Yesterday, Wall Street giant J.P. Morgan Chase announced a $4.4 billion profit in the third quarter. Wall Street analysts should have cheered. Instead, they golf-clapped, while the bank’s chief executive officer, Jamie Dimon, went on the defensive on an earnings call.
[Economy1] The reason: foreclosures, again threatening everything from More…
Some good news for the housing market: Building starts on new homes climbed 10.5 percent in August, the Census Bureau announced this morning. Construction ramped up to an annualized pace of 598,000 homes, the highest rate since early spring. Economists had expected starts to decline slightly. More…
This weekend, Shaun Donovan, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, said that “it was too soon to say” whether the Obama administration might revive its $8,000 tax credit for first-time home buyers or $6,500 credit for other home buyers.
Today, I’ll be covering a Treasury Department conference on the future of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored enterprises that provide liquidity to the mortgage market and have required $150 billion in a taxpayer bailout so far.
Reform will prove difficult and will happen slowly because Fannie and More…
Today, RealtyTrac announced that lenders repossessed 93,000 homes in July — 9 percent more than in June, and up 6 percent since 2009. Again, California had the most filings, and Nevada had the highest foreclosure rate, for the 43rd straight month.
Washington is quiet, but that does not mean it is dormant. Staffers on the Hill and in the Treasury Department are working on a plan to restore normalcy to the mortgage market and to fix Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored enterprises that buy up mortgages from More…
Today, RealtyTrac reported that foreclosure notices increased in three out of four metro areas — cities with more than 200,000 residents — in the first six months of the year, compared with the first six months of 2009. The cities and states with the biggest bubbles and biggest collapses remained More…
The New York Times and CoreLogic examined the data, and found that the rich are more likely to purposefully default on their mortgages — to “strategically default” — than lower-income homeowners:
More than one in seven homeowners with loans in excess of a million dollars are seriously delinquent,
Economists expected home sales to drop once the Obama administration’s homebuyer tax credits ended at the end of April. Most said homes sales would decrease around 15 percent — with March and April stealing purchases from May and June. Few anticipated such a sharp drop. Today, the National Association of More…
As I’ve noted on the blog, since the government took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in September 2008, their roles in the housing market have changed dramatically. They aren’t profit-motivated, but stability-motivated, a government liquidity instrument to make sure mortgages remain affordable despite the credit crunch and housing More…
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