A Bloomberg article today highlight’s the Commercial real estate sector (CRE) as the next leg down in the U.S. property bubble. The article states:
With 312,000 private-sector jobs lost in the last four months, foreclosure rates more than double what they were a year before, and the homeowner vacancy rate at a record high, it’s [...]

Today, Fannie released horrible quarterly financial results. The company lost $2.2 billion and is now looking to shore up its capital base.
Fannie said an estimate of its fair value of net assets was $12.2bn at the end of the first quarter. This was 66 per cent lower than the value of $35.8bn assigned at [...]

The Lex column in Yesterday’s FT highlights what many market players are thinking about the company’s £4 billion ($8 billion) rights issue: the economic outlook in the UK is worse than feared.
“The main potential explanation for the apparent excess capital is that the board’s outlook for the real economy is worse than stated. Retail bankers’ [...]

If you are looking for companies that have yet to write down massive amounts of losses in this global credit meltdown, look no further than Banco Santander. The Spanish Bank holds a major position in the Spanish mortgage and construction boom. The Spanish property market is heading south quickly and I fully anticipate [...]

As the Fed Funds rate gets close to zero, pundits have been worrying about a pending liquidity trap. While I think these worries are well placed because the Fed is running out of bullets, I am more concerned about inflation right now.
We are in the midst of a credit crisis. Banks are having [...]

This blog entry is an updated version of something I wrote way back in 2004. I wrote 90% of this 4 years ago when housing prices were much lower. The fact that I can re-publish this today, largely unchanged, demonstrates how the housing bubble has morphed into a giant of grotesque proportions.
The global [...]

We are already in recession by most accounts as I said on this blog yesterday. But, today I went back and looked at some of the historical employment data to see what the data said about Employment and recessions. What I was able to find out is that Employment is indeed a coincident to lagging indicator of recession.