text:
When you guarantee something, you have all of the downside risk of ownership, often without any upside hope of profit. A guarantee is the most dangerous financial action you can take. Ironically, the more that you can pay, the greater is the danger. A guarantee should be specific, limited, and closely watched. All of Wall Street and Main Street know this. Politicians know it too; they pretend that they don't.
The center of the current financial disaster is a runaway government guarantee placed in service of government affilliated corporations Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, under the direction of Barney Frank, and the cooperation of most of Congress.
A mistake in oversight can cost you plenty.
Credit Parable(Stage lights brighten from black)
Son: Hi Dad. I need a credit card for college. I can get a card with a $3,000 limit at 18% interest, and I'll pay off any balance from my part-time work. I expect to occasionally run a $2,000 balance. I figure this will cost me about $150 per year. At $12/month I think the convenience is worth it.
Dad: You have done your research, and I think this makes sense.
Son: I want to mention that they will cut the rate to 10% and raise the limit to $5,000 if you will guarantee the card. I'll have all the credit I need in an emergency, and I'll save $67 per year, just for getting your signature. It's free money.
Dad: OK, I trust you. I'll just sign here ...
(A year later)
Son: I have a problem. You know that credit card I got a year ago? I owe them $18,000. They are going to make you pay them.
Dad: What? How can that be? What did you do?
Son: A few months after I got the card, they raised my credit limit to $20,000. I think they were impressed by your credit rating. They offered me 0% interest for a year, so I moved to an off-campus apartment and bought some furniture. I could not resist taking a spring break to Cancun. Did you know that you can gamble at age 18 in Cancun?
I met a beautiful girl. She is from a wealthy Nigerian family, but needed a loan to complete her first year. Bad luck, she had to leave college and go home. Unfortunately, the college says they didn't get the tuition she owed them, but they do have my credit card number and my signature. Her phone number in Nigeria is not working.
They raised the interest rate to 29% when I was late with a minimum payment, and there were some extra credit fees. With late fees and some stupid stuff with their attorneys, they say I owe them $17,893, and that you have to pay if I don't. Of course, I can't pay them.
I'm sorry Dad, I thought I could clear this all up, and I really didn't know what to do. So, there it is.
Dad: This is impossible. I only guaranteed a $5,000 limit, and you were going to be careful. They aren't getting more than $5,000 from me, and you are going to work that off.
Son: They told me that raising the $5,000 limit was just an extension of the contract terms, and that I had 60 days to object, but I didn't see the harm. Also, it seems that you guaranteed "the card" and not "the limit". Anyway, it might take a lawyer to fight their claim. They said that we would have to pay more of their attorney's fees if we fight and lose. Your credit rating is also at stake.
Dad: (Head in hands, wheezing sounds) What a disaster.
(Lights fade to black)
Created by Congress
The parable suggests what the Congress did with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government Sponsored Enterprises (GSE's) that Congress set up to encourage lending for home ownership.
Congress maintained close oversight of what Fannie and Freddie (FanFred) were doing, and approved of it. Congress created OFHEO (The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight) especially to regulate FanFred. The much larger and more visible SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) was available, but Congress wanted its own regulator.
OFHEO knew month by month that by December 2007 FanFred had bought and held 18% ($219 billion) of all subprime mortgage bonds (the most risky) created in 2006 and 2007. By June 2008, Fannie owned in addition $307 billion of questionable Alt-A mortages, 11.5% of its total of $2,670 billion of mortgages owned.
FanFred borrowed money from private institutions in order to buy and hold this "subprime paper" and more usual mortgages. Fannie and Freddie together owned and guaranteed mortgage bonds representing $5,400 billion in home mortages ($5.4 trillion). In comparison, the borrowed debt of the US is separately $5.5 trillion. Institutions loaned to FanFred whatever it wanted, because FanFred had the implied guarantee of the US Government.
Risky Lending
An Alt-A mortgage is rated as an intermediate risk, between standard prime "A" mortgages and "subprime" mortgages. It may be granted to someone with low credit scores and serious late payments, without recent defaults or bankruptcy. Compared to a prime loan, it allows for no verification of stated income and assets ("no-doc loan"), higher debt for the stated income (payments at a higher fraction of income), less money down ("high LTV Loan to Value ratio"), and for less desireable properties.
A "subprime" mortgage is rated as high risk. It is granted to someone who cannot qualify for Alt-A, maybe to someone with recent defaults and bankruptcy.
The small market for Alt-A loans increased hugely because FanFred became a buyer. The subprime mortgage was created by government mandates on banks through the the CRA housing bill, and the volume of subprime loans expanded mostly because FanFred became a buyer, as dictated by Congress. FanFred did not buy all of the risky loans, but it supported the market for such loans and made them acceptable over time to other institutions. So, mortgage losses have not been limited to FanFred.
FanFred set the standards for the mortgage market. Mortgage lenders made risky loans to people with poor credit ratings, according to the standards for the loans FanFred would buy. FanFred's decreasing credit standards of course produced decreasing credit standards by retail mortgage lenders. FanFred knowingly took on all of the risk when they bought these loans.
Don't Stop
No one stopped FanFred from making these bad investments. The Congress (House and Senate) intentionally ignored clear warnings over many years. The House Financial Services Committee (overseeing banking and financial services) did not object, and actually encouraged more lending to subprime borrowers. Barney Frank (D. MA) has served as ranking (most senior) Democratic member on this committee since at least 1991
Called the House Banking Committee in 1991, it had oversight over Fannie Mae.
Events in 1991: Frank pushed the Banking Committee to loosen regulations on mortgages for two- and three-family homes.
Fannie hired Herb Moses as Assistant Director for Product Initiatives where he helped develop many of Fannie Mae's lending programs for affordable housing and home improvement.
Moses had lived with the openly gay Frank since 1987. , and has chaired the committee since 2007 in the Democratic majority.
Barney Frank was Fannie Mae's Patron Saint, blocking attempts at limiting and reforming FanFred at least since 1992, denying that there were any problems, and even today demanding that any restructured company continue buying subprime loans.
FanFred's management was corrupt. In May 2006, OFHEO levied a $400 million fine against Fannie (as a corporation) for intentionally reporting $10.6 billion in false profits. According to USA Today "OFHEO holds Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines and former CFO Timothy Howard as principally responsible for manipulating the company's earnings from 1998-2004 while reaping tens of millions of dollars in pay and bonuses."
In April 2008, the NY Times reported that Raines and two other top executives would together pay $31.4 million in fines for their actions in 1998-2004. There is no mention of anyone going to jail.
Republicans did nothing for 12 years as the majority party. Democrats have done nothing in the past two years as the majority. There was never a majority of legislators, of whatever political party, in favor of stopping FanFred from using its guarantee to recklessly borrow money and buy risky loans.
Plausible Deniability
Politicians benefitted from FanFred in many ways. Their voters received loans, they received votes, FanFred made campaign contributions, and many of the political elite worked for FanFred at high salaries.
Most Democrats, in particular Rep. Barney Frank, said that FanFred aided poorer voters as part of enlightened social policy. Most Republicans did the same, and many did not criticise FanFred, afraid of being labeled heartless penny-pinchers who didn't want to help the poor. FanFred bought political support by contributing $200 million in the last 10 years toward lobbying and political contributions.
A long list of politically connected, mostly Democratic directors, senior management, and consultants made FanFred a vehicle for political patronage and personal profit. See Slate.com - Sep 2008 Fannie Mae and the Vast Bipartisan Conspiracy: A list of villains in boldface.
It is amazing that the government offered no written, legal guarantee of FanFred's mortgage bonds and debt. Large institutions relied on an implicit government guarantee
Fannie Mae's awfully big advantages
At the link [edited]: Fannie Mae is a government-sponsored enterprise. The financial markets concluded that the government will provide full faith and credit for Fannie's debt. So, Fannie Mae maintains a AAA credit rating.
The government has never said it would guarantee Fannie and Freddie's portfolios, and Fannie denies any guarantee in its offerings. But everybody, and I mean everybody, believes that the government would support Fannie and Freddie, and they don't press the government to say anything.
AMG: See also the other advantages that Fannie and Freddie had over any private company., and they were proved right by recent bailouts.
Institutions and credit rating companies such as Standard & Poor's (S&P) see almost no risk of default by FanFred and other GSE's, because GSE's are created by Congress, promote public policy (what politicians want), and are huge enterprises. This view has been supported by at least 30 years of government intervention to give government agencies and GSE's a guarantee in fact, if not in law.
Strangely, the GSE's and the government emphasize that there is no legal obligation for the government to pay their debts if the GSE's or agencies default.
Here is Barney Frank at a hearing in September 2003 about a Republican (George Bush) administration proposal to increase the regulation of FanFred and other GSEs:
[edited] I will consider the legislation, but the GSE's Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are not in any kind of a crisis. An accounting problem has led appropriately to people being dismissed. At this point there is no threat to the Treasury.
This is an example of self-fulfilling prophecy. Some critics see a problem, that the Federal government must bail out people who might lose money. But, I do not believe that we have any such obligation.
I support the role that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac play in housing, but investors should not look to me or the Federal Government for a nickel. If investors take some comfort and want to lend them a little money at lower interest rates, because they like their affiliations, then housing will benefit. But there is no guarantee, there is no explicit guarantee, there is no implicit guarantee, there is no wink-and-nod guarantee. Invest, and you are on your own.
We have a system that has worked very well to help housing. The high cost of housing is one of the great social bombs of this country. I would rank it second to the inadequacy of our health delivery system as a problem.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have helped make housing more affordable, both through leveraging the mortgage market, and their mission to focus on affordable housing. In return, this Congress has given them some of the arrangements which are of some benefit to them.
I believe that we (the Federal Government) have probably done too little to push them to meet the goals of affordable housing and to set reasonable goals.
I worry frankly that there is a tension here. The more people exaggerate a threat of safety and soundness, the more people conjure up the possibility of serious financial losses to the Treasury, which I do not see.
We see entities that are fundamentally sound financially and will withstand some of the disastrous scenarios. And even if there were a problem, the Federal Government doesn't bail them out. But the more pressure there is, then the less I think we see in terms of affordable housing.
The Congress approved $200 billion ($200,000 million) to pay off FanFred's losses, and it may cost $300 billion. This was before, and in addition to, last week's $850 billion "bailout" bill recently enacted ($700 billion plus $150 billion added on by the Senate for pet projects and earmarks). When the government pays, this actually means taxpayers will pay, both in direct dollars and in even larger losses in opportunity and jobs. For 110 million households, the spending or loss of $500 billion is $4,500 each.
In my view, this is a giant case of Plausible Deniability. That is the tactic of benefitting from a situation, but claiming that you didn't know, weren't responsible, or even spoke against it. The attitude is "You can't prove that I knew". It is politics as usual.
Barney Frank has not repeated his position in the current crisis, that the government will not and should not pay off the debts of FanFred.
He wants FanFred to continue in its mission. He and Sen. Chris Dodd among others support restoring FanFred to health and then returning them to the way they were before they went into conservatorship, but with safeguards to prevent another crisis.
The Bush admistration favors the breakup of FanFred after this crisis has passed. New, private companies would compete in the market for loans, and they would not have the support of the government.
FanFred was in some ways a hidden project. There were no budget items. Politicians claimed that there was no guarantee, no cost to the government, and nothing extra to legislate. There was no need to publicly examine what would happen if FanFred lost money and defaulted. OFHEO warned the House Financial Services Committee about growing risk. Chairman Barney Frank dismissed this as a matter of opinion.
In the language of Washington, FanFred was "off budget", until it exploded onto the taxpayer's budget with massive losses and a disruption of the US and world financial system.
More Rules
Now, the losses are discovered, and the cry goes out by Democrats that the fault was a lack of regulation by the Republican President George Bush.
In my view, the majority of Congress knew the risks in FanFred and willfully ignored those risks, while whispering "so far, so good". Most politicians saw the problems, and accepted possible losses as the cost of doing business, eventually to be paid for by "rich" people through progressive tax increases. No harm done according to their philosophy. Other politicians did not want to be labeled "unfeeling" or "anti-poor", and couldn't point to losses until they occurred.
The economist Thomas Sowell has written that almost nothing in life can be reduced to a set of rules. The beauty of a free market is that people can use their full abilities, knowledge, and experience as needed to produce a productive result or avoid loss, while risking only their own money. This is called good judgment, and it can't be completely expressed as a set of rules.
The fatal weakness of government and bureaucracy is that it is limited to a set of rules. When the rules don't work and loss results, a bureaucracy blames lack of regulation, and wants even more rules and more money. There is no public solution. We can't risk having a government that is not bound by rules.
The failure and huge cost of FanFred goes beyond inadequate rules. Politicians actively suppressed regulation of a business that they created, supervised, and grew into a monster using government connections. These same politicians are now blaming the lack of regulation in a "free market".
Congress guaranteed the debt of FanFred so that it could borrow unlimited funds from lending instutions, without review by those instutions, and without the borrowings appearing on-budget as an obligation of the Government.
Congress ran FanFred into the ground, plucking presents along the way. Congress set up FanFred, took full responsibility by unofficially guaranteeing repayment of its debts, removed it from private market discipline, funded it through massive private borrowing outside of Government budget accounts, commanded it to do risky business outside usual standards, restricted its regulation to a special office set up by Congress (OFHEO), and then ignored that regulator.
This scheme continued until the losses were enormous and had to be accepted publicly. Congressmen and Senators now complain that it was greed and lack of regulation by all of those other people that caused massive losses, especially the other people in the other political party.
If Fannie and Freddie were truly private companies in the free market, no one would have lent them enough money to damage the US and world economies. The mortgage loans were too risky, and no one would have trusted them.
New Guarantees
The Price of 12 House Votes
10/03/08 - WSJ.com Editorial
[edited] The White House and Congress are raising bank deposit insurance to $250,000 per account (up from $100,000) to pick up 12 House votes in favor of the $850 billion emergency credit legislation. The political bet is that this will please the community bank lobby, which in turn will persuade a dozen House Members to change their vote to Yes.
[ Note that this guarantee and subsidy is a political payoff to banks, so that they will throw support and money at congressmen, to convince them to support the credit legislation (or bailout bill). It seems that the minority is arguing with money rather than principle. As usual, it worked. ]
Apparently, the way to persuade Members who claim to oppose a "bailout" is to increase the cost of that bailout. The same Members who denounce bankers taking reckless risks are delighted about a measure that will encourage bankers to take more such risks. Your Congress at work.
The long-term danger is more risky lending. We've seen it before. In March 1980, Congress increased deposit insurance from $40,000 up to $100,000. This encouraged struggling Savings and Loan banks [Government licensed, inspected, and insured local and regional banks] to pay higher rates to attract more deposits, and use them to make risky loans.
Those loans went bust a decade later, and taxpayers had to pay $150 billion [$235 billion in 2007 dollars] to cover the losses and repay the deposits. That hard lesson is one reason the $100,000 limit hasn't been increased until now.
Maybe by coincidence, $40,000 in 1980 was worth about $100,000 today, and so $100,000 back then was worth $250,000 today. Congress has made the same adjustment to deposit insurance today that it did in 1980, inviting the same behavior, risk, and result.
Deposit insurance is a government guarantee of private banks. Our politicians think that such guarantees are worth it and have little cost or risk, or they just don't care. The FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) is supposed to act like an insurance company, but it is out of money, as reported at Seeking Alpha.
[edited] 11/26/10 - The FDIC insures total deposits of $5,400 billion [calc] Calculated as $379 B /.07 from the link. in 7,830 banks and savings associations, up to $250,000 per account.
