Helping Good Investors Make Better Decisions
The Census Bureau News center today has released data detailing August 2008 construction spending – it’s down as you’d expect, and with the credit markets tied up as they are, we’re likely to see further reductions downstream from here.
Calculated Risk has taken the data and graphed both residential and non-residential (commercial) construction spending, providing graphs […]
The WSJ article over the weekend (FBI Probes Unusual Incentives for Home Buyers) that we linked to on Saturday set a lot of folks to thinking about the issue. No doubt you’ve read more than one commentary on the issue; we have too.
Barry R. at The Big Picture wrote a good post on Sunday detailing […]
Most of us here at the Bozeman office are traveling for an important meeting this afternoon, and have just finished a quick scan of news and blog items before we hit the road.
Here are a couple that deserve some attention today-
First – yesterday we posted a link to a post over on Calculated Risk discussing […]
Fannie and Freddie both lost in the range of 20% of their value today after Lehman Brothers analysts projected that Fannie and Freddie would be forced to raise in the neighborhood of $75 billion in capital if a proposed accounting rule change were enacted requiring companies to move certain off-balance sheet securities onto their books […]
Nick Timiraos has written a thoughtful piece in today’s WSJ taking a thoughtful look at seller funded groups (typically nonprofits) that are offering down-payment assistance programs which provide enough down-payment money to buyers to allow them to qualify for an FHA backed mortgage.
As demonstrated in the graph below, the default rate on these loans is […]
The more time we spend researching the issue, the more amazed we become at the housing bill being debated in the Senate this week. We encourage everyone who has an interest, an interest at any level, to spend some time researching the issues this next week – there’s a great deal at stake here. Here’s […]
A couple of interesting updates. Our apologies for using the same picture from last week; it just seems to fit this topic so well.
Congress is currently debating the $300 billion housing bailout legislative monster that we and many others have touched on recently. One of the most stinging criticisms of the legislation as it’s currently written […]
Clearly the story has legs and didn’t go away over the weekend. Here’s an update story / opinion today from the WSJ detailing a few points that we haven’t heard from any other source as of yet….
Technorati Tags: redfish emerging markets, countrywide financial
There’s a bit of chatter today on several of the more investigative web sites around looking a little deeper in Senator Chris Dodd’s dealing with mortgage giant Countrywide, themselves the target of a great deal of scrutiny of late.
Conde Nast’s Portfolio has a pretty detailed look at the story; here’s what appears to be the […]
Another round of interesting housing news from Washington today.
Fannie Mae reported a $2.19 billion first quarter loss due to impressive write-downs and credit costs. Given the state of the market, that’s perhaps not such a surprise. What’s more impressive to us is the fact that US regulators lowered the amount of capital that Fannie must […]
Carrick Mollenkamp wrote an interesting piece in yesterday’s WSJ about rising doubts regarding the reliability of the LIBOR – the London Inter-bank Offered Rate. We agree that the LIBOR has played a huge role in the global financial system, though we’ve been hearing increasing concerns about it’s reliability for several months from contacts in finance.
The crux […]
A reader who attended McCain’s speech Thursday in New York emailed in some commentary and suggested we take a look at McCain’s policy stance change announced yesterday; the change counters what he put on record as recently as two weeks ago.
Speaking to a group of small business owners in New York, McCain proffered the idea […]
There was a very short and insightful letter to the editor in the WSJ just a couple of days ago regarding the proposal to license mortgage brokers, an option being discussed which would create yet another morass of bureaucracy.
The author of the letter (Merrill from Fort Worth) suggested wisely that licensure of mortgage brokers would not achieve […]
Great opinion piece in the WSJ today titled “Uncle Subprime”.
House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank (D) and his distinguished colleagues are suggesting at this point in time an $11 billion relief package targeting the housing market, as well as an unprecedented shift in risk from lenders and borrowers and taxpayers (hundreds of billions of dollars […]
We received several emails yesterday for the most part agreeing with us in our veiled criticism of the media’s interpretation of the S&P’s Case-Shiller data released yesterday. Several news sites mentioned the OFHEO index data also, as did several of those commenting on our post.
We’d strongly suggest that following both of these indices is critical […]
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