AMERICAN PREDATORY LENDING AND THE
GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
Interview with
Michael Azzarello, CMB
Bass Connections
Duke University
2020
PREFACE
The following Oral History is the result of a recorded interview
with Michael
Azzarello, CMB conducted by Carolyn Chen on December 28, 2020. This interview
is part of the Bass Connections American Predatory Lending and the Global
Financial Crisis Project.
Readers are asked to bear in mind that they are reading a
transcript of spoken word, rather than written prose. The transcript has been
reviewed and approved by the interviewee.
Transcriber: Olivia
Wivestad Session:
1
Interviewee: Michael Azzarello Location:
By Zoom
Interviewer: Carolyn
Chen Date:
December 28, 2020
Carolyn Chen: I'm Carolyn Chen, an undergraduate student and a member
of the Bass Connections American Predatory Lending and the Global Financial
Crisis team. It is December 28th, 2020. I am currently in Vancouver for an oral
history interview with Michael Azzarello, current Sales Director of
Correspondent Lending at Caliber Home Loans, who has joined me via Zoom. Thank
you for joining me today.
I'd like to start by establishing a
bit about your background. I believe that you obtained a Bachelor of Science in
Business and Marketing at the University of Illinois. Is that right?
Michael
Azzarello: That's correct.
Carolyn Chen: In the
context of your work life, when and how did you first become involved with
residential mortgages?
Michael
Azzarello: As I was looking for a job out of
college, I spoke to various industries and I was hooked up with a recruiter who
had an opening with a client at a company called Great Lakes Mortgage as a loan
officer. I really did not go to school to become a loan officer. I wasn't sure
exactly what that job entailed, but it was financial services and sales
related. So, anyway, I did take that job in 1976 and I've been in the mortgage
business since then.
Carolyn Chen: How
would you characterize the state of the mortgage market at the time? Who were
the main players and products?
Michael
Azzarello: Good question. At that time, the
company I worked for was an independent mortgage company. They also had savings
and loans. A lot of savings and loans were doing mortgage lending back in the
late ‘70s and early ‘80s. We, as a mortgage banker— a company called Great
Lakes Mortgage— we were a lender who originated mortgage loans for people
buying homes, and we were also a [mortgage loan] servicer, so we would collect
those mortgage payments. And they started me out through a massive training
program where I was in loan servicing, calling borrowers, collecting mortgage
payments, and then they trained me to become a loan officer. They assigned me a
territory and my position really entailed owning a particular territory in the
Western suburbs of Chicago, which is my hometown. My job was calling on
realtors and builders in hopes that should they sell a home, that they would
refer their borrower to me for their mortgage needs. That's basically what loan
officers do. They learn the mortgage business. They learn how to qualify
borrowers from an underwriting standpoint, determining borrowers' risk. And the
main goal really is to bring in mortgage loans into the company, which is a
profit center for Great Lakes Mortgage.
Carolyn Chen: You
were a vice president and correspondent production manager at HomeSide Lending from 1988 to 2002. Is that correct?
Michael
Azzarello: That's correct.
Carolyn Chen: Could you define correspondent lending and how it differs
from wholesale lending?
Michael
Azzarello: In the mortgage business, there are
basically four channels of bringing in mortgage loans or originating mortgage
loans. The retail side of the mortgage business is where the lender would have
typically retail branch locations, whether they're a bank or mortgage company,
you'll see them all over. The retail side is directly interfacing with the
consumer who needs a mortgage loan to purchase a home or to refinance a home.
So retail is branch. We call it brick and mortar— they have branches, and they
take [mortgage] applications [for borrowers]. They process those loans. When
everything is completely documented, they would close the loans and either
retain the servicing, so you, as the homeowner, would either make your payments
to me as the retail lender, or we, possibly, would sell that mortgage, which is
a commodity, to a larger servicer and then you'll see your servicing being
transferred. So that's retail mortgage lending, loan officers, processors,
underwriters.
You also have correspondent lending.
Since 1995, I've been on the correspondent side of the business. I manage a
territory in the Southeast part of the country, out of Jacksonville, Florida.