As of 09/30/2010, the FDIC had a negative balance of $8 billion [borrowed from the Treasury], despite adding $7.2 billion during the quarter. In the next 4 years, the FDIC expects to pay out $52 billion for hundreds of bank failures due to losses on commercial real estate.
The FDIC is supposed to collect fees from insured banks to pay for any losses (to pay back the depositors) if this or that bank fails. The FDIC has not collected enough to cover current bank failures, and looks forward to needing at least $52 billion more.
Raising the insured limit to $250,000 has made things worse, because depositors are encouraged to put more money into bank deposits, at the higher interest rates the banks are likely to offer. They will not care about how much risk the bank has acquired as an investment institution.
Like Fannie and Freddie, like Savings and Loans in 1980, this increased government guarantee is a subsidy to the banks. It provides the banks with more money to lend, supplied by depositors who "don't have to worry". It poses "systemic risk", the risk that the worst banks will offer the highest interest, acquire large deposits, and lose their bets on risky loans.
Starting with a government guarantee, only government regulation stands in the way of disaster. This is the same regulation that has failed in the past and present, regulation based on rules and modified by powerful politicians, lobbying, and campaign contributions. Depositors have less risk to their deposits, but a greater hidden risk to their 401K accounts and the availability of jobs, when the next bubble bursts and is bailed out by the government (by the taxpayers).
Government guarantees have great value and invite unlimited risk. The guarantee is made by government on behalf of taxpayers. The cost of these guarantees is not limited to the amount that government spends or borrows, it is as great as all of the promises that politicians make or allow their Fannie's and Freddie's to make. The guarantee will be paid by you, in taxes or lost jobs, when the bill is due.
Many politicians make unlimited promises. They need to be regulated by being fired, before a declining economy fires you and takes your investments and retirement account.
McCain Talks to the Senate
On 5/25/05 Sen. John McCain spoke to the Senate about his bill, The Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of Jan 2005.
[edited] Fannie Mae reported quarterly profit growth over the past few years. OFHEO regulates Fannie Mae and reported that this growth was an "illusion deliberately and systematically created" by the company's senior management, resulting in a $10.6 billion accounting scandal.
Fannie Mae employees intentionally manipulated earnings targets to generate bonuses for senior executives. Franklin Raines was Fannie Mae's chief executive officer. Over half of his compensation during 1998-2003 came from meeting these targets. This echoes the deeply troubling $5 billion profit restatement at Freddie Mac.
Fannie Mae lobbied Congress in an attempt to interfere with the regulator's examination of the company's accounting problems. The OFHEO report comes some weeks after Freddie Mac paid a record $3.8 million fine to the Federal Election Commission, and restated lobbying disclosure reports from 2004-2005.
This report confirms that the GSEs need to be reformed without delay. If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Faannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole.
McCain's letter about Fannie and Freddie
On 05/05/06, Sen. John McCain wrote a letter to Senate Majority Leader William H. Frist and Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee Richard C. Shelby. Nineteen Republican senators co-signed. No Democratic senator signed. Sen. Obama did not sign.
Republicans held a majority in both the House and Senate, and George W. Bush was president. McCain wanted to resrict Fannie and Freddie, but there was no majority for stopping them.
(Democrats would win majorities in both the House and Senate in the Nov 2006 elections.)
McCain [edited excerpts]: We are concerned that that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose an enormous risk to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole. We want effective regulatory legislation this year for the Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) in housing finance. If not enacted this year, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed.
Therefore, we offer to you our support in bringing the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act (S. 190) to the floor and allowing the Senate to debate the merits of this bill. It has passed the Senate Banking Committee.
These GSE's are mammoth financial institutions with almost $1.5 Trillion of debt outstanding. Deficits, entitlements, pensions, and flood insurance are fiscal challenges facing us today. Congress must ask itself who would actually pay this debt if Fannie or Freddie could not?
Fannie, Freddie Subprime Spree May Add to Bailout (Update 2)
09/22/08 - By Jody Shenn via Bloomberg
[edited] Freddie Mac had been gorging on subprime and Alt-A debt, buying the safest classes of the [riskiest] mortgage loan pools. Freddie bought 13% ($158 billion), and Fannie bought 5% [$61 billion] of all these securities created in 2006 and 2007, according to its regulator and the newsletter "Inside MBS & ABS".
These purchases supported the boom in lending that led to frozen credit markets, more than $514 billion in bank losses, and the collapse of two of the biggest securities firms. The amount of subprime losses may determine whether the $200 billion authorized to U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is enough. William Poole said that Paulson may have to spend $300 billion. Mr. Poole is a former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
[ Fannie and Freddie have guaranteed payments on $5.4 trillion ($5,400 billion, $5,400 thousand million dollars) in mortgage bonds and its own corporate debt. ]
How the Democrats Created the Financial Crisis
09/23/08 - at Bloomberg by Kevin Hassett
[edited] Alan Greenspan told Congress in 2005 that it was urgent to act: if Fannie and Freddie "continue to grow, to have low capital, and to engage in the dynamic hedging of their portfolios (to avoid the risk in changing interest rates), they potentially create growing systemic risk. We are placing the total financial system of the future at a substantial risk."
For the first time, the Senate Banking Committee passed a serious reform bill. The bill gave a regulator power to require Fannie and Freddie to eliminate their investments in risky assets. [The bill went from the committee to consideration by the Senate.]
The market for risky mortgage bonds would likely not have existed without Fannie and Freddie keeping the market liquid by buying up excess supply. These subprime bonds buried many of our oldest institutions in losses [when Fannie and Freddie stopped buying them].
The bill did not become law. Democrats opposed it on a party-line vote in the committee, making this a partisan issue. Republicans were tied in knots by the tight Democratic opposition, and couldn't get the Senate to vote on the matter.
How Government Stoked the Mania
10/03/08 - WSJ by Russell Roberts (via EconLog)
[edited] Housing prices would never have risen so high without multiple Washington mistakes.
Congress designed Fannie and Freddie to serve both investors and the political class. Congress and the White House subsidized low-income housing by demanding that Fannie, Freddie, and local banks do more to increase home ownership among poor people. It was a political free lunch, avoiding an allocation of budget dollars.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) told Fannie and Freddie that 42% of their mortgage financing in 1996 had to go to borrowers in their area with below median income. The target was 50% in 2000, and 52% in 2005.
The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 (CRA) did the same thing with traditional banks. It encouraged banks to serve two masters, their own profit and the so-called common good. The CRA was "strengthened" in 1995, causing an increase of 80% in the number of bank loans going to low- and moderate-income families.
Fannie and Freddie were part of the CRA story. Bear Stearns did the first securitization of CRA loans in 1997, a $384 million offering guaranteed by Freddie. Bear Stearns issued $1.9 billion of CRA mortgage bonds backed by Fannie or Freddie in the next 10 months. Fannie Mae securitized $394 billion in CRA loans in 2000-2002, with $20 billion going to buy mortgage bonds from others.
[ "Securitized" means collecting mortgages together into "pools" and selling "mortgage bonds" that pay principal and interest according to what the homeowners pay on their mortgages. ]
Politicians pressured banks to serve poor borrowers and poor regions of the country despite risk. They could push for increases in home ownership and urban development without having to commit budget dollars. Another political free lunch.
Fannie Mae's Patron Saint
09/09/08 - WSJ.com Editorial
[edited] Taxpayers are now on the hook for as much as $200 billion to rescue Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. To know why, look no further than House baron Barney Frank's rapid response to this bailout. The Treasury wanted the companies to reduce their ownership of high-risk mortgage-backed securities (MBS) starting in 2010. Mr. Frank said "Good luck on that," and that it would never happen.
That is the Fannie Mae problem in profile. Mr. Frank wants you to pick up the tab for its failures, while he vows to block a reform that might prevent the disaster from happening again. At least he is consistent. His record is close to perfect as a stalwart opponent of reforming the two companies, going as far back as 1992.
In January 2007, Mr. Frank noted one reason he liked Fannie and Freddie; they were subject to his political direction. He contrasted Fan and Fred to private-sector mortgage financers. "I can ask Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to show forbearance" in a housing crisis. Mr. Frank believed they would do his bidding because Fannie and Freddie are political creatures.
Mr. Frank attempted to prove exactly this when housing prices began to decline. He encouraged the companies to guarantee more "affordable" mortgages, thus encouraging their disastrous purchases of subprime and Alt-A loans. He increased the conforming-loan limits, to allow buying larger mortgages. And he pressured regulators to reduce capital requirements [money in reserve]. The larger losses are being paid by taxpayers.
The biggest payoff for Mr. Frank is the "affordable housing" trust fund he required as one political price for supporting the recent Fannie reform bill. This fund siphons off up to $500 million per year of Fannie's and Freddie's profits, which he and other politicians can direct to their favorite interests.
This is why Mr. Frank won't tolerate cutting the companies' MBS holdings. Those portfolios were a main source of profits before the housing crash, and he figures they will be again after this crisis. This time, his fund will get part of the loot.
Shouting Fannie! in a Crowded Congress:
Advice from the man who foresaw the GSE collapse.
10/14/08 - WSJ by William McGurn
[edited] Richard Baker is the Louisiana Republican who spent nearly a decade in Congress crying out that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were ticking bombs. He is now CEO of a lobbying firm for the hedge fund industry. He is somewhat bemused to hear people say they are shocked, shocked to learn that someone had predicted it all. Mr. Baker said "Everyone writes as though there were just one hearing or one piece of legislation. I think I must have had eight bills and maybe 40 hearings going back to 1996."
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had the worst of both public and private accountability. They lacked the congressional oversight that would have come from an explicit and acknowledged taxpayer guarantee. And, the privileged position given by the implicit guarantee removed market discipline that applies to other private enterprises.
Mr. Baker said that it wasn't the unregulated part of the financial markets that got us here. It was the regulated part.
For example, the lack of a government guarantee in the hedge fund industry means folks do a lot more investigation before they part with their money.
Today this sounds wise and obvious; but back then he was opposed. Fan and Fred's executives threatened to sue him when he made public their outrageous compensation. A fellow congressman accused him of a "lynching" when he questioned Franklin Raines, the now disgraced former head of Fannie Mae. He was dismissed as a crank when he suggested Fan and Fred's [mortgage bonds] were not solid. He couldn't find a single co-sponsor on one of his early reform proposals.
The Very Poor Pelosi-Obama-Reid Economy
10/18/08 - Pajamas Media Blog by Tom Blumer
(via Instapundit) [edited]
Barack Obama and others have an equal-results-regardless-of-merit mindset.
You see, thanks to blockbuster research done by Ragnar Danneskjold at the Jawa Report, we know that Obama was a plaintiff in a lawsuit against banking behemoth Citibank in 1994, ultimately settled out of court in 1998. In essence, the suit demanded that the bank approve an equal percentage of minority and non-minority mortgage loan applicants. Danneskjold writes: "The net result of this sort of litigation was, of course, that banks like Citibank started approving more subprime loans in the 1990s."
Lawsuits like this fueled the explosive growth of these high-risk loans to minority borrowers who could not qualify for conventional mortgage financing. Government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (a.k.a. Fanron and Fredron) also responded to these legal pressures by lowering credit score thresholds for subprime and conventional loan approvals.
The high default and foreclosure rates that followed ultimately led to the crackups at Fan and Fred. Those failures in turn contributed to liquidity problems in the banking system that were apparently so serious that Congress rammed through a $700 billion bank "bailout" package. Despite such supposedly corrective measures, equity markets have steeply dived.
All of this likely makes Barack Obama the first U.S. presidential candidate in history to cause an economic downturn even before the general election has been held.
After experiencing barely one quarter of the Pelosi-Obama-Reid Economy, can it really be that the American people want four more years of this?
Credit Rating Agencies Misled Investors
Barack Wrote a Letter About Fannie and Freddie
10/29/08 - WSJ Opinion
The main topic is that politicians write vague letters complaining about things, then later point to those as proof that they were early in predicting any crisis. But, letters are nothing. Public statements, action, and votes are everything.
Part of this article explains a piece of the financial meltdown puzzle. A "Credit Default Swap" is an insurance policy that pays if a company can't make payments on its debts. It is the industrial version of mortgage insurance, which pays back your bank if you can't make the payments on your home loan. A financial institution guarantees a repayment when it sells a Swap.
For example, a Bank has some doubts about loaning money to X-Corp. The Bank wants Hedge to pay back the loan if X-Corp fails. So, the Bank loans the money to X-Corp at 12% interest, and pays 6% interest to Hedge to buy a Swap. The Bank keeps 6% interest as a result, and feels safer knowing that either X-Corp or Hedge will pay back the loan. The Bank pays Hedge to take most of the risk.
[edited] Many sellers of Swaps (insurers of corporate credit) made horrendous judgments in assessing the likelihood of defaults. They were encouraged to make these poor judgments by government-approved credit-rating agencies, who evaluated and approved mortgage-backed securities (bundles of home loans).
Banks bought AAA rated (rock-solid) mortgage securities. The ratings were given by government-approved agencies. Other institutions (say insurers like AIG) relied on those AAA ratings, and insured those banks by selling Swaps, which seemed to be a safe, conservative risk. The actual risk of those mortgage securities was far higher.
Much of the subprime disaster could have been avoided if the credit rating agencies had never agreed to put a AAA rating on collateralized debt obligations - CDO's.
CDO's are constructed from pieces of other mortgage bonds, in complex ways that almost no one understood. Most investors around the world had never heard of a CDO before the housing boom, but they knew what AAA meant. They relied on the credit rating agencies to understand CDO's and tell them that they were safe. The government's chosen credit raters had said for years that this label applied to conservative investments that were highly unlikely to default.
Conflicts and the Credit Crunch
09/07/07 - WSJ.com Opinion by Arthur Levitt Jr., former chairman of the US Securities and Exchange Commission
The credit rating agencies such as Standard & Poors, Moody, and Fitch are specially authorized by government regulators to give their opinions about the riskiness of bonds and debt. This gives these few companies almost all of the credit rating business, excluding healthy competition that might challenge their judgment and practices.
[edited] Originally, investors bought a subscription from credit rating agencies to get information to support investment decisions. This business model changed in the 1970's. The issuers of securities paid the agencies for assigning ratings.
This conflict of interest deepened with the rise of complex structured financial products. The credit ratings agencies offered the issuer (the company selling the bonds) help in constructing the product to obtain a high rating, and then went on to assign that rating.
This has become a lucrative business for the ratings agencies in the past few years. Structured finance deals accounted for 40% of Moody's total revenue last year. This raises doubts about the objectivity of ratings that are critical to the proper functioning of the market.
The Moody's Blues
02/15/08 - WSJ.com Opinion
[edited] Investors struggled to understand complex new securities during the credit boom. So, they relied on the credit-rating agencies, mainly Standard & Poor's, Moody's, and Fitch. These firms labeled the new securities with the ratings already applied to corporate bonds.
But, the new securities had almost nothing in common with corporate bonds. Joseph Mason is a professor of finance at Drexel University. He examined Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) having a Baa (medium risk) rating from Moody's. He found they were more than 10 times as likely to default (10 times the risk) as corporate bonds of the same rating. Moody's argues that the figure is closer to eight times, but you get the idea.
Are the ratings agencies always the last to know, or just the last to acknowledge a problem? The agencies say that they rely on facts presented by issuers, and that they are not responsible for conducting their own factual review. When S&P and Moody's rate a pool of mortgage loans, they don't examine any of the individual mortgages. S&P said "We are not auditors; we are not accounting firms."
So, the information about the assets underlying these bonds comes from the company selling the bonds, and the credit rating agency never verifies any of it. Investors might wonder what exactly does the rating agency provide? An opinion.
Write the Rating Agencies Out of Our Law
