Countrywide's Angelo Mozilo

Personal Fortune, Economic Disaster

I don't follow pro sports very closely these days, but growing up, I remember a statistic in basketball and hockey called the "plus/minus ratio."

The goal was to filter out individual statistics like goals scored or baskets made, and instead, focus on each player's net contribution to their team.

The result was something called the player's "plus/minus" ratio.

To calculate it, you added the total points scored by the player's team while he or she was on the ice (or court), then subtracted the total points scored by the opposing team.

So, a player who didn't score much, but was great on defense, would have a deceptively high plus/minus ratio.

So would a consummate team player, who unselfishly aided his or her teammates' point-scoring.

Net Minus

What makes me think of this is Angelo Mozilo, former CEO of subprime lender Countrywide, who now stands accused of (civil) fraud.

Leaving aside the particulars of the subprime business, what's clear is that Mozilo's total compensation over the last decade or so was several hundred million dollars.

Compare that to the carnage caused by the the toxic loans his company made: hundreds of thousands -- if not millions -- of foreclosures. Conservatively, say the number is 500,000.

Assuming each foreclosure costs $50,000, Mozilo's conduct arguably could be said to have cost the economy $25 billion. And that's before taking into account the human suffering, dislocation, etc. caused by all those foreclosures.

That makes Mozilo's "plus/minus" ratio a rather lopsided negative $24.5 billion. Not quite up there with Bernie Madoff (minus $50 billion), or the senior management of AIG, Merrill Lynch, or Goldman Sachs -- but a pretty staggering sum, nonetheless.

Compare that to the contributions made by a teacher, a fireman, or a talented doctor, whose pay may be nominal, but whose efforts add real wealth to the economy, and society generally.

Unlike the Angelo Mozilo's of the world, they would all score very high on the social "plus/minus" scale.

Not to mention the "financial" Hippocratic oath: 'first, do no harm.'

Verbal abracadabra

Quick: Synonym for "Other-than-Temporary?"

Want to get rid of something? Change -- or obscure -- its name.

So, it's no longer swine flu, it's an acronym.

In finance, all the toxic loans still on too-big-to-fail bank balance sheets are not "toxic loans" -- suddenly, they're "legacy assets."

And how are those to be valued?

According to FASB, by applying new, so-called "other-than-temporary impairment" (OTTI) rules.

English actually has a word for "other-than-temporary": it's called 'permanent.'

Proposal: Financial "Son of Sam" Law

Look Who's Cashing in on the Mortgage Mess

Fairly or not, Countrywide Financial and its top executives would be on most lists of those who share blame for the nation’s economic crisis. After all, the banking behemoth made risky loans to tens of thousands of Americans, helping set off a chain of events that has the economy staggering. So it may come as a surprise that a dozen former top Countrywide executives now stand to make millions from the home mortgage mess. Stanford L. Kurland, Countrywide’s former president, and his team have been buying up delinquent home mortgages that the government took over from other failed banks, sometimes for pennies on the dollar. They get a piece of what they can collect.

--Eric Lipton, "Ex-Leaders of Countrywide Profit From Bad Loans"; The New York Times (3/3/09)

Let me see if I've got this right.

Bank executives at subprime lenders made hundreds of millions originating toxic loans that helped blow up the housing market. In turn, that helped blow up the banking system, which -- surprise! -- is now tanking the general economy.

Nothing has happened to them.

On the contrary, they are now using their toxic loan wealth and banking connections to make money a second time on toxic loans -- this time, by buying them for pennies on the dollar.

To paraphrase the government attorney who admonished Joseph McCarthy: "Have you no sense of decency sir(s), at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

And what kind of financial and legal system stands by and watches this happen??

Proposal: Financial "Son of Sam" Law

After serial killer David Berkowitz reportedly received lucrative offers to sell his story to publishers, New York state passed a law preventing such a travesty.

Known as the Son of Sam law, it authorizes the state to seize money earned from such a deal and use it to compensate the criminal's victims. The rationale, which hardly seems to require explanation, is that no one should financially profit from crimes that they've committed. Since then, 39 states have passed similar laws.

Such an approach seems tailor-made for today's housing and financial crisis, and the "economy killers" at the root of it.

The best thing for public confidence would be a healthy economy generating lots of well-paying jobs.

In the meantime, the next best thing would be sending the people most responsible for the financial crisis to prison -- or at least pulling them away from the trough ("A-I-G" is starting to look and smell a lot like P-I-G).