Buying banks’ bad assets finally comes to fruition

WICHITA — It’s been nearly a year since the financial crisis began to take hold, causing the Treasury Department, Congress and then-President George Bush to unveil a series of efforts aimed at preventing a collapse of the nation’s financial system.

One of those proposed efforts that seemed to fade from the spotlight as quickly as it was mentioned was creating a system that would allow banks to get bad assets — primarily subprime mortgages — off their books.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. said today that it has a winner of its pilot offering in the Legacy Loans Program.

Residential Credit Solutions bid more than $64 million in cash for a 50 percent stake in a limited liability company organized by the FDIC to hold a portfolio of mortgages with $1.3 billion in unpaid principal.

The FDIC said it “received various bids that were very competitive.”

The rub to all of this is the portfolio was from Franklin Bank in Houston, which regulators closed in November.

As this program moves forward, it hopefully will be used to buy bad assets from banks that are still in business, thus preventing them from failing.

5 Comments

  1. bth
    Posted September 17, 2009 at 6:48 pm | Permalink

    $64 million for a half-interest in $1.3 BILLION. In other words, we are recovering about 10 cents on the dollar.

  2. itsuckstologin
    Posted September 21, 2009 at 8:33 am | Permalink

    I don’t know about 10 cents on the dollar, my calculator said about 5 cents on the dollar. Hey, I have some bad assets you can buy. Just let me know.

  3. bth
    Posted September 21, 2009 at 8:45 am | Permalink

    Arithmetic 101:

    a 50% (one-half) stake in a “portfolio of mortgages with $1.3 billion in unpaid principal” works out to $650 million.

    $64 million divided by $650 million equals 0.09846 or “about 10 cents on the dollar”

    I think you missed the “50 percent stake” part.

  4. Posted October 3, 2009 at 7:14 am | Permalink

    all good things

  5. Posted October 10, 2009 at 8:16 pm | Permalink

    Great. Now i can say thank you!,