Strategic Default

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…

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

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…

The December 2009 data for the widely followed S&P/Case-Shiller Indices were released this morning.  The data are showing a mixed picture. On the one hand, the unadjusted numbers are down on both a month-to-month and year-over-year…

In the lead-up to the credit crisis, I really didn’t write a considerable amount about second mortgages despite my focus on credit writedowns. At that time, I was more focused on writedowns from securitized mortgage paper (and later…

This past Monday I was on the BBC talking about the recently unveiled Fiscal Year 2011 Budget proposed by the Obama Administration for the U.S. Federal Government.  The budget is, as with most things Obama, a tightrope walk between the…

Exactly three months ago, I told you to expect bankruptcy in the record Stuyvesant Town real estate deal. Today, this is exactly what we got: A group led by Tishman Speyer Properties has decided to give up the sprawling Peter Cooper…