01/02/09 - Online.WSJ by Robert Rosenkranz
[edited] [ There are only a few government certified rating agencies, including S&P, Standard & Poors, and Fitch. ] Their ratings on bonds determine the amount of money (capital) that a bank needs to set aside by regulation for expected losses.
Ratings have a profound influence on how financial institutions invest their assets. Regulations make the rating agencies the de facto allocators of capital. Every participant in the financial system has a strong incentive to group assets in ways that maximize their rating, not their fundamental soundness.
[ Large capital requirements (more money set aside) means owning fewer bonds and making less money on the coupon payments. ]
The $6 trillion structured finance business serves mostly to improve ratings. Subprime mortgages and all manner of other risky loans would deserve a "junk" rating if taken alone, and require high capital reserves.
The structured finance people bundled these assets and sliced the bundles into "tranches" [groups according to order of repayment]. The rating agencies gave AAA ratings to 85% of the tranches by value, and gave "investment grade" to another 14%, thus turning lead into gold through ratings alchemy.
This created enormous demand for risky mortgages packaged into bonds. Mortgages were given to countless house purchasers of poor credit risk, which in turn drove dramatic increases in prices. The housing bubble has now burst, and average house prices in America are down 20% to 25% from the peak. This led to the current financial crisis, based on huge losses from the "rock solid" bonds.
A "tranche" is similar to a first and second mortgage on a home. The first mortgage has priority, and is repaid first in any default. Any remaining money goes to repay the second mortgage.
Tranches (French for "slices") are obligations created from a bundle of home mortgages or other loans. All of the mortgage payments collected from the bundle are allocated to repay the first tranche as required, then the second and remaining tranches until the money runs out.
The first tranche is likely to be repaid even if many loans default. The last tranche is likely to be worthless if more than a few loans default. Many risky tranches were given AAA or "investment grade" ratings, far above the actual risk as now understood.
+ + +
A comment about the above article
by Craig Bardo - 01/02/09 at EconLog.EconLib
--> Capital Requirements and Bond Ratings
[edited, restated] The failure of the ratings agencies has had consequences that are out of proportion. It should not be dismissed as a simple regulatory mistake.
I represented bond issuers and designed entire programs based on getting better ratings as well as better tax treatment for non profit issuers. Why did the ratings agencies get the mortgage securities so wrong and not the debt of hospitals, colleges, and universities I represented? Why did purchasers do better buying lower-rated health and university bonds than the higher-rated mortgage bonds?
The answer lies in political pressure. My issuers had very little power over the rating agencies. But, the federal government effectively provided the charter for the ratings agency, and the federal government tacitly backed the bonds being rated. Even the most seasoned, hardened analyst working for the ratings agency would have a hard time stating that those bonds were not worth the paper used to print the offering document.
The ratings agencies obviously treated the federal government involvement as a credit enhancement. They looked past the credit worthiness of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and treated their securities as a full faith and credit obligation of the federal government.
Investors would make better decisions if we didn't have the current ratings and regulatory schemes. The government was a direct participant in the current crisis.
Craig Bardo's comment illuminates an important question. The financial crisis is world-wide. Banks bought housing bonds from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that were implicitly guaranteed by the U.S. government. The failure of those bonds has caused losses to the federal government, but not to those bond holders, because the government is meeting that guarantee. The larger banking crisis is not about the losses on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bonds. (Of course, we should still be unhappy about those losses to the U.S. government and our society.)
The world-wide problem is that banks and other institutions bought huge amounts of mortgage bonds that were issued independently of Fannie and Freddie and not guaranteed in any way by the U.S. Government. Those banks are failing because of the huge losses on those bonds.
Maybe this is what happened:
The ratings agencies gave AAA and investment-grade ratings to MBS bonds (Mortgage Backed Securities) issued by Fannie and Freddie. The bonds were risky, but the implicit guarantee of the government made up for that. The implicit guarantee was a sophisticated (and correct) prediction by most analysts.
There was political pressure to bless the subprime credit expansion, the government policy to expand home ownership. The ratings agencies found a rationale for blessing the bonds independently of any government guarantee. After all, the government said there was no guarantee.
Subprime MBS bonds issued by investment banks received the same AAA ratings as the bonds issued by Fannie and Freddie. Subprime MBS bonds were built on similar categories of subprime mortgages. The ratings agencies couldn't say that Fannie's bonds were AAA, but that similar bonds issued by others were risky "junk".
Bond buyers came to believe the AAA classification given by the ratings agencies. These agencies had been reliable analysts of the other bonds on the market.
Bond trading departments were making money. They wanted to believe the AAA ratings. They would collect their bonuses long before any problems with the bonds, so they kept any doubt to themselves.
The risk control departments of banks had no formal or regulatory reason to limit trading or ownership of AAA rated bonds.
The government was indeed a direct participant in the current crisis.
The Housing/Financial Crisis - Their Own Words
Our leaders talk about the good and safe purposes of Fannie and Freddie.
Democrats Were Warned of Financial Crisis and Did Nothing.
(YouTube 3:32) A review of actions about Fannie and Freddie.
Watch the whole thing. Barney Frank says Fannie and Freddie are solid. (1:40 - 2:05)
Don't Regulate Fannie and Freddie
(YouTube 8:30) Late 2004 - Democrats fight greater regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. "Excerpts from a hearing to investigate Fannie and Freddie's illegal bookkeeping"
Barney Frank - Lack of Regulation by Republicans
(YouTube 1:49) 09/18/08 - Barney Frank speaks on the lack of financial regulation by the Bush administration (:35 - 1:40).
Sponsoring Recklessness at Fannie Mae
11/13/08 - (07/28/08) The New Yorker by James Surowiecki
(Via Greg Mankiw) [edited]
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have long been required to tell investors that their securities are not guaranteed by the federal government. But, the financial markets have always believed that this demurral was window-dressing, and everyone was right. The Federal Reserve rescued them last week when fears of their collapse threatened a financial crisis. The implicit guarantee became an explicit one.
There is no obvious reason for these Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSE's) to exist in the form they do. The government could directly do Fannie and Freddie's jobs. They were set up to buy and sell mortgages to promote home ownership. Fannie Mae started in 1938 as a government agency with authority to buy mortgages, in the hope that this would expand the supply of credit to homeowners.
Fannie was privatized in 1968. Freddie was created two years later, private from the start. Accounting was the main reason for the change. Lyndon Johnson was concerned about the large debt of the Vietnam War on the federal budget. Making Fannie Mae private moved its liabilities off the government's books, without removing the obvious, real liability. It was like what Enron did thirty years later, when it used "special-purpose entities" to move liabilities off its balance sheet.
The implicit guarantee of the government empowered Fannie and Freddie to borrow money more cheaply than their competitors. They used this cheap financing to buy increasing numbers of mortgages [and make outsized profits].
They were able to grow extravagantly because neither the market nor the state checked their growth. Had Fannie and Freddie been ordinary private companies, there would have been a natural limit. Companies with more debt are usually seen as riskier, and that makes investors less willing to invest. On the other hand, had Fannie and Freddie been government agencies, visible budget constraints would have limited the size of their operations.
Congress failed to give regulators sufficient power to rein them in, thanks in part to ardent lobbying [and political contributions] by Fannie and Freddie.
The Bank's Mistake was Trusting the Government
03/13/09 - ChicagoBoyz by Shannon Love
[edited] For leftists, OneUnited should represent the perfect small, minority owned bank. The "socially responsible" Maxine Waters invested in the bank and sat on its board. There is no evidence that it made predatory loans. Yet, it failed.
It failed not due to any short-sighted greedy decisions of the bank's management, but because the bank's management and board members, like Waters, trusted that the mortgage-backed securities issued by the government sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac were worth the paper they were written on.
OneUnited is a microcosm of the entire financial collapse. Over the past 40 years the GSEs have piled up a vast store of toxic assets created by the attempt to get something for nothing by fooling the market about the risk of residential mortgages. Ratings firms gave the GSEs top ratings because of their implied government guarantee and oversight. Banks like OneUnited bought into the political myth and now they and everyone else are paying for it.
Whitewashing Fannie Mae
12/11/08 - WSJ.com Review and Outlook
[edited] Documents from a recent congressional hearing prove that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac turbocharged the housing mania with a taxpayer-backed, Congressionally protected business model that has cost America dearly.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have long maintained they were quietly buying 80% fixed-rate 30-year mortgages when they were blindsided by the greedy excesses of subprime lenders.
Memos and emails from 2004-2005 by top management show they took increasing risks to maintain their market share [fraction of all loans they would buy] and meet affordable-housing goals set by HUD, by purchasing risky loans including option-ARMs and interest-only mortgages.
In April 2004, Head of risk management David Andrukonis wrote to his colleagues about "stated income, stated assets" (Liar's) mortgages, "This is not an affordable product, but a product necessary to recapture market share. In 1990 we called this product 'dangerous' and eliminated it from the marketplace."
One Fannie Mae document from March 2005 notes dryly, "We invest almost exclusively in AAA rated securities, but the rating agencies may not be properly assessing the risk." Fannie and Freddie bought them anyway, to maintain their market share and to show people like Democrat Barney Frank that they were promoting affordable housing.
By mid 2008, Fannie and Freddie had bought or guaranteed $1.6 trillion [$1,600 billion] worth of subprime loans. They were central players creating the housing boom and the credit bust. They bought private-label subprime and Alt-A MBS (Mortgage Backed Securities) They helped legitimize and provide liquidity (be willing to buy and sell) for products that they now claim others irresponsibly sold.
Mr. Raines (former CEO of Fannie) testified "It is remarkable that during the period that Fannie Mae substantially increased its exposure to credit risk, its regulator made no visible effort to enforce any limits."
He failed to mention that Fannie and Freddie spent millions on lobbying to ensure that regulators did not get in their way. Freddie spent $11.7 million lobbying in 2006 alone. Fannie and Freddie tried to buy everybody in town, from both political parties, and made themselves immune from regulatory scrutiny.
Stop Covering Up - Kill The CRA
11/28/08 - Investor's Business Daily Editorial
(Via InstaPundit)
[edited] The Community Reinvestment Act is to blame for the financial crisis. It so powerfully serves Democrats' interests that they will do anything to protect it, including revising history.
The CRA coerces banks to make politically correct loans to people who can't afford them. Clinton beefed up the CRA in 1994 and forced banks to subsidize poor communities with close to $1 trillion in high-risk loans and commitments that ignored prudent lending rules. Clinton ordered HUD to set quotas for "affirmative action" lending at the Government Sponsored Enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, creating the secondary market [buyers] for subprime loans.
This destroyed credit standards and created the subprime market. Minority home ownership rates had been flat, but began a steep rise in 1995. Home prices soon followed, stoked by easier lending. This promoted the housing bubble that has now burst, causing the worst housing and banking crises since the Great Depression.
Many bank officials complain that they still feel pressured by CRA regulators to make inner-city loans they know are at great risk of default.
Myth: The CRA could not be at fault, because the overwhelming share of subprime mortgages came from non-bank lenders that were not regulated by the CRA.
Fact: Nearly 40% of subprime loans in 2004-2007 were made by CRA-covered banks such as Washington Mutual and IndyMac. This doesn't include loans by bank-owned subprime lenders which were in effect covered by the CRA.
Myth: The CRA did not force anyone to do subprime loans or take excessive risks.
Fact: Banks made subprime loans to comply with the CRA, encouraged by Clinton's regulators. Subprime loans were rare before Clinton took office. They were more than 9% of mortgage originations when Clinton left office, and are 20% today. Clinton pushed banks to grant mortgages to minorities with poor credit, or risk being branded racist. Rules were weakened to accept welfare and unemployment checks as qualifying income.
Myth: Greedy investment bankers securitized and sold subprime mortgage bonds. They produced the credit crisis, not government.
Fact: Clinton's CRA amendments created the subprime market. Wall Street got involved in a big way only after Clinton pressured Fannie and Freddie to assume the risk and guarantee the profit from subprime loans.
Regulations had almost everything to do with this mess. We should be abolishing these regulations, instead of strengthening them to atone for the alleged "sins of capitalism".
FDR and the FDIC
12/02/08 - Cafe Hayek by Russ Roberts
President Franklin D. Roosevelt recognized the danger of a government guarantee in the 1932 proposal for the FDIC, Federal Deposit Insurance on bank accounts. He opposed the bill, but accepted credit for the program after congress passed it.
[edited] Roosevelt: It would lead to laxity in bank management and carelessness on the part of both banker and depositor. I believe that it would be an impossible drain on the Federal Treasury to make good any such guarantee. For a number of reasons of sound government finance, such plan would be quite dangerous.Federal Deposit Insurance: A Banking System Built on Sand
June 2010 - The Freeman by Warren C. Gibson
Many aspects of the FDIC and banking.
[edited excerpts]: Rep. Henry Steagall vigorously pushed deposit insurance. Franklin Roosevelt opposed him.Roosevelt in March 1933: The underlying thought behind the word 'guarantee' for bank deposits is that you guarantee bad banks as well as good banks. The minute the Government does that, there will be a probable loss. We do not wish to make the United States Government liable for the mistakes of individual banks, and put a premium on unsound banking in the future.
FDR was right. Deposit insurance creates a moral hazard, an incentive to be reckless when misdeeds are covered by someone else. Bank managers tend to make riskier loans than they would without insurance, and depositors don't worry about the lending practices of the banks they use.
Many people, including me, buy bank certificates of deposit through online brokers, perhaps not learning the name of the bank that received the money. The magic letters FDIC are all we look for.
Though the FDIC lacks market incentives, it is awash in political incentives. Congress voted in 2008 to increase deposit coverage from $100,000 to $250,000 with little or no discussion of the costs. This "temporary" increase will likely become permanent.
Members of Congress are motivated by the campaign contributions of bankers and others. They may not know or care about the long-term consequences.
Deadweight Loss of Taxes
It isn't common knowledge just how much wealthy people already pay, and how much tax is wasted by increased spending on everything. Ironically, raising taxes on anyone will lower the production of the US, and so will lower the number of jobs.
There are two myths that make people eager to raise taxes, if it doesn't affect them personally.
- Taxes are a nice transfer. $1 from him means $1 for me or my friends.
- Government spending stimulates jobs. Good for the economy.
Tax Avoidance And The Deadweight Loss Of The Income Tax
2000 by Martin S. Feldstein, the George F. Baker Professor of Economics at Harvard University and former President of the US National Bureau of Economic Research.
[edited] Traditional analyses of the income tax greatly underestimate deadweight losses by ignoring its effect on compensation and consumption [jobs]. The full deadweight loss is easily calculated. Estimates imply a deadweight loss of as much as 30% of revenue. The deadweight loss caused by increasing tax rates may exceed $2 per $1 of revenue increase.
I will restate this. Government activities and transfer payments had better be useful to the society, because economic output has already been lowered by 30% of the taxes currently collected. Output will be further lowered by $2 for each $1 of any additional taxes collected. This means that $2 worth of production (jobs) will be destroyed for every additional $1 collected through increased taxes.
This is a severe loss, because there is no "stimulus" from that "extra" $1 in government spending. That $1 would have been invested or spent anyway. Taxes only move goods around from some people to other people, at great expense.
To transfer $1 to a needy voter, or bail out a public loss, the government will take $1 from a richer person, eliminating $2 in production of goods and services, also called jobs. By the same analysis, $1 of decreased tax results in $2 in new production and jobs. This effect is not "trickle down" from spending. The $1 in reduced tax supports some amount of increased investment that in turn supports $2 in new jobs.
At The Myth of the Economic Multiplier I consider why it seems there should be a stimulus that goes beyond each dollar of spending, and why this is wrong. Government spending is a banquet, not a stimulus.
Also see my post Public Tax Meeting about proposed tax policy, to raise taxes on the wealthy 5% and give a rebate check to the 95%.


