Remember how we were experiencing the greatest financial collapse since the great depression?? Well the president apparently thinks healthcare “reform” is more important than addressing the fundamental flaws in the American financial system. This would explain why he has done next to nothing for the last 8 months to address these problems.

What do you think?? Did Obama get his priorities out of order??

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090914/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_obama_financial_regulations

And even as the economy begins a “return to normalcy,” Obama said, “normalcy cannot lead to complacency.”

Nevertheless, Obama said, “Instead of learning the lessons of Lehman and the crisis from which we are still recovering, they are choosing to ignore them.”

His tough message warned the financial community to “hear my words: We will not go back to the days of reckless behavior and unchecked excess at the heart of this crisis, where too many were motivated only by the appetite for quick kills and bloated bonuses.”

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=Apq0WBA7av6km1YCnxn80lrty6IX;_ylv=3?qid=20090824121005AAVzcNq

Wall Street may have discovered a way out from under the bad debt and risky mortgages that have clogged the financial markets. The would-be solution probably sounds familiar: It’s a lot like what got banks in trouble in the first place.

In recent months investment banks have been repackaging old mortgage securities and offering to sell them as new products, a plan that’s nearly identical to the complicated investment packages at the heart of the market’s collapse.

“There is a little bit of deja vu in this,” said Arizona State University economics professor Herbert Kaufman.

But Kaufman said the strategy could help solve one of the lingering problems of the financial meltdown: What to do about hundreds of billions of dollars in mortgages that are still choking the system and making bankers reluctant to make new loans.

These are holdovers from the housing bubble, when home prices soared, banks bought risky mortgages, bundled them with solid mortgages and sold them all as top-rated bonds. With investors eager to buy these bonds, lenders came up with increasingly risky mortgages, sometimes for people who could not afford them. It didn’t matter because, in the end, the bonds would all get AAA ratings…………”There’s no voodoo going on here. It’s just math,” said Sue Allon, chief executive of Allonhill, which helps investors analyze such hard-to-price investments.

Financial gurus call it a “resecuritization of real estate mortgage investment conduits.” On Wall Street, it goes by the acronym Re-Remic (it rhymes with epidemic).

“It actually makes a lot of fundamental sense,” said Brian Bowes, the head of mortgage trading at Hexagon Securities in New York. “It’s taking a bond that doesn’t necessarily have a natural buyer and creating two bonds that might have a natural buyer for each.”

The risk is, if the housing market slips even more, even the AAA-rated investments may not prove safe. The deal also relies on the rating agencies, which misread the risk at the heart of the subprime mortgage crisis, to get it right.

And then there’s the uncertainty about the value of the underlying investments, which FBR Capital Markets analyst Gabe Poggi called “totally combustible.” Poggi likes the deals because they appear to have breathed some life into the market, but he said it only works if everyone knows exactly what they’re buying.

The Obama administration is also working on a plan to get banks buying and selling risky bonds. But the public-private partnership announced this spring is still in the works and has yet to help investors figure out what those bonds are worth. By creating Re-Remics, banks can help start the process themselves.