In The New York Times, University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan offers some housing-market optimism:
Recent reports on housing starts, new home sales and housing prices show that the housing recovery continues….
Although the housing inventory exceeded the demand in 2007 and 2008, we have known for a while
Charles Smith at Seeking Alpha has an interesting post estimating that the number of people living in their homes but not paying their mortgages — people delinquent on their mortgages, people in foreclosure, strategic defaulters and others — might be as high as 4.4 million. He uses FDIC and More…
RealtyTrac reports that foreclosures reached their highest-ever level in March: “[F]ilings were reported on 367,056 properties in March, an increase of nearly 19 percent from the previous month, an increase of nearly 8 percent from March 2009 and the highest monthly total since RealtyTrac began issuing its report in More…
As a quick follow to Annie’s nice wrap of yesterday’s gathering of the commission investigating the recent financial crack-up, it’s worth noting that Alan Greenspan — once contrite about the “flaw” surrounding his blind trust in free markets — is now making the claim that he’d been More…
To much fanfare, the Obama administration a year ago launched a $75 billion program designed to prevent foreclosures by providing financial incentives to lenders and servicers who modified mortgages to keep them affordable. The program, the White House said, would reach between 3 and 4 million struggling homeowners. More…
A few weeks back, it was the House Oversight Committee’s domestic subpanel that examined the effectiveness of the White House programs designed to curb foreclosures. (They weren’t pleased.) Now, the full committee will have a crack.
Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.), chairman of the Oversight panel, just announced a More…
Long before the financial crisis, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were synonymous with moral hazard in the minds and classrooms of most economists. Everyone (including Fannie and Freddie) believed that if they got into trouble by making risky investments, the government would bail them out. Of course, the feeling that More…
One year after the Obama administration launched its $75 billion anti-foreclosure program, the housing market remains volatile, loan modifications have been scant, foreclosures are still sky-high — and more and more lawmakers are wondering why the White House hasn’t More…
Gretchen Morgenson and Louise Story’s New York Times piece yesterday was a thorough explanation of Goldman Sachs’ machinations that contributed to the collapse of AIG and the government’s perceived need to jump in and pay for everything without negotiating prices.
But unless you’re well-versed in the modern minutiae More…
This time in Memphis. In fact, city officials are so fired up that they’ve filed a lawsuit charging the mortgage-loan giant with discrimination. The New York Times reports:
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Tennessee, marshaled a raft of statistics to argue that Wells Fargo offered one
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