housing-bubble
Housing market is barely breathing
12.16.08- The housing market is barely breathing. According to Marketwatch.com, housing starts plunged 47% in the past year, down 73% from the housing bubble’s frothiest days. And building permits plummeted 48% in the past year, off 72% from the peak of real estate lunacy. There’s still a glut of unsold McMansions, and foreclosures are rising. [...]
The Lending Tree
The Lending Tree grew from a mere sapling just after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 into a giant monster that blocked out the sun, eventually toppling under its own girth, crushing the borrowed possessions in the home that it shared a lawn with.
The reason I mention 9/11 is that Americatown went into a short and [...]
Banks Bounce Back from the Dead
Bank shares are back in style. Even after staggering losses were announced by the likes of Wachovia, which registered a $8.9 billion loss in the second quarter, and Washington Mutual, which posted a $3.3 billion stain of red ink in the same period, their shares traded up by 27 percent and 6 percent, respectively.
The share [...]
Six Months of Job Losses and the Credit Bubble
Poof! That was the sound of approximately 62,000 jobs vanishing from the U.S. economy last month. June marks the sixth straight month of job losses. As for the month of May’s half percentage point spike in the unemployment rate to 5.5 percent - it stayed the same for June as well. Whaddya know? That huge [...]
Market Meets Reality
The stock market met reality yesterday – it did not go well. Record high oil prices and a warning about inflation form the Federal Reserve smacked sobriety into U.S. investors. Oil traded at $135 a barrel and the minutes from the Fed’s late April policy meeting implied that further interest rate cuts are unlikely [...]
The credit bubble blew up in ‘05
Sales of new homes fell 2.8 percent from December’s levels, and the median price of an American castle dipped to $215,000, which amounts to a 15 percent decline from year ago levels. I am actually tired of writing about the continuing dismal saga that is this nation’s housing market.
I wrote a rather long-winded essay in [...]
Struggling Banks Get Foreign Investment
It seems as though xenophobia has an inverse relationship to the ebb and flow of the stock market. As stocks prices sink under the gathering economic gloom brought on by the collapsing housing bubble, paranoia about sovereign wealth funds started to rise. These funds are made up of the accumulated savings of developing nations, such [...]
Employment Report Lands with a Thud- by Greg Strid
Thud. That was the sound of January’s dismal payroll
number as it landed in the collective face of overly
optimistic Wall Street economists early Friday morning.
Non-farm payrolls contracted by 17,000 last month, marking
the first decline since the summer of 2003. The “thud†that
was heard around the world’s trading salons was the result
of reality smacking fantasy for a [...]
Big Bank Set To Buy Big Pile of Trouble- by Greg Strid
Bank of America is inching closer to purchasing Countrywide
Financial, the poster child for all that went wrong with
subprime mortgage lending over the past several years.
Granted, no cash will change hands; Bank of America will
pay $4 billion in stock. This is on top of $2 billion in preferred
stock that Bank of America invested in Countrywide last [...]
Citigroup smacked by reckless bets
Citigroup reported a 57% decline in profits for the third quarter of 2007. Apparently it received some nasty wounds from souring fixed-income investments and sinking consumer loans. This sad quarter reflected approximately $5.9 billion of write-offs; once light was shed upon faltering securities prices and proprietary trades gone terribly wrong.
Much of the damage inflicted upon [...]