text:
Overview#EDirectory Performance Tuning is a guide to help in eDirectory Capacity Management
EDirectory Performance Tuning is a complex activity and requires understanding of both the eDirectory and Operating System's subsystems. EDirectory Performance Tuning involves monitoring the system to identify bottlenecks and fixing them one at a time.
EDirectory Performance Tuning of the Operating System Subsystems#
- File System
- CPU Subsystem
- Memory Subsystem
- Network Subsystem
eDirectory Subsystems#EDirectory Performance Tuning for eDirectory Subsystems influence eDirectory performance.
eDirectory Configuration #EDirectory Performance Tuning of the eDirectory Configuration Management has an influence by adjusting the tunable parameters.
- FLAIM Database
- NDS Thread Pool
- ACLs
- EDirectory Synchronization
- Solid State Disk (SSD) - Always better
- NMAS Login Update Interval
- SSL Overhead
- Import Conversion Export (ICE)
- ldif2dib
- Enhanced NCP Packet Size]

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Have A Low-Cost, High Volume-Low Profitability Problem? Dextro Analytics' Advanced Knowledge Discovery Tools Enable Telecommunication Company To Improve Profitability By Over 2 percentage points!
Telecommunication is an information-rich, and highly competitive sector. The client was a low-cost telecommunication provider facing significant pressure to improve profits-while maintaining their competitive price structure.
Foresights from advanced analytics helped to identify drivers of profitability and services that were draining profits.
Enabled organization to compete on value, not just on price.
Identified short-term and long-term customer needs which helped to re-allocate funds to revenue-generating, and profitable products and services.
While our client's number of new subscribers was steadily on the rise, profitability from each account (particularly B2B) was less than 4%. The client has multiple product offerings across internet, cell phone, and cable TV-but even after offering streaming services, profitability remained low.
Given the large amount of both internal and external data, Dextro Analytics formulated large team of decision and data engineers to kick-start engagement quickly. The team invested a substantial amount of time, devising a structured and strategic process of ETL and analytics process mapping. The goal of the data discovery platform was to:
1. Establish transparency by integrating complex data, and to identify the product and market gaps that drive profitability.
2. Apply transaction-level mixed modeling, by developing a holistic framework that identifies drivers of profitability-and the products needs of all customer segments.
1. Identified products and services that are eroding profitability, and establish a revenue generation roadmap for current offerings. Rolled out a custom solution in 3 stages.
2. Established guidelines for developing signature low-cost, yet substantially profitable new services.
3. Coached executive team on how to view profitability through Dextro's innovative optimization framework.
4. Telecommunication company now operates a competitive, results-driven, and fact-based platform that is optimized for profitability.
"Dextro Analytics helped us to see our business from whole new perspective. We were amazed by the insights that guided both our marketing and new product development teams."
- Director of Risk Modeling
Our team would love to share the nuts and bolts of the study and our best practices.
Please provide us with your contact information.


