Last week, HW managing director Richard Bitner made the media rounds to tout his new book, Confessions of a Subprime Lender. One of the appearances was on none other than Larry King Live, which means we now officially can say that Larry King has uttered the words "Housing Wire dot com."
Bitner managed to...
Rolfe Winkler at Option ARMageddon questions the wisdom of MBA's recent real estate purchase -- in 2007, the trade group purchased a new office building to house its operations (and pull in some income by leasing to other tenants).
As the market has continued to tank, however, the weakness in real estate has spread into CRE and since left the MBA holding the bag on tenants that have yet to appear....
Katie Porter at Credit Slips has a transcript of a call from a borrower to his servicer (hat tip, Naked Capitalism). See below.
For the record, and contrary to the suggestion being made at Credit Slips (which tends to be a lenders-suck sort of site), there isn't anything really immediately insidious here in terms of the actual...
Sometimes fiction mirrors reality -- read this at the Onion and tell us there wasn't a part of you that said "absolutely."
An excerpt:
A panel of top business leaders testified before Congress about the worsening recession Monday, demanding the government provide Americans with a new irresponsible and largely illusory economic bubble in which to invest.
"What...
Yves Smith writes at Naked Capitalism Tuesday that a pretty significant shift is taking place -- Treasuries are looking similar to senior debt of the GSEs.
From her post:
As we indicated, a deterioration in Treasuries was the likely outcome of affirming the implied Federal backing of Fannie and Freddie debt. And as we said, we might have been able to...
Remarks earlier this week from Secondary Marketing Executive editor Phil Hall have left us wondering how much he really understands about the industry he covers. To wit, from an op-ed published on their own Web site:
I believe that someone (whether within the federal government or in the leadership ranks of the industry) needs to raise the possibility of putting a...
Looks like Bernanke has a reason for concern. Via the Associated Press:
The Labor Department reported that soaring costs for gasoline and food pushed inflation at the wholesale level up by a bigger-than-expected 1.8 percent in June, leaving inflation rising over the past year at the fastest pace in more than a quarter-century.
Over the past 12 months, wholesale prices are up 9.2 percent, the...
Today, a very long look at mortgage insurers graces the front page of the Wall Street Journal, and it finds out what we've already known for some time: that it's the mortgage insurers that are playing the role of final arbiters of credit in a fast-contracting mortgage lending market (at least the part of it not backed by the Federal Housing Administration).
Way back on June 11, Linda Lowell...
Via Peter Viles at the Los Angeles Times, a visual history of then and now.
Then: waiting in line to buy a house in Simi Vallley, circa 2003....
Now: waiting in line to claim at least some deposited funds from failed Indymac Bank,...
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp has temporarily halted any foreclosures on the $15 billion of bank-owned mortgage loans found in IndyMac's portfolio, FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair said on Monday.
Bair said in an interview on CNBC television that IndyMac, which the FDIC took over after it failed on Friday, had a $200 billion mortgage servicing portfolio.
...
