Category Archives: Residential Market
How Carl Levin Got Goldman Sachs’s Goat
Interview by Paul Smalera, senior editorApril 30, 2010: 3:21 PM ET (Fortune) — At Tuesday’s epic Goldman Sachs hearing, Senator Carl Levin of Michigan led a public grilling of Wall Street not seen by a government panel since the Depression-investigating … Continue reading
A CLOSER LOOK AT THOSE GREAT HOUSING FIGURES
Just yesterday, for instance, the Commerce Department reported that new-home sales grew at an annualized rate of 11 percent last month, which was much better than people were expecting. And if you look under the covers, the annualized rate actually … Continue reading
“Increasingly, the determination of when to default is not guided by the moral question: Is this the right thing to do? It is guided by the pragmatic concern: Am I too far underwater on my mortgage?”
Walking Away When You Can Pay By Kelsey VanOverloop Homeowners are turning to the “strategic default” — walking away from a mortgage even when there are funds available to keep paying. “Increasingly, the determination of when to default is not … Continue reading
Who’s to blame for the housing crash?
To read “Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us” is to relive, in painful, anecdotal detail, the real estate bust that brought our economy low. Through Alyssa Katz, a journalism professor at New York University and the former … Continue reading
Where’s the (Remaining) Housing Wealth?
Falling home prices have eroded the equity that American homeowners have in their homes, as David Wessel observes in his Capital column. More than half of American home equity is in homes for which there are no mortgages; there never … Continue reading
Not Paying the Mortgage, Yet Stuck With the Keys
A growing number of American homeowners are falling into financial limbo: They’re badly behind on payments, but their banks have not yet foreclosed. The backlog of seriously delinquent mortgages, which so far affects about 1 million borrowers, is a shadow … Continue reading
Foreclosure Fiasco
It’s not working. The Bush-Obama strategy of throwing trillions at the banks to solve the mortgage crisis is a huge bust. The financial moguls, while tickled pink to have $1.25 trillion in toxic assets covered by the feds, along with … Continue reading
ARMs Away!
Subprime is done. All the teaser rates are over, the interest rates have reset and the writing is on the wall. But in the coming quarters, the scenario will play out with other exotic mortgages, Option ARM (pick-a-pay), Alt-A, etc. … Continue reading
A boost to consumers?
The Biggest Stimulus Won’t Come from Obama – Randall Forsyth, Barron’s THE BIGGEST STIMULUS to the economy in the next 12 months won’t come from the Obama administration’s vaunted fiscal plans but from the rather arcane operations of the Federal … Continue reading
Another Stimulus?
By Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns. A reader at Naked Capitalism asked us to respond to a recent article from the Christian Science Monitor asking Does US need a second stimulus to create jobs? Marshall Auerback has already done some … Continue reading →