Countrywide CEO to help solve Mortgage Mess? R U kidding?

From the are you kidding me segment? Who better to clean up the Mortgage mess than the guys who created it? Countrywide exec’s, including former COO Stan Kurland as white knights riding in to help solve the mortgage mess! Here’s the story in a nutshell.

The FDIC cut a first-of-its-kind deal to sell a portfolio of bad residential mortgages from a failed bank to a private equity group, while still maintaining an interest in those loans. The loans were sold to Private National Mortgage Acceptance Company, or PennyMac,  for somewhere between 30 and 50 cents on the dollar. That's quite a discount. The FDIC will share in any potential new losses from these loans, OR in any potential gains.

The exec team at PennyMac comes from Countrywide the, one of the symbols and perpetrators of the housing mortgage debacle, and is led by Stan Kurland.  Some have wondered if these Countrywide alums are now profiting from a mess Countrywide helped create. "I don't like to spend a lot of time going through the history," Kurland tells me, adding, "I left Countrywide in 2006, and much of the things that you're criticizing, or that people criticize, occurred quite a ways after I left. ( someone check the TRUTH here, that’s just erroneous, his watch is when the mortagge standards deteriorated tremendously.)  He blames the housing meltdown on a "perfect storm" which included mistakes by direct lenders, ratings agencies, GSE's, the Fed lowering interest rates, an over reliance on FICO scores, and on the mistaken belief that home prices would keep going up, but of course he had nothing to do with it. His risk assesmnet team and underwriting standards had nothing to do with it.  This is hypoctrisy. This guy at Countrywide as president and chief operating officer in September 2006, received a pay package valued at $42.5 million, including a $25.4 million severance payment. He also realized $108.7 million from the exercise of options that year. that is the exercise of these Options. The guy stole money from the shareholders was the overseer of liar loans and therefore encouraged such practices is now working with the FDIC to solve the mess he created?

Still, as for criticism of his team, Kurland says to make PennyMac work, "The only people that can do this are people that come out of the mortgage industry...it's much different than just investing in securities. You actually need to have expertise in all the activities that go from sourcing mortgage pools to modeling, evaluating, due diligence, servicing, (and) modifying mortgages."

Due Diligence? What due diligence did he do other than ensure he worked the remuneration package to his advantage?

How dare the FDIC even think of working with these clowns.

Punishment should be the cold shoulder. Why should a guy who is the very essence of excessive greed, completely sunk a mortgage industry, helped in the poor risk lending standards possibly be involved with this industry ever again. There should be a black list. And clowns like this should have some sense of shame to have there names associated with mortgages. 

Stan Kurland represents everything that was wrong with the lax mortgage lending practices, that has caused much grief for Homeowners, the economy overall, shareholders of Countrywide…the list is endless. 

Yet he is the experienced hand people turn to?