Jim Cramer is not just calling a stock market bottom, but now he’s calling a housing bottom too.  In fact, he says go buy a house.  “Buy a house and buy Bank of America too?”  Cramer says: “This is patently obvious.”
Take a look and tell me what you think.  Personally, I know his stock picking [...]

OK, I lied.  I am forced to used that dreaded phrase – one last time.  What did a commenter just call it: “Photosynthetically capable new plant growth?”  The reason the dreaded phrase is making a comeback is due to the excellent analysis of Niels Jensen, Senior Partner over at Absolute Return Partners in London. Visit [...]

Actually, I lied.  He really is not that bullish at all.  But he does sound relatively upbeat by comparison to 5 months ago.
I have seen Whitney Tilson of T2 Partners a lot in the media of late.  The two most recent appearances are with Tech Ticker where he talked about house prices and with the [...]

Earlier today I posted an article about how accounting was favourable to banks in that it could help them weather the storm and appear well-capitalized until a recovery is underway.  Afterwards, a buoyant economy would increase earnings enough to allow the massive writedowns that need to flow through the income statement to be taken in [...]

This is a video from Bloomberg Television yesterday. It underscores the fragility of this incipient recovery. You will notice that California is leading the way in terms of foreclosures, one reason the state will 00 bankrupt or be bailed out. Here are some tidbits from the related Bloomberg News story:

342,000 homes were seized, foreclosed on, [...]

This report comes via “The Center for Public Integrity”:
The top subprime lenders whose loans are largely blamed for triggering the global economic meltdown were owned or bankrolled by banks now collecting billions of dollars in bailout money — including several that have paid huge fines to settle predatory lending charges.
These big institutions were not only [...]

If you read my recent post on How big banks earned so much money this quarter you would see that much of the income at Wells, JPMorgan, US Bank and others came from refinancing old mortgages. While this may be a boon to present income, it is very much a problem for the legacy [...]

The website You Walk Away has become pretty popular because it teaches mortgage holders how to dump their properties on banks and get out from under their mortgage without losing everything. Apparently, banks are getting into the act too — and walking away. That leaves some people holding the bag when they didn’t [...]

This comes from Angus Robertson of Research Recap.  Expect some major writedowns here going forward:
A dramatic rise in delinquencies has led Fitch Ratings to raise its average loss estimates for recent vintage jumbo prime mortgage pools to between 3 and 5 times higher than its previous estimate.
Fitch’s revised average loss estimates as a percentage of [...]

The details on Obama’ new mortgage relief plan are out. The key parts are the following: