It’s only January but we may already have a winner for sheer audacious rent seeking of the year award. The NYT reports that the nation’s big banks would like to be named as replacements for Fannie and Freddie: Wells Fargo and some other large banks would like private companies, perhaps even  themselves, to become the […]
From Reuters, here’s a pretty amazing statistic: Home prices fell for the 53rd consecutive month in November, taking the decline past that of the Great Depression for the first time in the prolonged housing slump, according to Zillow. Home prices have fallen 26 percent since their peak in 2006, exceeding the 25.9 percent drop registered […]
Lots of talk over the past few days about housing and its prospects for 2011. For the first time a few brace souls are coming out of the closet and proclaiming that while they might not be housing bulls quite yet, they think the worst is over. That doesn’t mean the bears have vanished though. […]
A couple of days ago I put up a post that reviewed returns on homes for the past decade. Here’s a bit more recent history via a great graph from CalculatedRisk.com. (click for a larger image) Pretty awful isn’t it? Basically, we’re going nowhere which shouldn’t be at all surprising. The similarity to the S&L […]
I suspect that even when the economy reaches a point of real recovery that there will be someone, somewhere stumping for another mortgage relief plan. Today’s edition is brought to you by Glenn Hubbard and Chris Mayer. It’s essentially a rehash of a plan Morgan Stanley touted a couple of months ago. In a NYT […]
Not much time to post this past week, so here are some things that caught my eye along the way. Housing The emerging consensus seems to be that while the government can keep shooting bullets at the housing market for as long as they care to throw away tax payer dollars, their efforts are likely […]
Posted in banks, Housing, regulation, State and Municipal Finance 
Tags: Housing, pension plans, REO 
79 Comments »What we’ve learned over the past three years, courtesy of the NYT: When the housing bubble burst, one of the culprits, economists agreed, was exotic mortgages, including those that required little or no money down. But on a recent evening, Matthew and Hannah Middlebrooke stood in their new $115,000 three-bedroom ranch house here, which Mr. […]
