In Case You Were Wondering: Countrywide Says It’s Fine

Published: November 20, 2007, 6:33 pm

Tags: mortgage news insight, cfc, countrywide, liquidity problems, mortgage mess

Countrywide, whose stock tumbled to just $10 today, said in a statement that management believes the company has ample liquidity to continue operations and growth for the foreseeable future. Rumors of another Countrywide squeeze cropped up after Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac shed some light in to their exposure to lending risks. Those announcements seemed to suggest that the GSEs would need to scale back their re-purchase and securitization efforts to reign in some of that risk. That doesn’t bode well for Countrywide who has repositioned themselves to be a GSE seller (as opposed to the private loan market which is still relatively dead). From our friends at Market Watch: “Countrywide’s survival strategy has depended on access to the secondary markets through GSE purchase and re-securitization. That strategy is less viable in an atmosphere where the GSEs themselves are capital constrained and may need to shrink,” Fox-Pitt, Kelton analyst Howard Shapiro

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