foreclosure

I still see this phenomenon as a major risk to US growth due to the credit writedowns associated with it. However, the vast majority of house price losses are behind us. If house prices double-dip as they appear to be doing now, the losses…

he money that the government spends on a failed modification goes to banks, not homeowners. Typically, the government will have substituted an FHA insured mortgage for the original mortgage issued by a bank. This means that when a…

This PBS Frontline film on foreclosures first aired in October.

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David Rosenberg was out over the past week with some pretty large numbers supporting the thesis that strategic defaults are driving retail sales. In his daily piece last Friday, he said: To repeat, what has driven consumer spending in…

At the end of last month I proffered three potential explanations for the continued fall in the US savings rate.   The first explanation was that the economy was in a cyclical recovery predicated on asset price inflation and this…

Jim the Realtor gives advice to buyers about what to look for in order to avoid short sale fraud, something he sees as rampant in North County, San Diego where he works as a realtor. (Hat tip Tom Lindmark.) San Diego and LA are seeing…

What follows is a more comprehensive re-write of my take on the latest bailout proposals by the Obama Administration. I felt the original write-up was a bit rushed and one-sided. I have tried to outline the objectives of the bailout plans…

I see Diana Olick’s recent comments about government mortgage modification programs as proof that these props will not work. She says: Despite extraordinary loss mitigation efforts that have resulted in the execution of approximately…

John Hussman notes that the very large non-subprime Alt-A and Option ARM cohort interest-rate resets lie ahead of us and not behind us in his latest weekly market commentary. In my view, this is a very big problem for the US banking sector…