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Worth noting: In The New York Times today, Gretchen Morgenson profiles Annaly Capital Management (sorry, it’s behind the pay wall), a mortgage real estate investment trust that has avoided the sub-prime crisis through cautious, and smart, investing. Unlike many of his peers, Michael Farrell, the firm’s CEO, saw the trouble coming in the mortgage market. This is his outlook:

“ ‘I look at this sort of like 1990 and 1991,’ he said, referring to the savings-and-loan crisis. ‘Against that background you had a $7 trillion economy that gave birth to the $300 billion Resolution Trust Corp. Now we have an $11 trillion economy and we’ve already seen $2 trillion of market capitalization going away’ before many loans in the pools have actually defaulted, he said.

‘What about the people who argue that the impact of the mortgage mess will be muted because risks have been spread well beyond the banks and into many parts of the financial world? Mr. Farrell takes the opposite view. Spreading the risk beyond the banking system will make the task of fixing the mess much harder.

“ ‘Even if the Fed eases, it is probably not going to help the housing market,’ he said. ‘This repair cycle is going to take a lot longer because it is not concentrated in the banking system like it was in the 1990s. Back then, they could repair the banking system by dropping interest rates. Now they can’t bail out rich hedge fund guys in Greenwich.’ ‘