Matt Levine has an interesting take on the Richmond, California eminent domain spat. He uses the conventional model which is floating around of a $300,000 mortgage on a house worth $200,000 and asks the question, “What’s the mortgage worth.” If it’s $300,000 as the mortgage owners contend then assuming they can take it via eminent […]
Posts Tagged ‘mortgage’
Does Option Theory Validate The Richmond Eminent Domain Plan
Posted by Tom Lindmark on August 9th, 2013
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Reshaping Mortgage Finance
Posted by Tom Lindmark on January 22nd, 2011
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 […]
Fannie Reembraces Subprime Mortgages
Posted by Tom Lindmark on September 5th, 2010
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. […]
More Doubts About 30-Year Fixed Rate Mortgages
Posted by Tom Lindmark on June 14th, 2010
Here is some further heretical thinking on 30-year fixed rate mortgages from, believe it or not, an economist who works for the federal government’s housing cabal. His name is Patrick Lawler and he works for the Federal Housing Finance Agency. James R. Hagerty wrote of Mr. Lawler’s comments in the WSJ Developments blog. Here is […]
Mortgage Applications Actually Falling
Posted by Tom Lindmark on March 11th, 2009
Housing Wire has some useful information on mortgage applications this morning. The headline number from the Mortgage Bankers Association is that mortgage applications were up 11.3% for the week ending March 6. HousingWire presents a different picture. Household applications actually fell, according to Mortgage Maxx LCC, which tracks weekly mortgage applications as well for its […]
The ABA Says Citi Is Off The Reservation On Cram-Downs
Posted by Tom Lindmark on January 9th, 2009
Last night I put up a post about Citi throwing in with the Congressional Democrats on mortgage cram-down legislation. I speculated that Citi was probably just doing its new masters’ bidding. Since then a couple of stories, both from Housing Wire have come out that adds a bit more meat to the bone. The first […]
A Shack In Arizona And The Housing Crisis-How They Came Together
Posted by Tom Lindmark on January 3rd, 2009
I’ve been spending a largely unproductive Saturday morning browsing the Internet and came across this little gem from the Wall Street Journal. It’s the story of a woman, a ramshackle house in Arizona and the mortgage crisis. You and I have seen a lot of these before, but this one is well put together. The […]
