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

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 [...]

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 [...]

Giant Mortgage Lender Files For Bankruptcy

American Home Mortgage, one of the largest mortgage lenders – and a glaring symbol of unsound business practices- filed for bankruptcy early this week. Mortgage lenders like American Home Mortgage are responsible for helping to inflate the largest housing bubble in American history. Now investors are running from the crappy mortgage-backed securities originating from these [...]

House-slide- by Greg Strid

Take my house, please!

The housing market has been cooling off as of late. The sale of single-family homes declined 5 percent from June to July, and are off 11.4 percent from a year ago. Although the national median home price rose 1.5 percent over the past twelve months, there are signs that the frothiest coastal markets are [...]