The Baseline Scenario submits:
By James Kwak
Via Yves Smith, John Hempton analyzes the quarterly results of Bank of America (so-so) and Fannie Mae (terrible). The underlying issue is that bank quarter-to-quarter results are largely driven by the amount of provisions they take against future loan losses. You can think of this as a very rough approximation to marking-to-market — instead of waiting for the loans to default, you estimate how many loans will default in the future (that estimate should change as the economic situation changes) and put that amount of money into reserves. Then when the defaults actually happen, you take the money out of reserves.