mortgages

I named my blog "Credit Writedowns" because I anticipated an historic wave of credit writedowns in the global banking system which would lead to a wave of deleveraging, systemic risk, and bank failures -- in short, a massive financial and…

This is a topic I first broached in May. The United States has a mortgage problem in that house prices have fallen so much and the financial sector is so leveraged that the U.S. faces systemic banking risk from a vicious circle in the…

From the Guardian:

"Prime looks terrible." Those were the words of Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase when he had his earnings call for Q2. And, indeed, prime is terrible. New data out from Hope Now shows that there are now more prime mortgage delinquencies…

Last month, Hank Paulson, the U.S. Treasury Secretary, was waxing prosaically about covered bonds and their benefits to mortgage markets. From his comments, one gets the impression he sees this a potential solution to preventing a future…

When it comes to residential property in the US, banks were overzealous on the way up and now they are overzealous on the way down. You have probably heard that banks are cutting HELOCs (home equity lines of credit) like mad. Borrowers,…

The past few weeks I have been chronicling how Europe is fast catching up to the United States in terms of the magnitude of the housing bust and its effects on its economies. I'd like to turn back to the United States and Northern…

I was listening to a money programme about the credit crunch in the UK this morning on my iPod Wake Up To Money (Podcast). They were discussing ways in which the credit crunch was made manifest to home buyers in the UK. In the broadcast,…

Below are the latest writedown stories from the web that I have seen. For the full timeline of news, visit my credit crisis timeline. Bloomberg recently updated their tally of writedowns to arrive at $503.8 Billion to date. That is on…

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…