Housing

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…

Frederick Sheehan is the author of Panderer to Power: The Untold Story of How Alan Greenspan Enriched Wall Street and Left a Legacy of Recession (McGraw-Hill, 2009). Alan Greenspan's reputation has a whiff of terminal decline after his…

Second Mortgages Vex Borrowers - WSJ.com U.S. Says Regulators Feuded Over WaMu for Years - NYTimes.com Tim Duy's Fed Watch: Stuck in the Middle FT Alphaville - Tracy Alloway - Robbing Pedro to pay Paul (of Greece) … AIG,…

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…

Why is the US savings rate continuing to fall? Three possibilities: increasing asset prices, debt-related stress, a surge in strategic defaults.

Update 2010-03-31. Note: I discovered the first video at the UMKC blog, where Black posts. Subsequently, I saw all the videos on YouTube where you can rate them and add to the buzz.

Rampant fraud in the mortgage industry has increased so sharply that the FBI warned Friday of an "epidemic" of financial crimes which, if not curtailed, could become "the next S&L crisis." Assistant FBI…

The Case-Shiller Home Price Indices released this morning were a mixed bag. The data for January 2010 showed a decline of 0.7% from a year earlier. On a month-to-month basis prices fell 0.4%. Yet nine of the 20 markets in the Composite-20…

The Nationwide, the UK's largest building society, released data this morning showing that UK house prices rebounded in March from February's dip. The average UK home now costs £164,519, up 9.% from year ago levels. Much of the increase has…

I was reading Dean Baker's commentary on why the Obama mortgage plan brings no relief in the Guardian when it dawned on me that the 'new' plan is an enhancement of the old plan. And this is significant because the old plan turned…