Category Archives: Real estate

Congressmen Call for Hearings on Risks of Rental Securtizations

Private equity firms have been playing residential landlord for only a few years, but the impressive amount of capital they’ve deployed in this strategy means they’ve had significant impact in the markets they’ve targeted. Needless to say, that impact does not look to be very positive. A Congressman has called for hearings on rental securitizations out of concern that this structure could make this already not-too-good-looking situation much worse from the perspective of tenants and communities.

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In Echo of Runup to Crisis, Bond Investors Reaching for Yield

An article in the Financial Times by Tracy Alloway gives yet another sighting that bond investors are getting a bit frantic in their hunt for yield. The piece has the eyepopping title, Yield-hungry investors snap up US homeless bond. It uses recent deals in the CMBS (commercial mortgage backed securities) market as a proxy for bond investors’ QE-driven hunt for more return.

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The Fed’s Taper and Market Fealty

The Fed’s announcing the taper was supposed to be an earth-shaking event. But that actually sorta happened last summer when Bernanke first used the “t” word and interest and mortgage rates made an impressive upward march in a short period of time.

From my considerable remove, what was noteworthy about the Fed’s announcement yesterday is how terrified it seems to be of creating an upset.

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Michael Hudson: Trade Advantage Replaced by Rent Extraction

An interview with Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City, and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, on the Renegade Economists radio/podcast

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Big Banks About to Start Booking Second Mortgage Losses They Can No Longer Extend and Pretend Away

Reuters has a new article, Insight: A new wave of U.S. mortgage trouble threatens, which is simultaneously informative and frustrating. It is informative in that it provides some good detail but it is frustrating in that it depicts a long-standing problem aided and abetted by regulators as new.

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How Wall Street Has Turned Housing Into a Dangerous Get-Rich-Quick Scheme — Again

Over the last year and a half, Wall Street hedge funds and private equity firms have quietly amassed an unprecedented rental empire, snapping up Queen Anne Victorians in Atlanta, brick-faced bungalows in Chicago, Spanish revivals in Phoenix

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Bob Goodwin: Why Code is Law

Several bellwether software initiatives have gone off the rails over the last five years. I am going to focus on one, because I learned about it on Naked Capitalism, and is where I first saw the expression “Code is Law”. I hope when history is written, this example will stand out on how the anarchist nerds that we call software engineers inadvertently started to hijack public institutions.

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Judge Rakoff Blasts Breuer, Prosecution of Companies Rather than Individuals in Bar Speech

Absent sitting on the Supreme Court, it is difficult for a single judge to effect much change. Yet Jed Rakoff, in sending the SEC back to the woodshed in two separate cases over its failure to get factual admissions, meaning admissions of misconduct, on civil settlements of SEC cases, singlehandedly embarrassed the SEC and the Department of Justice into seeking these statements (for instance, numerous media reports indicate that the Administration wants that sort of confession as part of its pending settlement with JP Morgan).

Rakoff threw down another gauntlet in a New York Bar Association speech on Tuesday.

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Richard Alford: On Grading the Bernanke Fed

We are certain to hear more and more appraisals of Bernake’s tenure as Fed chairman as he approaches the end of his term. But will they use good benchmarks? We suggest measuring his performance against his claims for the Fed’s objectives and what he said the central bank could accomplish. Not surprisingly, we find that he came up short.

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