Blowing the Lid Off the Mortgage Industry
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If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!Today is the day the recovery starts, at least according to those peering into the rosiest-colored crystal balls. The Wall Street Journal dug up these great examples:
Most forecasters seem to expect growth to be weak for a few quarters, [...]
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It’s been quite a week for Citi.
Tuesday it walked into a feces storm of its own making by announcing it would raise salaries by 50% to offset cuts in bonuses.
To be fair to Citi, they are taking (well-deserved) crap for the entire industry on the salary issue. BofA, Morgan Stanley, UBS and others are [...]
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As the unemployment rate continues to grow it is hitting an increasing number of people who had prime mortgages. The result is a huge increase in foreclosures among primes. In the first three months of the year, prime fixed-rate loans accounted for nearly half of the increase in foreclosure proceedings, according to the Mortgage Bankers [...]
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The best that can be said about S&P/Case-Schiller numbers out today is maybe home prices can’t fall any faster. Prices for Q1 of this year dropped at 19.1%, .9% more than they dropped in the last quarter of ‘08. The 20-city index dropped 18.7% year-over-year, also a record. It fell 18.5% during the last three [...]
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A bad time to sell things is an even worse time to own property where things get sold. Thus the news that retail sales dropped “unexpectedly” in April means retailers are dropping as well. Here in Boston take a walk down posh Newbury Street and you will see many storefront “for rent” signs.
Other high enders [...]
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The Obama administration has announced a new program to help borrowers with second mortgages stay out of foreclosure. Under this program, the government will pay mortgage servicers $500 upfront and $250 a year for three years if they successfully modify a second mortgage, such as a home equity loan.
The Treasury Department says second mortgages are [...]
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So far Spain, Ireland and the UK are already seeing it and Japan is teetering on the brink.
“Ireland, struggling with a ballooning budget deficit and record unemployment, has been at the vanguard of Europe’s economic collapse. Now deflation threatens to push the country deeper into its worst recession in eight decades.” (Bloomberg)
“Britain’s statistics office says [...]
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There has been a deliberately high signal-to-noise-ratio (”the ratio of a signal power to the noise power corrupting the signal“) around the financial fiasco. The reason for this is the same reason that a magician does patter — to divert your attention from the sleight-of-hand.
We have heard long explanations about how no one could have [...]
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The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) has approved a new set of rules allowing financial firms to fiddle with how big their real-estate losses are.
The change is in mark-to-market accounting rules, which say companies must value assets at prices reflecting current market conditions. But now the phrase “current market conditions” will have a big asterisk [...]
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