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April 22, 2008
Moody Mortgage: Must-Read Mortgage Markets Missive
Roger Lowenstein has a massive, must-read piece on mortgage markets in next weekend's NY Times magazine. Clocking in at more than 5,000 words, the piece is, well ... long, but it is Lowenstein, so it is worth reading in its entirety. Roger's walk-through of how Moody's explained mortgage ratings to him via a real case is worth the effort alone.
And for those of you who can't stomach the idea of reading something this long on a Tuesday, here is a tag cloud of the most common words in Roger's piece. At least you can sound smart: Agencies! Borrowers! Triple-A! And my favorite: Moody Mortgage!!
My current favorite snippet from the piece is actually a quote from an S&P executive who says mortgage-related credit markets broke down because of consumers' "ahistorical behavioral modes" (which is a great name for a blog). That's right, it's those darn buyers who messed up the mortgage market. As far as obfuscatory prose goes, that's right up there with comScore being "directionally correct".
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