text:
About Us
Experience is the one word that wraps up why you want to call Motorcar Gallery. Motorcar Gallery's roots go back to the early 1970's, when Ed Waterman started an exotic car dealership in Virginia. The exotic Ferraris, Maseratis, Rolls-Royces, and Etceterini that sit at the pinnacle of the collector car values today were the staples of the business.
Ed moved to Florida in 1984, opening the now legendary, Motorcar Gallery, on the main drag near downtown Fort Lauderdale. Over the next 34 years 1,300 cars from 71 of the most prestigious manufactures were sold by Motorcar Gallery. The assortment included 400 plus Ferraris, 114 Maseratis, and 113 Rolls Royces. We sell the rare cars you remember from magazine covers as well as interesting collectables that fit a smaller budget.
In August of 2018 Motorcar Gallery got an infusion of new blood. Brothers, Diego Ribadeneira and Barry Lundgren, bought a majority interest of Motorcar Gallery. Long time sales manager, Tom Clark joined them as a partner and Ed Waterman still retains an interest.
Diego and Barry were born with the automobile gene. Their grandfather had been the Packard importer for Ecuador and the family has had an interest in several vehicle related businesses. Diego is a serious enthusiast who enjoys racing and rallying events. He has participated in the Miglia Mille, the Carrera Panamericana, Tour Auto, and the LeMans Classic. Diego is the on-site principal.
Barry grew up in the Honda business. He helped his family build a Boston area Honda motorcycle dealership into a multistore Honda automobile business. Barry also inherited the automobile gene. He's an active participant in racing, rallying, and show events. You may know Barry from his Share the Enzo campaign. If Barry's Ferrari Enzo is stationary he's normally next to it helping people in and out. Barry finds the fun in having an Enzo is sharing it with other people. You can follow Barry and the car at SharetheEnzo on Instagram.
Tom Clark's migration from Cleveland to Fort Lauderdale was in the right side of his father's Ferrari Lusso. A small fleet of the Clark's other exotics soon followed as the family set up shop in South Florida. For many years, the Clarks operated The Steering Wheel, a franchised Maserati dealer and exotic car emporium. Tom grew up at the dealership, gaining unique first-hand knowledge of the cars and the business.
Our wealth of knowledge means we know to pick the best cars and how to prep them to give you the most enjoyable ownership experience. When you call Motorcar Gallery, you'll be talking to someone who's lived with the cars they're representing.
We have over 200 years of combined in-house exotic, vintage and collector car experience. From the common to the obscure, there are few models of collector cars we're not familiar with. From the racetrack, to the concours field, to vintage rallies, and Sunday drives, we are participants in the fun part of classic car hobby.
We also understand the complicated economics of buying & selling collector cars. We're here to help you navigate value, inspections, finance, transportation, storage, and the maintenance of a vintage car.
When you're ready to buy a collector, vintage or exotic car, nobody brings more to the table than Motorcar Gallery. Call us today to begin your adventure and let us help find the classic car of your dreams.
Motorcar Gallery: Classic Cars For Sale. Serving South Florida, Fort Lauderdale, Miami, Tampa, Naples, West Palm Beach.


