Category: Housing
Banks Paying Cash to Homeowners to Avoid Foreclosures
Here’s the latest story that’s been getting buzz around the internet: banks are trying to get troubled mortgages off their books without having to go through costly foreclosure processes and they are offering homeowners cash incentives to do so
More on Banks Making Shed Loads But Fannie And Freddie “Losing Money as a Matter of Policy”
Fannie and Freddie have already been nationalized and the government is already on the hook for hundreds of billions of dollars of losses as a result. Clearly, this makes it a lot easier to use the GSEs as vehicles to pump money into the economy because any incremental loss is completely obscured by the existing gargantuan losses. Fannie and Freddie can essentially become a giant stimulus slush fund for the Obama Administration as we head into the 2012 election
Robert Shiller: “Sweden has a bubble”
Sweden may have a bubble in its housing market. But now that housing prices have begun to fall, it is too late to deploy countermeasures
Full Text: Moody’s revises rating outlook for Australian mortgage insurers to negative
Below is the press release issued by Moody’s in conjunction with the down grade of Australia’s mortgage insurers
House Prices Plunge in Chinese Ghost City
Could this be part of the reason the Shanghai was the only major index we track that was down last week
Australia: There goes the neighbourhood
The last two days have seen the latest monthly data on credit growth in Australia from the RBA, and the latest quarterly data on house prices from the ABS. Together they confirm trends that I’ve identified on numerous occasions between the acceleration of mortgage debt and the change in house prices
Shanghai property values plunge, recent buyers protest
The Chinese property market has come off the boil according to this video from NTD Television. The issues are reminiscent of the US subprime crisis in which developers, under the gun from a falling market, were forced to slash prices to sell new apartments. Recent buyers are seeing their investments implode overnight
Secular decline in US housing equity
We stumbled upon this interesting chart from the Financial Stability Oversight Council’s 2011 Annual report which shows the share of owner equity in household real estate. It surprised us, not so much in that it is at record lows, but that owner equity showed only a blip upward during the housing bubble. The secular decline in owner equity is also an eye opener
Lenders now suing for mortgage debt after foreclosure
The statute of limitations is five years for default. That means banks still have until the beginning of 2012 to sue a strategic defaulter from early
Hungary: Controversial Swiss franc loan law goes into effect
Central European borrowers loaded up on cheap Swiss franc and euro loans (mainly from Austria and Switzerland) in the lead up to the credit crisis because of higher nominal rates in central Europe. When the crisis hit, these loans became expensive overnight. In Hungary, one of the hardest hit due to currency depreciation, the government has legislated a fix that goes into effect today
No Bottom in Sight for Housing
From Global Economic Intersection Guest author: Keith Jurow is the author of the MVP Housing Market Report. This article was posted at Minyanville with the title “There Is No Housing Bottom in Sight” At the end of June 2011, macromarkets.com released the results of a poll in which 108 leading economists and housing market analysts
All twenty metro areas with monthly house price increases in Case-Shiller
On a month-to-month basis, all metro region in the Case-Shiller Home Price Index for June 2011 showed price increases. On the other hand, we saw year-on-year housing declines across 20 major US metro areas of 4.5%