Housing

An article in today's Guardian says that London property prices are falling. In fact they fell over 5% in a single month.Asking prices in London fell 5.3% in August, according to the Rightmove house price survey - equivalent to a £21,000…

This weekend I am at my wife's family reunion so I haven't have a lot of time for blogging. But, I caught an interesting article in Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter, which cites an IMF study which claims that property values in Sweden are…

As the first bubble economy to hit the skids and officially fall into recession, tiny Denmark deserves a mention. Statistics Denmark has released figures showing that house prices are falling in Denmark, which joins an ever-increasing group…

According to Seattle-based Zilliow, nearly one-third of U.S. home buyers who bought in the last five years are now underwater. A full 45% of those who bought at the peak in 2006 have negative equity in their homes. Negative equity makes…

My Commentary: The lead story today is about UBS and it.s $5.1 billion in writedowns and what this means for the financial system going forward. When one combines the downbeat assessment by UBS management regarding Q3 and Q4 with the…

A credit writedown is a reduction in the value of an asset as it is carried on a company's balance sheet. As these losses must also be reflected on the income statement, credit writedowns result in massive losses.

This chart from the New York Times demonstrates visually what happens when the Fed lowers interest rates too much: it skews simple economic decisions like what type of mortgage product to use, often with unintended consequences. Similarly…

This is one of those things that make you go hmm.... But, hey, this is what people really think.The housing downturn has been under way for a while now, so it's hard to believe that many homeowners could still think their homes are…

About five years ago, Daniel Kahnemann won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on Behavioral Economics. This was a breakthrough because the financial markets and the economics profession had been dominated by the "efficient market,"…

When we have a major economic dislocation, there is always some aspect of criminal behavior involved. As a result, the governmental authorities look for specific companies and individuals to use as scapegoats for all of the ills of the…