Another Bear Stearns hedge fund is apparently in trouble. But this one isn’t heavily invested in subprime. And it isn’t leveraged, either. Reuters reports: Bear Stearns’ $850 million Asset-Backed Securities Fund experienced declines in July, prompting some investors to seek redemption of their investments. The investment bank, however, believes the assets in the fund — tied to [...]

The latest S&P/Case-Shiller indix numbers are out today, which showed that the 20-city composite index dropped 2.8 percent in May from year-ago levels — the largest YOY drop in six years. The 10-city composite index dropped 3.4 percent, its largest decrease since 1991. The formal press release is available here. From Bloomberg: The declines indicate that housing will [...]

American Home Mortgage Investment Corp. issued a formal statement this morning confirmed what most in the industry had known since yesterday — that the lender was facing a liquidity crisis that had forced the company to cease funding new loans. In a press release, the company said it is facing what it called “unprecedented” liquidity [...]

IndyMac posted second quarter results this morning, which showed that the Alt-A specialist is feeling the heat from a continued downturn in the housing market. The company reported earnings of $44.6 million in the second quarter of 2007, down 57 percent from the year-ago period; net revenues declined 21 percent, falling to $297.8 million. IndyMac [...]

Following up on a story I posted on last night, C-BASS this morning put out a press release acknowledging liquidity challenges at the scratch-and-dent operation, and said that the company was “exploring all options” in terms of finding additional liquidity. From the press release: While nothing fundamentally has changed at C-BASS, like many other firms in [...]

Per the Wall Street Journal this morning, it looks like the subprime lending crisis is impacting homeownership in a significant way: New data released by the Census Bureau this month put the share of American households that own their own homes at 68.4% in the second quarter. The homeownership rate, which peaked at 69.4% three years [...]

Both Radian and MGIC said late today that more than $1 billion invested by the companies into Credit-Based Asset Servicing and Securitization (C-BASS) is at risk and may be written off due to continuing turmoil in the subprime mortgage markets. C-BASS is probably the single largest scratch-and-dent mortgage operation in the nation. Here’s MGIC’s press release. [...]

HSBC Holdings PLC, Europe’s largest bank, said today that first-half profit rose 25 percent, driven largely by investment gains in China. The gains there were enough to offset continued weakeness in the company’s US-based mortgage lending operation, HSBC Finance, according to the company’s earnings statement. From Bloomberg: HSBC, which has offices in 82 countries, reported higher pretax [...]

In case you needed some validation as to the magnitude of the surge in borrower defaults this year, RealtyTrac’s latest foreclosure report — released today — found that borrower defaults surged 55 percent in the first half of 2007. The RealtyTrac data showed that a total of 925,986 foreclosure filings were reported on 573,397 unique [...]

GMAC Financial Services released second-quarter earnings today, reporting a 63 percent drop in profit due largely to continuing woes at its Residential Capital LLC unit. The company reported quarterly earnings of $293 million, compared with earnings of $787 million a year earlier. In spite of the continued housing pinch, it’s clear that ResCap has righted the [...]