Vote for the man who promises least; he’ll be the least disappointing. Bernard Baruch
Archive for February 24th, 2009
Quote Of The Day
Posted by Tom Lindmark on February 24th, 2009
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Houston Decides To Ditch A Dicey Mortgage Plan
Posted by Tom Lindmark on February 24th, 2009
In case you missed it earlier today, all the rage in the blogosphere was about the plan advanced by the city of Houston to pay off credit cards for prospective borrowers. The lame brained idea behind this was to lower the balances on homebuyers credit cards which would, hopefully, push up their FICO scores. About […]
A Few Things To Think About Before We Reregulate
Posted by Tom Lindmark on February 24th, 2009
Calls for new regulations for financial industry participants are in the echoing about and are likely to increase in volume over the next couple of months. The subject is expected to be at the top of the agenda for the April meeting of the G-20. An article in the WSJ on Monday set the tone: […]
The Beijing Real Estate Disaster
Posted by Tom Lindmark on February 24th, 2009
Here is an absolutely stunning item from China Financial Markets: By Rodman’s calculations, 500 million square feet of commercial real estate has been developed in Beijing since 2006, more than all the office space in Manhattan. And that doesn’t include huge projects developed by the government. He says 100 million square feet of office space […]
Bernanke Says Little, Markets Soar
Posted by Tom Lindmark on February 24th, 2009
Well the markets certainly appeared to like Bernanke’s comments. Frankly, I didn’t hear anything that earth shaking but, then again, I wasn’t looking for a reason to buy. What I did take away from the whole show was that the Fed is going to play for time. It isn’t going to nationalize or put a […]
Big Banks: Are They Dinosaurs That Deserve To Die?
Posted by Tom Lindmark on February 24th, 2009
The one thing the blogosphere seems to be long on right now is opinions about nationalizing one or more of the nation’s banks. I’ve made my opinion pretty clear before. Just do what we’ve always done, place insolvent banks in receivership and reconstitute them as quickly as possible. Putting that aside, it’s occurred to me that […]
Case-Shiller: No Sunshine This Month
Posted by Tom Lindmark on February 24th, 2009
The latest Case-Shiller report is out. Not really any great news. Here is a summary from the WSJ Real Time Economics blog: In the 20-city index, no area experienced year-over-year price gains, the ninth straight month that has happened. Further, none of the cities managed to avoid month-to-month declines for the third month in a […]
