt in late 2003 and [Wall Street] needed a mechanism that could enable them to ‘mark up’ these loans, package them opaquely, and EXPORT THE NEWLY PACKAGED RISK TO UNWITTING BUYERS IN ASIA AND CENTRAL EUROPE!!!!

“These CDOs were the only way to get rid of the riskiest tranches of subprime debt. Interestingly enough, these buyers (mainland Chinese banks, the Chinese Government, Taiwanese banks, Korean banks, German banks, French banks, U.K. banks) possess the ‘excess’ pools of liquidity around the globe. These pools are basically derived from two sources: 1) massive trade surpluses with the U.S. in U.S. dollars, 2) petrodollar recyclers. These two pools of excess capital are U.S. dollar-denominated and have had a virtually insatiable demand for U.S. dollar-denominated debt . . . until now.”

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/business/ambrosevanspritchard/august07/marketmayhem.htm

As the markets brace for today’s opening, the question on everyone’s lips is whether the US Federal Reserve’s attempt to inject more liquidity into the system by cutting the discount rate and terms at which banks borrow from them will be sufficient to stabilise financial markets.

According to the influential financial analyst James Cramer, of TheStreet.com, up to 7 million people in the US will default in the next two to three years.

Alan Fishbein, the director of housing and credit policy at the Consumer Federation of America, puts the figure at 2 million to 3 million. But he says the worst is yet to come, with a big bulge of subprime loans due to move off honeymoon rates next month.”

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2007/08/19/1187462082111.html

siehe auch hier

http://www.leap2020.eu/Im-Februar-2007,-LEAP-vorhergesagt-Rekordzunahme-an-Immobilienzwangsvollstreckungen-in-den-USA-10-Millionen-Amerikaner_a873.html