My clients are lenders who originate loans. These are retail lenders who
originate loans, but, generally, they would not retain the servicing. They
would be my correspondent and they would sell that servicing to, what today
would be, Caliber Home Loans, which is my current employer. So my role is to go
out there and create relationships with banks and mortgage lenders who like to
originate loans but prefer to sell the servicing because they may not have the
systems, the capabilities or possibly the infrastructure or economies of scale
to service mortgage loans, which basically entails collecting the borrower's
payment, paying the real estate taxes once or twice a year, making sure your homeowners’
insurance has been paid, etc. Correspondent lenders are retail mortgage
companies who have their own funds, so they originate mortgages. They close the
loans with their funds in their name, but then they sell the servicing to a
correspondent investor like Caliber Home Loans.
A third channel in the mortgage
business is wholesale, which are mortgage brokers. So, if you're doing
wholesale lending, instead of me doing business with correspondent banks and
mortgage companies who have their own warehouse lines and they're capable of
closing loans in their name with their funds, in wholesale lending, you work
with mortgage brokers, which are typically smaller companies who are on the
street, originating loans, calling on realtors, calling on builders, but,
they're not large enough to maintain their own warehouse lines [of credit]. So they need their wholesale investor — Caliber has a [wholesale]
channel that buys loans from [mortgage] brokers as well, the wholesale investor,
will actually fund the loans for those brokers. The brokers don't have the
financial strength to fund their own loans.
The fourth channel to originate
mortgage loans is what we call a consumer direct channel. Consumer direct are
large servicers who have their own consumer direct group of people who
typically will solicit their servicing clients. So if
you have a loan with Wells Fargo, a mortgage loan, you may hear from Wells
Fargo, "Hey, it's a good time to refinance rates have come down," etc.
Consumer direct is soliciting business from your current servicers [loan servicing
customers]. Those are typically the four channels.
So again, I've been on the
correspondent side for quite a long time. I've got 70 mortgage lenders in the
Southeast that originate loans and sell some to me, some to all of my
competitors. There's a lot of competitors who service mortgages. So that's kind
of what I'm doing today, but I was in retail originations, taking loan
applications from borrowers, managing retail branches. I did that for the first
18 years of my career.
Carolyn Chen: What
was the nature of your role at HomeSide Lending over
all of those years?
Michael
Azzarello: The majority of the time I was a
Correspondent Regional Manager. I managed a territory, typically the Eastern
half of the country, and I had account executives that reported to me. Those
account executives all managed correspondent relationships, lenders,
originating mortgages, in the region that I was responsible for.
Carolyn Chen: I
believe after HomeSide Lending, you went to work for
Washington Mutual Bank in 2003, is that right?
Michael
Azzarello: That's correct. That was the same
role as it was at HomeSide Lending. Washington Mutual
was headquartered out of Seattle and they had a large correspondent division
that purchased mortgage loans from our correspondent’s and they were a large [mortgage
loan] servicer. So basically, I did the same thing with Washington Mutual,
which began in 2002, which was at the beginning of the early stages of the
financial crisis that kicked in and around 2008, but same role with them. We
had some different products. As a mortgage lender, we had various products,
your 30-year fixed rate mortgage was your most popular, and as the markets
became busier and busier, there were additional products that were rolled out.
You probably are familiar with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae. Those
are quasi-government entities that guarantee and insure mortgages so that they
are available as lenders securitize those loans in the secondary market.
Washington Mutual was my first company where we started diversifying our
product lines into more— I don't know if they would be a sign of the times— but
one of the products was an option ARM mortgage. It was an adjustable-rate
mortgage that allowed the borrowers to pay interest-only for a period of time.
It was an adjustable-rate mortgage that would go up on a regular basis.
Washington Mutual also had a separate division, which they called sub-prime.
The sub-prime mortgage division back in 2004 started becoming more popular.
Those are loans for borrowers who weren't able to qualify for agency loans,
Fannie Mae loans, Freddie Mac loans, FHA [Federal Housing Administration], VA
[Veteran Affairs], USDA [United States Department of Agriculture]. That was
something we had a separate channel for. Subprime is not something that I ever
originated when I was in retail, or for HomeSide or
Washington Mutual. HomeSide, in 2006, decided to
close down the correspondent channel— we weren't profitable in their minds. So they closed down the correspondent channel and that's
when I left and we started up a correspondent channel for a company called
Taylor, Bean, & Whitaker, back in 2006.
