One of today’s lessons is to have greater courage in my convictions. In a number of earlier posts (such as “The Rising Tide of Liquidity,” part 2 and part 3 of the same, “Where Has the (Perception of) Risk Gone“) I pointed to how toppy the markets have been, and how much capital has flowed […]
Read more...Yesterday, we had a link and some commentary on a front-page New York Times article, “Crisis Looms in Mortgages,” by Gretchen Morgenson. Morgenson likes a take-no-prisoners style of writing, and she tends to be controversial due to her forceful articles about CEO pay. I will confess to having read past it (I am inured to […]
Read more...Gretchen Morgenson, in Sunday’s New York Times, has an excellent front page story, “Crisis Looms in Market for Mortgages.” Her forecast is the worst is yet to come. The story describes how delinquencies in the subprime market, already at 12.6%, are already high (we’ve pointed out before that borrowers are also starting to look shaky […]
Read more...One long-standing skeptic about the housing market is Nouriel Roubini of RGE Monitor. You have to sign up for premium content to get his full story (he does give you an initial free peek), but you can get the drift of the gist from his synopsis, “The housing market is still far from bottoming out:” […]
Read more...Here it is, Sunday evening. The Asian markets are opening down. I don’t know about you, but I am already tired of the events of last week. They don’t appear to be ending anytime soon, despite the attempts at reassurance by various people in positions of authority. And no, I didn’t take a beating. It’s […]
Read more...That’s the title of an article in today’s Financial Times, describing how concerns about the implosion of the subprime mortgage market has led to concerns about the broader mortgage market. As the piece sets forth, this isn’t simple speculative precaution; it turns out delinquencies are running higher than expected in mortgages that are rated just […]
Read more...The Wall Street Journal today ran a story, “Mortgage Bond Pioneer Dislikes What He Sees,” featuring Lew Ranieri’s comments on the mortgage securities market. For those of you too young to remember, Ranieri effectively created the mortgage securities market at Salomon Brothers in the 1980s, as head of its mortgage-backed securities department. He and his […]
Read more...Somehow, “subprime contagion” doesn’t have the same ring as “Asian contagion” did in 1998, but we have the same sort of phenomenon at hand: that panic in one sector of the debt market could lead to a broader rout. Nouriel Roubini in his RGE Monitor quotes extensively from a Bloomberg story that indicates that the […]
Read more...Mirable dictu, a Wall Street Journal editorial, “How Expansions Die,” that, for the most part, has a solid foundation in reality. Although the WSJ’s news pages have been reporting on the meltdown in the subprime mortgage market (admittedly somewhat less intently than the Financial Times), both the news and editorial pages have treated it as […]
Read more...Normally, I shield readers from posts from The Housing Bubble Blog. It features news stories from newspapers all over the country, and the tone of the articles ranges from “somewhat bad” to “pretty desperate”. Generally speaking, one has to wade through quite a few listings to have a sense of the whole. This post, “Will […]
Read more...The well-regarded Nouriel Roubini of RGE Monitor thinks it might. He picks up on the themes we’ve discussed earlier, particularly the severity of the subprime mortgage market contraction (these are loans made to particularly weak borrowers, which therefor e command higher interest rates). Roubini comments on what he regards as an unusual feature of this […]
Read more...The stockmarket today posted another new high, yet the drip, drip, drip of less than cheery economic and political news continues (or have market participants forgotten that governments are bigger than they are?). But the markets focus on whatever good news there is, and the spectacle of Bernanke reassuring Congress also soothed, perhaps anesthetized, investors. […]
Read more...The Financial Times reported today on a spike up in the ABX index, a means to buy and sell default insurance on mortgage-backed bonds rated BBB- (the very bottom of investment grade bonds) are now trading at nearly 1000 basis points, up from 650 a week ago, a dramatic increase. The reason? More bad news […]
Read more...Courtesy Seeking Alpha, an extensive compilation of recent stories on the housing market, called “Housing Bubble and Real Estate Market Tracker.”
Read more...The Housing Bubble Blog put the question more neutrally in its post headline, “When Did Lending Standards Start Charging So Much?,” but the responses all point in one direction: Readers suggested a topic on when loan standards changed. “Here’s my question for the gang – when did lending standards start changing so much? I was […]
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