No, not that sell-side. Think real estate. Think realtors, home builders, the people who have to make a sale to justify their very existence — the same groups now pushing Congress and Treasury to consider installing teaser mortgage rates in an effort to entice borrowers back into housing.
Via the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, we’re not making this up:
Large builders like Toll Brothers and real estate companies like Realogy Inc., the owner of thousands of Coldwell Banker and Century 21 offices, and now the National Association of Realtors, want the federal government to cut mortgage rates to 4.5 percent or less — for home home sales up to $1 million.
“Our research indicates that an interest rate deduction of just one percentage point could result in as many as 840,000 additional... more»
… make sure you read this, from Michael Lewis. A tour de force — consider:
Steve Eisman had become a poorly kept secret. Five hundred people called in to hear what he had to say, and another 500 logged on afterward to listen to a recording of it. He explained the strange alchemy of the C.D.O. and said that he expected losses of up to $300 billion from this sliver of the market alone. To evaluate the situation, he urged his audience to “just throw your model in the garbage can. The models are all backward-looking.
The models don’t have any idea of what this world has become…. For the first time in their lives, people in the asset-backed-securitization world are actually having to think.” He explained that the rating agencies were morally bankrupt and living in fear of becoming... more»
As you read this, your dollars are being spent. Your dollars are being put to lend $2 trillion to unnamed, faceless financial institutions that ponied up God-knows-what as collateral to get it — and your dollars are on the line for the mortgage assets of Bear Stearns, too. If that’s not enough, your dollars are also now on the line for a just-announced SIV that will be buying up multi-sector worthless CDOs in the latest — but mark my words, not the last — effort to keep AIG afloat and the CDS market alive.
Which makes the lawsuit Bloomberg is bringing against the Federal Reserve one that every single one of us should be rooting for:
The Federal Reserve is refusing to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of emergency loans from American taxpayers or the troubled... more»
Via the Federal Reserve:
The Federal Reserve Board on Monday announced its approval of the applications and notices under sections 3 and 4 of the Bank Holding Company Act by American Express Company and American Express Travel Related Services Company, Inc., both of New York, New York, to become bank holding companies on conversion of American Express Centurion Bank, Salt Lake City, Utah, to a bank, and to retain certain nonbanking subsidiaries, including American Express Bank, FSB, Salt Lake City, Utah.
Everyone is moving into the FDIC’s purview, and at HW, we don’t think that’s a mistake.
From the WSJ:
Troubled electronics retailer Circuit City Stores Inc. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Monday in an effort to stay ahead of lenders owed $898 million.
With going-out-of-business sales already in full swing at about 20% of its outlets, the nation’s second-largest consumer electronics chain by revenue says it has an immediate need for financing.
The company cited erosion of vendor confidence and consumer retreat in the face of the global economic crisis for the bankruptcy filing.
The housing mess is now a full-blown blowup in consumer debt.
We’ve read a lot of speculation lately about what an Obama Administration will look like and how it will affect the housing industry. We’re beginning to form our own opinions, but we’re not quite ready to go to editorial with them.
Now we’re turning to you, our readers, in the final hours of production on the next print issue of HousingWire. We want to know what you think about Obama’s housing policies.
Click here to fill out the survey and have your voice included in the upcoming print issue, as well as an online story in the next day or so. Remember to give us your full name, e-mail address and location in order to be considered for inclusion.
Be quick, though. We’re entering eleventh-hour territory here.
The OC Register’s Jon Lansner has a great post up this morning that looks at the states Obama carried versus McCain, and the relative price declines and foreclosures in each, using data from First American CoreLogic. In total, he suggests that states representing nearly 80 percent of the nation’s foreclosure mess went to Obama:
Obama
McCain
No call
States (+DC) won
28
22
1
Electoral votes
349
174
15
Avg. home price
-9.4%
-1.3%
0.7%
Foreclosure share
79.3%
19.3%
1.4%
And that may be the hidden subtext here of the entire election: It was these states that saw Democratic voters turn out in droves, despite the fact that McCain performed nearly as well as Bush did in 2004 in terms of Republican support.
I’d personally suggested for nearly six months that the... more»