text:
As a sender, you are obligated to give your recipients in each advertising email the possibility to opt-out from your lists, at no cost. Also, if you hire another company to handle your email marketing (3rd party mailer), you can't contract away your legal responsibility to comply with the law.
Here's a rundown of CAN-SPAM's main requirements:
Don't use false or misleading header information
Your "From," "To," "Reply-To," and routing information – including the originating domain name and email address – must be accurate and identify the person or business who initiated the message.
Don't use deceptive subject lines.
The subject line must accurately reflect the content of the message.
Identify the message as an ad. The law gives you a lot of leeway in how to do this, but you must disclose clearly and conspicuously that your message is an advertisement.
Tell recipients where you're located.
Your message must include your valid physical postal address.
Tell recipients how to opt out.
Your message must include a clear and conspicuous explanation of how the recipient can opt out of getting email from you in the future. Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your message. You must honor a recipient's opt-out request within 10 business days. You can't charge a fee, require the recipient to give you any personally identifying information beyond an email address, or make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request.
Monitor what others are doing on your behalf.
The law makes clear that even if you hire another company to handle your email marketing, you can't contract away your legal responsibility to comply with the law.
* https://www.ftc.gov/ for more information


text:
CFACT Ed
CFACT -- We're freedom people.
Mark Morano…former communications director for James Inhofe and producer for Rush Limbaugh. Political science degree, no climate science credentials whatsoever. Why should we believe anything he says?
I'm always amused about how he cherry-picks quotes and consistently refers to "they" as this malevolent group of infiltrators, out to destroy American freedoms, all the while side-stepping the evidence and ignoring the fact that virtually every US and international scientific academy acknowledges the mechanism and impacts of AGW.
On the question of Marc and his thoughts, we see moves in most Countries to destroy Western economies, the redistribution our wealth to the Third World, and political parties all having the same general direction in spite of what they might say before Elections.
Now is this coincidental? When same unexpected thing happens twice that may be a coincidence. When it's happening everywhere I feel it's been discussed, pressure to comply suggested, and possible sanctions threatened. I suspect this is discussed Internationally to bring about the desired changes required by Internationalism.
Exactly as formulated by Karl Marx and his mentors, might this actually be conspiracy rather than unlikely coincidences?
Remember Swift Boat too.
The GREENS are now claiming that we could actually produce another Adolf Hitler if we don't subscribe to the "Climate Change" policies because, as the world warms, there will be more demands for "Lebensraum". Ref. "The Guardian":
"Hitler's World may Not Be So Far Away" – "Misunderstanding the Holocaust has made us too certain we are ethically superior to the Europeans of the 1940s. Faced with a new catastrophe – such as devastating climate change – could we become mass killers again?" – By Timothy Snyder. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/16/hitlers-world-may-not-be-so-far-away
Question everything, and then decide for yourself.
Comments are closed.


text:
The Hamilton Bulldogs opened their 2013-14 AHL season with a thrilling 3-2 win over the St. John's IceCaps back on October 11th.
It was the ideal way for the 'Dogs to get their season off on the right foot, however not the same could be said at the time for one player in particular.
That player was defenceman Morgan Ellis.
Ellis, who appeared to be in head coach Sylvain Lefebvre's doghouse to start the season, watched not from the bench with his teammates, but rather the press box as a healthy scratch.
It was a tough way to start the season for the former Cape Breton Screaming Eagles captain and Montreal Canadiens prospect, drafted 117th overall in the 2010 NHL Entry Draft.
Ellis admitted that after training hard in the summer, it was difficult not being in the Bulldogs lineup to start the season.
"You can't dwell on it, you just got to keep working hard," said Ellis. "I find when you work hard, things don't go unnoticed and you're only going to get better."
Ellis's days watching from the press box would not last long however, after earning a spot back in the Bulldogs lineup.
"Fortunately I made my chance when I got in the lineup and I've been playing pretty well since," said Ellis.
Since getting back into the lineup, Ellis has been a mainstay on Hamilton's blue line and has a team-leading plus-9 rating.
Must Read
Must Read
One of Ellis's partners on defence this season has been Nathan Beaulieu, who has since been called up to the Montreal Canadiens.
Prior to his call-up, Beaulieu acknowledged Ellis's stability on defence and how it has benefitted his own game.
"I like playing with Morgan, he's more of a defensive-minded kind of guy so he lets me free-wheel a little bit more," said Beaulieu. "I feel more comfortable joining the rush or skating the puck up the ice with him there because he's very reliable in the D-zone."
Bulldogs head coach Sylvain Lefebvre says he's been impressed with Ellis's ability to overcome adversity this season.
"To do what he did shows a lot of character, a lot of determination," said Lefebvre. "He should be a strong example to a lot of those guys in the locker room and all the credit gets back to him."
- Top Six Minutes: When you don't have anything nice to say...
- P.K. Subban becomes a Detroit Red Wing (gif)
- It's time to rant about the Montreal Canadiens
- The last time Michel Therrien was fired
- 24CH Recap: Season 2, Episode 14
- Peter Budaj tries to fight Marc-Andre Fleury gif
- Friday Habs Links: Therrien searches for answers


text:
Location: Dedicated to Lord Vishnu, Shweta Varahaswamy Temple is a magnificent temple situated at the southern entrance of Mysore Palace.
Description: Shweta Varahaswamy Temple is a historical evidence of Hoysala architecture style. During Wodeyar dynasty, King Chikka Devaraja Wodeyar installed a stone image of Shweta Varahaswamy in Srirangapatna, where this temple is currently located. Lord Varha is the prime deity of this temple and believed to be the incarnation of Lord Vishnu. The idol of Lord Varaha in this temple is made from pure white stone and that is why the temple's deity is named as 'Shweta Varaha'. The walls of this temple are ornamented with beautiful and highly attractive murals and paintings depicting images from Hindu epics Ramayana and Mahabharata. The doorway of this temple is beautifully decorated with medieval art. Due to the beautiful carvings, this temple is extremely popular among tourists. There are only a few temples in India primarily dedicated to Lord Varha and Shweta Varahaswamy Temple is one of them. This temple is a great contribution of Wodeyar Dynasty to represent Hindu culture and traditions.
Activities: Tourists must visit this temple in evening time, when the exterior of this temple is entirely lit up and the whole temple sparkles with enigmatic lights.