Carolyn Chen: While
you were at Washington Mutual, what geographic markets were you responsible
for?
Michael
Azzarello: I was responsible for the Midwest. We
called it the central region, which is basically the central third of the
country. We had an east coast, a central region and a west coast. So it basically ran from the upper Midwest, Michigan,
Wisconsin, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, down through Texas, basically the central
third of the country geographically.
Carolyn Chen: Did Washington Mutual sell their loans on the
secondary market? Who bought them?
Michael
Azzarello: Washington Mutual retained the
majority of the servicing. They were a very large bank. We would originate
loans through retail. We had a wholesale channel. I managed the central region
for our correspondent channel. The loans that we purchased either were sold and
securitized with Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the government loans. They did have,
for example, the option ARM product. That was a product that we called
non-agency securitizations, or private securitizations. Those were handled by
an affiliate of Washington Mutual out of New York, I don't recall the name of
the company [WAMU Capital Corp], but they were a financial services company
that would securitize— a Wall Street type of firm. They were starting to
securitize those option ARM mortgages, for example.
Carolyn Chen: How
would you describe the culture at Washington Mutual and how did it compare to HomeSide's?
Michael
Azzarello: HomeSide was an independent mortgage banker,
so we truly were a mortgage banker, meaning all of our products were mortgage
related. The culture was good. Our CEO was a chairperson of the National
Mortgage Bankers Association for a year, so we were quite involved with the
National Mortgage Bankers Association. When I moved over to Washington Mutual [HomeSide was acquired by Washington Mutual in 2002], they
were a very large bank, so a lot more bureaucracy in terms of being able to get
things done. It's just a banking culture versus an independent mortgage banker
culture.
Carolyn Chen: How
else would you describe that the mortgage market had changed from your time at HomeSide to Washington Mutual?
Michael
Azzarello: … We saw a lot of new products coming
out and some were instigated by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. For example, there
became a reliance on equity in your property and home value appreciation. To
me, there was a feeling that if your home appreciates, you'd like to buy a home
to start building your equity, which is a financial benefit. Maybe you, as a
borrower, didn't meet the stringent underwriting guidelines of two years of
employment, asset statements, but in any event, you had the ability to repay
the loan. I saw more and more lenders, in regard to staying competitive or
trying to do more business or make more money, started offering products that
were riskier. Those included higher LTV [loan-to-value] products instead of
requiring 20% down payment, or 10% down payment, or government loans allowed as
little as 3% down, VA loans, no money down. And really, the market, Wall
Street, I got the impression that they felt like appreciation will bail out any
mistakes on a loan. So if you bought a house and you realized you couldn't
afford the monthly payment, you would sell the home and a year later the home
went up in value, and therefore you were made whole— you got into the home, you
made your investment.
So,
high LTV loans, loans like the option ARM where you're paying a lower payment
than what the actual principal and interest needed to be to fully amortize that
loan. We saw more things like down payment assistance for people who weren't
able to save up the down payment. There were sources where they could go for
that down payment. All of that leads to the borrowers not having as much skin
in the game. If you're able to buy a home, but you didn't have to put any of
your money into it and you lose your job and you can't make your payments,
rather than try to fight it out and maintain your home or retain your home, it
was easier to let the loan go into foreclosure. That's partly how the financial
crisis started. A lot of people bought homes where the equity decreased because
home values started depreciating, and they maybe shouldn't have had that
mortgage in the first place.
Carolyn Chen: …You
mentioned that when you moved over to Taylor Bean and Whitaker, they had just
started up their correspondent lending channel. To your knowledge, do you know
why they were getting into that at the time?
Michael
Azzarello: They had a retail channel and they
had a wholesale channel, so they did a lot of business with mortgage brokers.
They were also doing a lot of business with community banks, and they were just
expanding their business model for the purpose of bringing on more loans,
increasing their servicing portfolio. It was just another way of bringing in
loans and they felt like we were a team at Washington Mutual that needed a
home. And it was an easier addition to bring on a team of people rather than
hiring one person to start a new channel and slowly growing it from there. They
wanted to do more business, increase their servicing portfolio and make more
money.
Carolyn Chen: I
believe you were the Sales Manager for both correspondent and community banks.
