Michael Yagi

Hope everyone has recovered from the holidays and New Year celebrations! As you may have been watching, the mortgage rates have been coming down prior to Christmas and now is a time to refinance or purchase a home.

The 30 year fixed rate as of this morning was at 4.875%! That's not too bad considering rates were in the high 6's this summer. I think rates will remain low for awhile but there's no better time to do something than now.

Let me know if you have any questions regarding loan programs or rates.

Looking forward to a great 2009!

We've been in this bad economy for awhile now and looking around I can't see it getting any better in the near future. I find it hard to believe that our government decided to bailout a number of financial institutions and an insurance company because of bad investment and management decisions. On top of that, the money was given to them with very little supervision. I'm sure you've all heard of the retreats the top AIG sales people received to the tune of over $400k or how about the $80k+ the executives spent on a hunting trip? This occurred after receiving the $37B loan from the government. Find anything wrong with those two expenses?

Let's talk about one of the main reasons why AIG, Merrill Lynch, Citibank, Bear Sterns et. al. got into financial trouble. The credit default swap. It's funny because most of us have heard of that "mortgage back security" term thrown around during the early part of the foreclosure phase. I found that many of us didn't know how the credit default swap ruined many institutions including AIG.

In a nutshell, the credit default swap acts like an insurance policy to cover the potential default on the mortgage backed security. The CDS was sold along with the highly risky investment vehicle to entice the investor to buy into it. In the event that the investment went south, just call in the CDS and you'll get your money back. As you can see, the CDS acts, smells and is used just like an insurance policy. However, the term "swap" allowed the institutions to not have to set aside the required reserves to cover potential losses. As the portfolios were defaulting and the investors were filing their claims, the institutions were hemorrhaging money and couldn't recover.

Can you name me the handful of men or women on Wall Street that came up with the idea of the CDS? Probably not because a handful of mathmatitions and physics teachers came up with the idea. Wall Street sub contracted this "brain trust" to evalute this very complex/risky investment and look where it got us. Institutions that have been around for over 100 years are now gone, a handful of banks are gone too.

My personal opinion, the government shouldn't be involved in bailing any one of these companies out. There are a number of institutions that are still operating in this tough economy, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Zurich, Travelers just to name a few. As a consumer we still have choices to shop insurance and investment brokers and banks so no problem there. There is still competition which keeps pricing down, no problem there either. Yes, we lose hundreds of thousands of jobs which is a bad thing. However, who do you think is going to end up paying for all of this? You and me.

Hi there-

My good friend Robert Swetz invited me to join you guys. I'm excited to be a part of your group and look forward to creating new business relationships.

Just to tell you a little bit about myself, I am originally from the Bay Area and ended up down in Southern California to attend CSULB where I graduated with a BS in Finance in 1993. I stayed down there until 2000 and then moved out here to Las Vegas.

I thought I was going to become a stock broker after I graduated from Long Beach but I happened to interview with a mortgage company and landed a job as a loan officer! If you remember we were in the middle of a recession in the 1990's and no one had any equity in their homes (sound familiar?) so I ended up leaving the industry for 8 years and came back to it when I moved out to Las Vegas.

I was with Greystone Financial for minute and then I moved to Prime Cap Financial (where I met my wife) and now I am with Trusted Home Lending. We are doing some fantastic things here and have a wonderful home searching tool called the Home Buyers Scouting Report. It's a free service we offer to all of our clients and business partners. As a realtor, if you haven't seen it, please call us and we will set up a time for you to take a look at it. We've had the service for about 7 months now and are closing 2-3 extra deals on top of our normal business. In this market, I don't know who couldn't use some more business?

Looking forward to hearing from you guys! Take care and God Bless.

Michael