Tyler Cowen writes:
Many smart people say we should. It seems increasingly clear that we must. For how long can the government prop them up? Are we never to have a private market in mortgages again?
Via Felix Salmon, Paul Kedrosky has a terrifying housing chart, showing the number of vacant U.S. houses. The stock of empty U.S. homes is now bigger than the entire Canadian housing stock.
Another sign of weakness in the housing market: This morning, the National Association of Realtors said that sales of existing homes declined 2.2 percent from April to May. NAR revised its estimate of April sales — bolstered by the end of the Obama administration’s homebuyer tax credits — up More…
Today, the S&P/Case Shiller Housing Index shows some worrying, if unsurprising, statistics about the housing market.
The good news is that the year-on-year index, the most-watched metric, gained, as from from March 2009 to March 2010 housing prices rose 2.35 percent. Economists had expected a gain of 2.5 percent. More…
University of Chicago economist and New York Times Economix contributor Casey Mulligan does not really believe there was a housing bubble. He has written a number of perplexing blog posts to back up his case. And now: this.
Mulligan writes: “Housing bubble theorists will offer you a list More…
As everyone already knows, 2009 was a terrible economic year for a lot of Americans, but some people had it worse than others. A handy table in today’s Wall Street Journal allows us to break down the five states that had the biggest declines in per capita income, More…
Of all the interesting tidbits in Brett Arends’ article in The Wall Street Journal about how to decide whether to walk away from your mortgage, his admission that the middle class is the only part of America adhering to standards of personal financial responsibility might be the most More…
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 More…
Just as the Obama administration prepares its plan to salvage the financial system and help homeowners facing foreclosure, the debate over whether loan modifications actually work is heating up again.
This is a policy argument in which only one thing is certain: no one involved has any idea what More…
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