Another ticking time bomb in the realm of real estate bad behavior is bound to go off sooner rather than later, and it is likely to impede normalization of values of residential property. As readers no doubt know, there is a lot of actual and shadow residential real estate inventory in the US. The time […]
Read more...With the fullness of time, housing prices are due to revert to something approximating the mean of their historical relationship to rental prices and incomes, albeit with an overshoot probable. But how quickly we reach that level will be very much a function of how quickly foreclosures take place and real estate is disposed of. […]
Read more...I know some readers may think that Lehman is 2008’s news. That sort of learned attention deficit disorder works to the advantage of those who participated in or enabled the looting of the average person to the benefit of the banksters. And the degree of questionable behavior of Lehman was so pronounced that if regulators […]
Read more...By Richard Alford, a former economist at the New York Fed. Since then, he has worked in the financial industry as a trading floor economist and strategist on both the sell side and the buy side. The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston recently published a paper titled: “Reasonable People Could Disagree: Optimism and Pessimism About […]
Read more...Is a stealth shift in policy afoot, to find the bottom in the housing market by getting banks to start clearing out their foreclosed and “ought to be foreclosed” exposures? On Tuesday, Fannie Mae announced that it was not longer giving servicers free rein, and was clamping down on multiple fronts, such as procedures and […]
Read more...This post first appeared on February 22, 2008 Man, not only does the Administration tell whoppers, but it is completely shameless about them. The latest sighting comes from Reuters: Treasury Undersecretary Robert Steel told the Reuters Housing Summit it is proper for homeownership to hold a special status…. “If I default on my credit card […]
Read more...I’m a bit mystified, given the abject failure of various government-devised “save the mortgage borrower programs,” that the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America’s mortgage mod marathon’s aren’t getting more coverage, and that limited media attention may be contributing to falling turnouts at its events. It’s telling that a Google News search confirms that the best […]
Read more...In case you’ve managed not to notice, the old saw, “the best government money can buy” increasingly applies to our legal system. In ECONNED, I describe briefly how a well funded “law and economics” movement which had corporate backing, including from the extreme right wing that was systematically trying to move America to the right, […]
Read more...I think we all know the answer to the question in the headline, courtesy F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The rich are different than you and me.” And the fact that they have more money means their defaults are couched as pure business decisions. But mere homeowners, told to view their house as an investment, are now […]
Read more...Boy, when you think you’ve seen the worst in utterly shameless, self serving tripe, someone manages to outdo it. Admittedly, it’s awfully hard to beat Steve Schwarzmann’s recent one-two punch of utter canard wrapped in tasteless hyperbole, that of Obama proposals that private equity kingpins pay taxes on what is really the fruits of their […]
Read more...By Andrew Horowitz of The Disciplined Investor I always thought that record would stand until it was broken. Yogi Berra Let’s get right to the point…There is nothing good that can be said about the report that came out earlier. Existing home sales dropped off a cliff. – It is that simple. But, once the […]
Read more...This post first appeared on November 10, 2007 The equity markets seem to have finally realized that conditions are ugly in the credit markets, due to get uglier, and the mess will pull down the real economy. And the bad news continues. The dollar index fell to a new low. Wachovia said the value of […]
Read more...A story by Ellen Brown gives a good summary of how the widespread use of a national electronic mortgage registry called MERS, designed to save mortgage securitizers the cost and bother of recording mortgages at the local courthouse, is backfiring spectacularly. Although in a industry as large and diverse as the mortgage industry, one has […]
Read more...This post first appeared on August 27, 2007 Recently, we’ve noticed a new theme among economics writers: Extreme Measures. Commentators have looked toward the end of the road we are on and fear it leads to a precipice. Hence the calls for radical course correction. Paul Krugman and Bill Gross of Pimco, each of whom […]
Read more...As we’ve noted on this blog, the Administration efforts to punish so-called strategic defaulters seem hopelessly misguided. First, it’s well nigh impossible to tell with simple screens who really could afford their house longer term (ie people who default suddenly, as opposed to wobble in and out of being current on their mortgage before folding, […]
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