Is that correct?
Michael
Azzarello: Yes.
Carolyn Chen: Could
you describe a bit about the differences between these kinds of institutions
and the work you would do with correspondent versus community banks?
Michael
Azzarello: Good question. Community banks,
because they do a lot of different things— they take deposits, they make car
loans— and a lot of smaller community banks didn't do a lot of mortgage
lending, they didn't have an expertise in that particular type of business. So one of the things we would do for the community banks is
a lot more training, a lot more handholding. We might provide some services for
those banks because they didn't have enough people to have individuals
responsible for various pieces of mortgage lending. And community banks still
are that way today. They do business with mortgage investors like Caliber, or
like Taylor Bean was at that time, who can basically help them originate
mortgages. Some investors would provide a loan origination system, like
processing software, for these banks. The banks needed a lot more handholding.
My correspondent clients are
professional mortgage bankers. That's all they do, and they know how to . Today, I look at my correspondent lenders— it's more of
a commodity. They are really looking for Caliber to give them, "Here's
some products that we purchased from my correspondence, here's today's pricing
based on where the market is." And they choose to sell loans to their
various correspondent investors, typically based on pricing. So
it's very commoditized, whereas community banks rely on that relationship. “I
need you to help guide me so that I can originate loans the right way.” If
they're only doing five mortgage loans a month, they really don't get super
good at it, whereas my correspondents are doing $20 to $200 million loans a
month and they know what they're doing. So they don't
need us to hold their hand.
Carolyn Chen: Are
there differences in the kinds of lending practices or products being pursued
by community banks compared to these larger institutions?
Michael
Azzarello: Not really, a mortgage is a mortgage.
I would say no. The products are the same.
Carolyn Chen: How
would you describe the culture at Taylor, Bean, & Whitaker at the time? Did
it change over time?
Michael
Azzarello: I would say the culture did not
change, but they did try and participate in some of the newer, unique mortgage
products. Fannie Mae had a program, which was a "no-doc" loan. Basically,
if your down payment was good enough, if your credit score was good enough, you
may not have to verify income. Those loans were being sold to Fannie Mae, so
they [TBW] did participate in that. The culture didn't change, but the market
changed quite a bit. I started at Taylor Bean in 2006, left in 2009 when they
closed down. It was owned by an individual versus a board of directors and
things of that nature. But the market changed quite a bit. It was very busy
times. We really did stick to our core products that we were selling— the
Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, FHA, VA, USDA. Those were the beginning of the
challenging times and really the beginning of the financial crisis. When I left
Taylor Bean, after they closed down the whole company in, I think it was,
September of 2009, there were 2,000 people just with that company that were
looking for jobs.
Carolyn Chen: Could
you describe how the market was changing, how lending practices were changing
during the 2000s? Were you aware of liquidity issues that Taylor Bean may have
been dealing with in those years?
Michael
Azzarello: Not really. I was a sales manager and
it was a company of 2,000 people. We were doing a lot of business and we
thought that the liquidity issue was [because] we were just doing too much
business. A lender who's originating loans uses warehouse lines of credit to
fund those loans. Then, when the loans get closed, they securitize those loans
and sell them in the secondary market and, basically, replenish those warehouse
lines. We were almost begging management to slow down the volume because we
weren't able to purchase those loans as quickly as we needed to. A lot of our
correspondents who were selling us those loans were waiting to get our funding
to buy the loans that they closed with their warehouse lines. [For] the whole
liquidity issue it [was] very important that they use the warehouse line to
close the loans, they wanted to get those loans reviewed and purchased by their
investor within a couple of weeks, so they can pay off their warehouse lines.
Now we just thought we were doing more business than the size of our warehouse
lines allowed and corporate wasn't managing it properly.
Carolyn Chen: In
terms of the changes in the market that you mentioned earlier, what were those
looking like?
Michael
Azzarello: I would say we talked a little bit
about high LTV loans. Because there was so much faith that the real estate
values would maintain and continue appreciating, lenders were doing high LTV
loans. We weren't. Everything I did at Taylor Bean was agency eligible. In
other words, we didn't have a Wall Street outlet to securitize loans.
Everything we did was agency-eligible: Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, FHA, VA USDA.
