housing bubble

As bank-owned foreclosed properties pile up across the country, from abandoned houses in hard-hit neighborhoods to empty big box retail stores in failed strip malls, the fight over holding someone responsible for the brick and mortar mess left behind by the mortgage crisis continues to heat up.

If you ever got picked on as a kid, and handled it by clinging to the belief that life was fair and your nemesis would get a comeuppance, then this is for you:
Fremont General Corp. once one of the nation’s top 10 subprime lenders, has agreed to pay $10 million to resolve charges it preyed [...]

What has — or hasn’t — Congress learned in the aftermath of the burst of the housing bubble?

Much of the reason our economy is a mess is due to the housing bubble, a period in which too many homes were built — and too many people bought homes they couldn’t afford. Home prices continue their death spiral because a glut of homes remains on the market, leftovers from the bubble as the [...]

We ran a piece today touching on the difficulty of fixing an economy broken by the bursting of something as large as the recent housing bubble. That is, if the inflated housing market allowed millions of Americans to leverage equity to buy things they couldn’t afford — and if millions of jobs were created to [...]

As Democrats in both Congress and the White House appear willing to wait a few more weeks (or months?) to tackle legislation that would allow bankruptcy judges to renegotiate troubled mortgages, Credit Suisse released a report today estimating the practical effects of this decision. From the report:
We expect the bankruptcy plan will provide about a [...]

U.S. consumers have cut back spending — which should be good news because economists and financial counselors have long urged them to pay down their debt, especially on credit cards. But when everyone does it, you get a nasty recession. Congress may have to come to the rescue with a second stimulus package.