text:
Glaz Family
August 14, 2015
I have been wanting to blog this session ever since the day I shot it!
Kristen babysat my brother and I when we were little. Some of my favorite memories with her are going to the Country Club (one of my current places of employment, I know, I'm crazy) to go swimming, her telling me I needed to finish my *daily reading* before I could play, and of course, LEGOS.
Now, she has 3 beautiful children of her own and I was so honored to be able to capture some special memories for them.
Let me just tell you a little about these kiddos. The oldest is Ellasyn (Ella) and she was definitely the quietest of the three. She took direction *so* well and was a great listener and sets a great example for her younger siblings. The middle child is Abigail (Abby) and her personality coined her a little nickname from her mom. Betty. As in Betty White. As in, this child is wild, funny, and unpredictable. She made every face imaginable at me and to actually get her to "smile nice" was a bit of a challenge... but that's ok, I like a challenge! The last child, the baby of the family, is Elijah (Eli). What. A. Hoot. This kid. Seriously. He had me in tears I was laughing so hard. He also adores his mama and that was so evident in many of these images.
The love that envelopes this family is undeniable. I had so much fun working with them and catching up with Kristen. I hope you enjoy looking at these as much as I do!
- Mary Boike Photography


text:
In today's competitive business world, branding has become more important than ever and the demand for Online Reputation Management for companies has shot up. This is because there are all kinds of businesses in almost every sector, and if you want yours to stand out, then you need to ensure that it's online reputation and brand image are good. However, as the company leader or CEO, your own reputation also plays a key role in the success of your business.
The following are some of the best CEO reputation management tactics that are proven to work:
1. Earn Top Search Results
Today, a large number of customers learn about new brands and their leaders through popular search engines like Google Search. So, if you want to improve your online reputation, then you must ensure that when Internet users search your name online, then they are able to find you in at least the first 10 spots. These pages shouldn't be from your own website or social media, but rather media coverage, authority blogs, and customer testimonials.
2. Get Active on Social Media
In this age, the leaders of top companies need to be active on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. In fact, a survey has revealed that 82% of people are more likely to trust a company if its leaders are active on social media.
When you are openly communicative on social media, then you show transparency and authority. Doing this also gives you control over your online reputation. Otherwise, anyone can open new social media accounts using your name and brand and promote false information that can hurt your reputation.
Now, there is no denying that a strong social media presence is important for every business leader. However, you also have to be careful with what you share. For instance, expressing your opinions about topics like religion, politics, etc. can backfire and divide your followers.
3. Take Responsibility for Your Mistakes
All businesses, no matter how disciplined and strong they are, make mistakes. However, the usual response of most of them is to enter damage control mode in which they try to dodge the responsibilities and put the blame on others.
As a business leader, if you want to protect your reputation, then you must own the mistakes of your company and be open about it. If you will try to play the blame game, then it will only work against you and the customers will stop respecting you.
A good example of how brands can admit their mistakes and show their apologetic selves is O.B. tampons whose one line of products were taken off the market in 2010. As the customers became furious, the parent company Johnson & Johnson created personalized apology videos for more than 65,000 women customers that were identified in the company's database. It then created 10,000 videos each of which had a different name and sent the same to the appropriate customers. In this way, it averted a massive disaster and won the hearts of the customers at the same time.
4. Publish Fresh and Authority Content
When you publish high-quality content online, then you establish yourself as an authority figure in the industry. This goes a long way in building your reputation. For instance, you can publish eBooks, informative videos, blog posts, etc. Just make sure the language you use is in sync with your brand and puts you in a good light.
Publishing fresh content also makes you appear in more search results which helps with your image. This is because even if you have received bad press, you can push it below the positive results (content published by you) and control how others perceive you online.
5. Consult an ORM Expert
Online Reputation Management (ORM) is a powerful technique that's used by brands and business leaders across the globe. There are professionals who provide these services that you can use yourself.
If you don't have the time or think that you won't be able to manage your online reputation properly, then you should talk to an ORM professional and let them handle your online activities.
So, there you have it. These were some of the most effective online reputation management techniques. By implementing them, CEOs and other top leaders can prevent bad press and leverage their personal branding.


text:
Director of Public Health Annual Report 2016 and additional tables
The eighth Director of Public Health (DPH) Annual Report focuses on health inequalities in Northern Ireland.
The health of people in Northern Ireland is improving. However, the improvements are not distributed equally across all areas of our population. Individuals living in the most deprived areas of the region are at higher risk of many health conditions and have shorter life expectancies than those in the least deprived areas. These inequalities in health are unfair, and are avoidable.
The DPH report presents examples of interventions and programmes that are currently being funded by the Public Health Agency across each of the three public health domains - health improvement, service development/screening and health protection - to understand and reduce inequalities in health.
On page 48, the report also lists core tables for 2015 relating to key statistical data, including population, birth and death rates, mortality by cause, life expectancy, immunisation and screening. The PDF of the core tables is available here.
In addition to the core tables, a specific set of tables relating to health inequalities is published alongside this report. This set of tables is also available as a PDF below.


text:
Trails have been evacuated and flights were cancelled as Japan's Mount Aso sent plumes of smoke and ash a mile high into the air. Officials have stated that there was no warning that the eruption would occur and the event came as big surprise to everyone on Monday morning.
Japan's Mount Aso: Volatile terrain
Mount Aso, set in a caldera on the island of Kyushu, is Japan's largest and most active volcano standing at 5,222 feet high. It has been sporadically erupting since late 2014, after two decades of remaining dormant. However, Aso is not Japan's only active volcano, as the island is situated on what is known as a "ring of fire" due to its location on the edges of the fault lines in the Pacific Ocean. Last year, Mount Ontake's eruption, considered the worst volcanic incident since 1902, claimed 63 lives.
Wait, A nuclear plant neighbors a volcano?
The incident has stirred up questions about how eruptions could affect the newly reopened Sendai plant, located 100 miles away and run by Kyushu Electric. Sendai is no stranger to natural disasters and was closed for a long period of time due to an earthquake turned tsunami that caused contamination of the surrounding area. Residents nearby were forced to relocate due to the resulting radiation. The plant reopened in August with new safety systems that have been held to extremely high standards. Kyushu Electric, as such, is confident that there is nothing to be concerned about.
During the eruption on Monday, the police worked to safely evacuate the people from the mountain. Although there were hikers at the parking lot of Aso's peak, no injuries were documented. People are now warned to not go near Mount Aso because it is still considered to be active and may erupt at any time. Surrounding areas, even those located 30 miles away, have ash falling into their towns. Meterologists, however, have reported that rain is forecasted, which could help clear everything up, thereby preventing the ash from traveling.


text:
The Cook Islands will host the IMF Pacific Financial Technical Assistance Center (PFTAC) Steering Committee in mid March 2015. PFTAC is one of the IMF's nine regional technical assistance centres, a model of technical assistance delivery first launched by the IMF in 1993 through PFTAC.
PFTAC's guiding objective is improved economic management and sustainable economic growth across the Pacific Island Countries. PFTAC now serves 16 countries and territories, including the Cook Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Niue, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Timor-Leste, Tokelau, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu.
PFTAC provides capacity-building assistance through a team of international resident experts, supplemented by short-term specialists, who deliver assistance in the IMF's core areas of expertise. With PFTAC, the IMF combines strategic advice from its Headquarters with local expertise and on-the-ground capacity building.
PFTAC is guided by a Steering Committee that consists of representatives from recipient countries, donors and the IMF, facilitating a coordinated design, implementation, and monitoring of technical assistance programs. Its current program cycle is funded by the Asian Development Bank, Australia, the European Union, the IMF, Korea, New Zealand, and the host country Fiji.


text:
Understanding the various research paper steps
Research paper writing is a rather long procedure which involves many steps and goes through various stages. Even though all that matters is the final document, unless you pay attention to the various stages and research paper steps, the final result will not be good enough. For that reason, it is important that you understand the process well enough before starting to write the research paper. If you don't, you might end up compromising on various aspects, resulting in a poorly framed research paper. If you follow an organized method of writing the research paper, it will help you in completing the assignment without much trouble.
The most important stages of research paper writing can be defined as:
• Studying the guidelines: Once you get the research paper guidelines in hand, study each and every instruction clearly.
• Choosing the topic: with due regard to the instructions in the guidelines, choose a suitable topic for your research paper.
• Find a good thesis: Brainstorming for the purpose of finding a good thesis is one of the most important research paper steps.
• Determining the sources: Finding sources is not the criteria; finding strong and credible sources is.
• Scheduling the research: Prepare a time-sheet, taking into account, the amount of research involved, the deadline and the availability of the sources.
• Doing the research: Try to stick to the schedule while doing the research. If you run out of schedule, it is quite possible that you miss the deadline because research is one of the initial stages of the long process of research paper writing.
• Outlining: An outline must be used for all research papers as it simplifies the process of research paper writing to a great extent and makes the research paper look impressive.
• Developing the outline: One of the longest of all the research paper steps, the part of developing the outline into a research paper requires a lot of attention. It must be done as per instructed in the guidelines, using the appropriate format.
• Editing and proof-reading: It is a step which either gets omitted or done poorly as it comes towards the end of a rather long procedure. But it is extremely important that it is done well. Hence, keep aside enough time for that.
Each of the various research paper steps are equally important and must be handled with due attention. There is absolutely no step which can be compromised on, if you wish to get good grades. If you are too tight for time or if you feel that you will not be able to handle the research paper efficiently enough, you can consider taking help from professional academic writers to complete your project. We have writers who are highly experienced in academic writing to help students with their academic assignments. If you wish to get a custom research paper prepared for you, that can be done as well. You can prepare an impressive research paper with the right kind of help from our expert writers.