Fannie Mae did have some limited-doc type programs. Instead of asking for a lot
of documentation, you asked for less documentation based on certain criteria of
the loans: borrowers' credit scores, size of the down payment, things of that
nature. But those were running through the automated underwriting engines that
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have—AUS [automated underwriting systems]— DU
[Desktop Underwriter] and LP [Loan Prospector]. They had to meet the criteria
in that black box. Option ARMs were gone by then. Taylor Bean didn't have the
option ARM. Washington Mutual was still originating loans. They closed our [correspondent]
channel, but they [Washington Mutual] were still doing some option ARMs at the
time. Then, you had a lot of smaller lenders doing the subprime lending and
subprime loans were going into private securitizations. They weren't, to my
knowledge, being purchased by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Subprime loans are
hard for me to describe, but are for borrowers who didn't meet agency
guidelines, whether it be a lower FICO score, or maybe not enough time on the
job. Washington Mutual had a separate channel that did subprime lending, but
Taylor Bean did not do that type of lending, it was all agency.
Carolyn Chen: Some
members of our team are writing an academic case study on Colonial Bank's
entire run. I believe they did business later on with Taylor Bean. I just had a
quick question related to them and your time at Taylor Bean, did you ever work
with Colonial Bank or their warehouse lending division? And if so, in what
capacity?
Michael
Azzarello: I personally did not. Colonial Bank
was a warehouse lender for Taylor, Bean, & Whitaker. I would recommend for
you and your associates, I don't know if you've seen it or not, but there is a
television show called American Greed. If you guys can find the episode
of American Greed where they did a 60-minute show on Taylor, Bean, &
Whitaker, I learned a lot from watching that particular episode years ago. It
described the relationship between the owner of Taylor, Bean, & Whitaker
and Colonial Bank and the whole warehouse relationship. So no, that was not my
role at Taylor Bean. I was on the street calling on lenders. Corporately, they
did use Colonial Bank as one of their warehouse lines and that was their
downfall.
Carolyn Chen: To what
extent, if at all, did figures within Washington Mutual or Taylor Bean
expressed concerns about the changing nature of credit extension during the
2000s? Did those concerns lead to any significant internal debates or changes
in business practices?
Michael
Azzarello: I wasn't at that level. I didn't see
that debate at my level on the sales side. The only thing I would mention on
that is nothing at Taylor Bean, but Washington Mutual did ask us to do our best
to promote and originate the Option ARM products. My customer base in the
Midwest was a little too conservative for that type of product, so I wasn't
very capable of bringing in that type of business in the Midwest. It's more of
a, I don't want to say a California product or whatever, but it's a less
conservative type product because of the variation of the interest rate and
payments. I was familiar with the option ARM programs at Washington Mutual, but
that was really about it.
Carolyn Chen: In the
run up to the crisis, were there other practices or products you were seeing
that were a little more region specific, such as in the Midwest or in the East
and Florida?
Michael
Azzarello: Some of the Fannie Mae products,
which were going through their AUS, were agency products in terms of limited
documentation loans. Subprime loans were very prevalent back in that era and
the option ARM programs were prevalent. I think it was part of subprime, but we
also had a product that we called a 125, which was a 125% LTV product. Somebody
would lend you 125% of the current value of your home, assuming that in a
couple of years, you're going to hit that number, which is ridiculous to even
think that. I would say those were probably the most prevalent, unique products
that came out that I can think of back then.
Carolyn Chen: How
would you define predatory lending if you had to put that term in a dictionary?
Michael Azzarello: Predatory lending is unfair and abusive loan terms on
borrowers, such as high rates, high fees, and negative amortization. Predatory
lenders would be those lenders who proactively solicited borrowers for those
types of products that may not have been in the best interest of the borrowers,
but possibly were in the best interest of their wallet share. These are
products that they maybe couldn't afford and kind of went downhill with the
depreciation and such.
Carolyn Chen: Do you
think these predatory products made their way more prominently into certain
communities, minority communities, for example?
Michael
Azzarello: I think it's a given that the
predatory lenders were looking for borrowers who, first of all, may need those
products, such as low to moderate income type borrowers, borrowers with, on
average, lower FICO scores. They were probably soliciting demographics that
would match the characteristics of those loans, I would say.
