Citi (C) And Bank of America (BAC) Buying Distressed Mortgages
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Secretary Tim Geithner designed a plan to assist the largest banks to rid themselves of toxic mortgage assets, but now Citigroup (NYSE: C) and Bank of America (NYSE: BAC) are aggressively buying up those same securities in the secondary market, according to The NY Post.
Both Citi and Bank of America each have received $45 billion in federal rescue cash to help prop up the economy and increase their lending to businesses. But the banks’ purchase of mortgage-backed securities, including some that use alt-A and option ARM as collateral, is having some traders question why they are buying those bad assets. Alt-A and option ARMs are widely recognized as the next mortgage type to see large increases in defaults.
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Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
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A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
