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Mortgage fraud was rampant during the housing boom. Regulators were asleep at the wheel during all of this. But now we are getting some indictments as WFAA News 8 in Dallas reports (hat tip Housing Wire). This television station did the dirty work for regulators and uncovered massive amounts of mortgage fraud.
Byron Harris reports:
News 8 [...]

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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 two million loan modifications – including the federal government’s Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) trial periods – the number of new delinquencies since [...]

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Meredith Whitney was on CNBC in London this morning. She concentrates her comments on mortgages and banking. She sees the winter lull as a harbinger of renewed softness in the housing market.
Note: the FOMC statement today reiterated the ending dates for MBS purchases. Let’s see how this plays out for mortgage rates in April and [...]

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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 and economy because of the credit writedowns these resets will generate.
For his [...]

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Ann Lee and Dan Alpert joined Bloomberg’s Pimm Fox today to talk about the housing market recovery. Lee, a professor of finance at New York University, was sceptical that population growth predicts any substantial increase in housing transactions and prices simply due to the continued pressure on wages and disposable income. and Dan Alpert, managing [...]

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The National Association of Realtors® announced today that existing home sales dropped a hefty 7% in January, adding further evidence that the resurgence of the housing sector is stalling. Wednesday, we saw a very soft new home sales number. Now, we see more softness in existing home sales as well.
Their press release stated:
Existing-home sales fell [...]

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This comes today via Reuters:
The Commerce Department said sales dropped 11.2 percent to a 309,000 unit annual rate, the lowest level since records started in January 1963, from an upwardly revised 348,000 in December.
It was the third straight month that new home sales fell and the percentage decline in January was the largest in a [...]

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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 basis (Composite-10 and Composite-20 respectively down 2.5% and 3.2% versus December 2008). Only four of twenty markets saw price [...]

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Given my post on Jim Rogers’ doubting Chanos’ knowledge about China, I thought it appropriate to post the latest Chanos interview on the China property bubble. 
This call by Chanos is really setting us up for some seriously entrenched camps of pro-China bulls (like Rogers)against China sceptics (like Chanos, but also like Andy Xie). Is [...]

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Commenting about the recent Wall Street Journal article “Housing rebound in Canada spurs talk of new bubble,” Rolfe Winkler of Reuters says
Last week Paul Krugman toasted the sobriety of Canadian banks. Among other things, he said that low rates aren’t enough to cause a bubble since Canadian rates are low and, well, they don’t have [...]