Carolyn Chen: Over
the last decade, we've seen a number of different narratives emerge to explain
the financial crisis. How do you understand what could have caused the crisis?
Michael
Azzarello: What caused the crisis? I've thought
about that. It's been 10+ years. I don't think we had really an economic issue
back then, a lot of job losses and such. They call it the financial crisis
because the financial markets caused that crisis. I think a lot of it stems
from the greed on Wall Street, looking for higher margin products that they
could make more money on. In fact, when I was with Washington Mutual, our
capital markets team grilled us pretty bad. It's like we can't make any money
on FHA and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loans. You need to be originating these
option ARM products because that's where the profit is. In fact, they closed
our [correspondent] channel because we weren't originating that higher profit
product. We would joke a couple of years later, “how did that high profit
product work out for you guys?” I don't know. Could you ask me that question
again? I got sidetracked.
Carolyn Chen: Over
the last decade, we've seen a number of different narratives emerge to explain
the financial crisis. How do you understand what caused it?
Michael
Azzarello: Okay. So I
think one of the causes is the real estate bubble. Home value appreciation went
up and up and up and up. For example, down in Southeast Florida, they were
building and building. I was hearing from people, "Hey! I bought a
condominium and they started construction and they're two months into
construction and it's already gone up $20,000." So as euphoria over the
real estate bubble— “I need to get into the real estate market because I'm
going to make a lot of money investing in real estate”— investors were buying
homes and the bubble burst. It was unsustainable. Values can't go up month
after month, year after year, so at the same time, you then had borrowers who
were put into maybe mortgages that they could not afford. They didn't realize
they couldn't afford them, but they soon found out that they couldn't afford
them, or they weren't really willing to budget themselves to devote their
budget to their mortgage because they were still doing other things as well. When
they stopped making mortgage payments, normally, if you can no longer afford
your mortgage payment, you would sell your home. Well, they couldn't sell their
homes because they bought them at the peak in the market, and now they were in
trouble a year or two or three later when the values were down. They couldn't
sell the homes. They were doing what they call strategic foreclosures. They
were just basically handing the keys back to the bank. The combination of the
real estate bubble with loans made to borrowers who had not proven that they
had the ability to repay caused a lot of the financial crisis back then.
Carolyn Chen: To what
extent do you see your personal experiences adding something important to our
understanding of what happened in the run up to 2007-2008?
Michael
Azzarello: I've always been conservative myself.
I'm a believer in our industry. I'm a Certified Mortgage Banker, which there's
probably less than a thousand of us in the country out of all of us in the
mortgage business. I just finished my term as President of the MBA [Mortgage
Bankers Association] for the State of Florida. I believe in giving back. I
guess I didn't participate in subprime because I didn't think it was the right
approach. I didn't think it was the right type of product to offer borrowers.
Even going back to my days of originating loans, I was trained and brought up
that you follow the rules. You make loans to people who can afford to repay
those loans. You lend money as if it's your money.
I hated to be a part of that. I would
go on an airplane in 2008, '09, '10 and, prior to that, they say, "Hey,
what do you do for a living?" "Well, I'm a mortgage banker."
It's like, "Oh, really? What are interest rates today?" They ask you
questions and after the financial crisis, it's like you're almost embarrassed to
say that you're in the mortgage business. So be it— but it was very sad to see.
And it took a long time for the market to recover. I would say that the
industry and the country has learned a valuable lesson. The Dodd-Frank Act
kicked into play. Loan officer compensation became very strict along with
making sure the borrower has the ability to repay. I've always said— those who
make mistakes, the least you can do is learn from them. So, the world is a
better place today because of it. There were definitely some lenders and loan
officers working for those lenders who took advantage of things during that
period of time.
Carolyn Chen: Looking
back on the crisis over a decade later, what do you see as its most important
lessons for mortgage lenders?
Michael Azzarello: I would say making sure the borrower has the ability to
repay before you lend them money. It does everybody good.
Carolyn Chen: And
just to end things off, is there anything we haven't touched on or asked about
that you would like to add?
Michael Azzarello: No, I don't think so.
Carolyn Chen: Great. Thank you so much for your time.
Michael
Azzarello: Bye Carolyn, pleasure meeting you!
[END OF SESSION]