text:
The light was amazing!
Monday, December 30, 2013
Family Photographer - Garden of the Gods
It is always a pleasure and joy to get together with this family. Unofficially I took a couple pictures of them at their wedding and have seen their little man grow up over the last couple years. The little guy loves riding on shoulders, throwing sticks, and climbing rocks. What a smile he has. Thank you guys for making the trip.
The light was amazing!
The light was amazing!
Posted by Mark at December 30, 2013 No comments:
Labels: family
Sunday, December 22, 2013
Shred It
My wife and I are back on the wagon and are paying off debt again. As a result we activated and canceled this card in the same day. Sorry Amazon, Dave Ramsey got to us and our cards.
Posted by Mark at December 22, 2013 No comments:
Labels: Personal
Wednesday, December 18, 2013
Being at this wedding you would never have known that the reception was moved not once but twice because of one of the most devastating fires in Colorado history. The Black Forest Fire was no match for these two. When I met the couple on wedding day they were cool and calm. Overcome could have been the theme of their wedding but they didn't need to overcome. Paraphrased...they could do all things in Christ who gives them strength"
Thank you to Amanda Lamb Photography, The Mining Exchange and the Spruce Mountain Guest Ranch.
Posted by Mark at December 18, 2013 No comments:
Labels: Wedding
Wednesday, December 11, 2013
Kid Safe
Kick, kick, yell, punch, roll, yell, kick and digging toes in a little more, hugs and kisses, farts and grins. These are a few of the everyday things! Most of our day is filled with sound effects and sippy cups but they sure are cuties.
You know you're a parent when you can type while being kicked. You also know you're a parent when you walk into a house without little ones and don't have an extra safety step when using a plug, opening doors, or heading up the stairs. Just a few more of the wonderful things.
Posted by Mark at December 11, 2013 No comments:
Labels: Personal
Sunday, December 8, 2013
Two rings to join them
This afternoon I had a few minutes where the kiddos were locked away. I took the opportunity to snap a few photographs with our rings. My wife and I have been married 7 years and the rings have never looked better.
Posted by Mark at December 08, 2013 No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)


text:
Hurricane Irma is the strongest hurricane ever to hit Florida and the Caribbean. The hurricane has left behind catastrophic devastation, starting what could become a complex, multi-country relief and recovery effort. This follows closely on the heels of the historic devastation caused by Hurricane Harvey in Texas.
Our thoughts are with any in the CFI family directly impacted by these storms, and we are following our established disaster protocols to track anyone affected.
We have been humbled to see the outpouring of support by individuals within the CFI family and by our parent company TFI International in the aftermath of each storm. For both Hurricane Harvey and Irma, TFI International has pledged $250,000 to relief efforts for a total $500,000 donation. CFI will be completing in-kind transportation of donations as part of relief efforts.
It is important that we continue to come together to help mitigate the terrible consequences of these events and we will continue to assist with recovery efforts. You can read about some of the ongoing work happening here and here. Employees are also encouraged to donate on an individual level to the Red Cross. Hurricane Irma Red Cross donations are now being collected here.


text:
MINI goes camping with MINI Cowley Caravan and MINI Swindon Roof Top Tent
MINI brand is announcing the arrival of very special modifications of the emblematic vehicle, which are perfectly suitable for camping: a sumptuously appointed caravan with two sleeping bays and a roof top tent (also designed for two) in the classic John Cooper Works color scheme.
After the debut of the MINI Clubvan Concept at Geneva Motor Show, now it is time to be offered a very MINI holiday experience as well.
First, the MINI Cowley caravan offers everything that one needs to pitch camp in comfort: two welcoming sleeping berths, a twin gas-stove, a water tank with pump and dish module to charge the on connection to supply the refrigerator, TV/DVD and hi-fi stereo system.
The silhouette of the MINI Cowley model brings to mind the sweeping circular curves of the door trim inside a MINI. Plus, both side doors have sliding windows, and this reminds of how things were back in 1969.
The trailer is only twelve centimetres than MINI Clubman mirror to mirror and weighs just less than 300 kilograms (661 lb). Indeed, with its outstanding agility and fleetness of foot, there's no danger of the hallmark MINI driving fun being left behind over long journeys.
And if there isn't any chance for trailer coupling, such as the models of John Cooper Works, then the MINI Swindon roof might be a preferable solution. The tent can be fitted comfortably and with no effort to the roof of a MINI, MINI Clubman or MINI Countryman. The tent also offers a sleeping space for two persons and basically relieves one from the stress to constantly look for accommodation.
In addition, the roof-top tent works a treat. What is very comfortable here is that the sleeping position is elevated and will keep any passing-by animals away from the tent.
The design of the roof-top tent box allows it to blend in seamlessly with the MINI when closed. Its lower shell is painted Midnight Black, the upper opening section in Chili Red, which is a combination previously reserved for John Cooper Works models.
Source: MINI


text:
If you buy something from the links on this page, we may earn a commission. Why trust us?
12 Best Backpacks for Men That Won't Cramp Your Style
Leader of the pack!
Forget the lame backpack of your school days. The easy-to-carry style has been seriously updated for the modern man. Now, backpacks have the sleek and stylish details you used to only find in briefcases and messenger bags. Back up your dapper duds with smart backpacks that go from your boardroom best to Sunday-funday attire with ease. Lead the style pack with these best backpacks for men.
Pack it up and pack it in — this men's backpack can seriously fit it all! This lightweight bag has large side pockets that can fit an umbrella, a convenient front zip pocket for your small stuff, and a roll-top large opening that seems to fit just about anything (including your 15-inch laptop!). With the Tuck Pack, you'll be ready to roll everywhere and anywhere.
Does your overflowing closet make you look like a crazy bag person? Save major cash and space in your wardrobe with this packable daypack from Herschel. With durable ripstop fabric and a lightweight feel, this bag is perfect for carrying your essentials.
Rain or shine, you still have to get around town and carry all your stuff, too. Everlane has you covered with its simple yet stylish water-resistant cotton twill bag. We particularly love the easy-to-open snap closures and drawstring detail to easily access your gear and go.
Go on a weekend adventure without looking too wild with the Klettersack bag. This backpack from Topo Designs has all the space you need for your gear, including a sleeve for your laptop. The cool design with small pops of color makes it a stylish choice for the man about town who likes to escape to the great outdoors.
Who would think an athletic company like Champion would make such a dapper backpack? The brand has been a hit in the menswear space thanks to the revival of '90s style, and this backpack is bound to be rocked by every stylish guy. It's simple, classic, and has a cool neoprene texture. For only $60, how can you resist?
A bright-colored backpack can still look sophisticated when done right! Clean and minimal, this A.P.C. backpack is sporty and fun, without looking like a kid's back-to-school pack. Go casual-cool or use it as a lightweight mini gym bag — your future is looking bright with this backpack.
You know this brand for their trusty rain boots, but they also make some seriously stylish backpacks! The cool, water-resistant rubber texture gives your backpack a sleek and smooth look, while totally protecting your gear from any bad weather. The lightweight backpack can fit a 13-inch laptop and is perfect for carrying around the essentials, without a bulky, unattractive appearance.
Available in black, yellow, red, bright pink, and our personal favorite, dark olive, you can go bold or stay subtle — there's an option for every guy.
This is one convertible you don't need a license to use! This Tidee bag can be carried as a backpack or a tote bag, with a top handle and removable arm straps. No matter your gear for the day and the outfit you're rocking, this backpack will always be your go-to.
What's camo, sleek, and allover chic? The Away daypack! The go-to luggage brand released minimalist backpacks this year, and we can't get over this limited-edition camo leather version. The camo print never looked so modern and elegant in pebbled leather. The sleek and simple design looks just as good with your slim-fit work suiting as it does with your casual T-shirt and jeans.
This tricked out backpack has a seriously light waterproof nylon fabric to match your winter puffer jacket this season. Though the look may be chic and simple, this bag features a detachable body strap, multiple breathing vents, a protecting sleeve that'll fit a 15-inch laptop, and even a phone charging dock with a power bank pocket.
Slide it onto your carry-on handle for travel or use the included drawstring bag for your gym clothes. This will be the only bag you need on any given day.
Smooth, high-quality leather takes your everyday backpack to stylish new heights. Sophisticated for work and practical for carrying your weekend gear, the Devion has your back for work or play.
Before you check out the price tag and faint, this backpack is meant as a status symbol. Since the '60s, when Gucci first applied their iconic logo to canvas goods, this printed fabric has become one of the most recognizable to use on a bag to symbolize premium luxury. Basically, no matter the time or decade, this backpack will not only make you look fashionable, but it'll have you looking like a total boss (even in a cheap suit!). As the brand continues to blow up as one of the most lustworthy luxury brands for millennial consumers, we expect this backpack will only increase in value over time.