We'd heard rumors about this, via MarketWatch:
Washington Mutual said Thursday that it is cutting 1,200 more jobs as part of the lender's efforts to reduce costs and return to profitability. More than half of the job cuts -- 775 positions -- are in California and Florida, two formerly booming real estate markets that have been hit hard...
A secondary mortgage market expert I think extremely highly of emailed me last night with the following terse take on the state of the financial markets:
I think we're on the cusp of another sewer break on the news front ... get your waders on ...
No kidding. While March may have represented the worst of the credit crunch thus far, May and June are looking to shape up as particularly troublesome for a side of the mortgage market that, so far, has seen...
No, no that Paulson. Instead, we're talking about John Paulson, the hedge fund manager that moved to the top of the class by shorting subprime in 2007 -- and the now-iconic investor thinks the crisis yet has legs.
At the GAIM International 2008 hedge fund conference in Monaco, Paulson said a recession was coming, and that a huge opportunity in distressed debt was on the horizon....
News that Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT), chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, allegedly received a sweetheart mortgage deal from Countrywide's tan-man CEO Angelo Mozilo has sent the good Senator into outright denial mode.
And one that might even be considered humorous, too:
At a tense news...
It's bad enough these days to be an out-of-work former bank CEO. But it's just adding insult to injury whenever a former bank CEO can't sell his house, isn't it?
Perhaps. It also might be a form of poetic justice, but that's not for us to decide.
We bring this up, because the word out of New York today is that former Citi chief Chuck Prince III is having a hard time unloading his 2.3 acre mansion in gilded Greenwich....
Last June, James M. Weichert went boldly on record calling the bottom in housing.
This June, the namesake of Weichert, Realtors is at it again. Tuesday, the now-is-a-great-time-to-buy! poster child went on record -- again -- calling right now the bottom of the real estate market.
From the boldly-worded, yet apparently also amnesia-ridden,...
The Orange County Register's Mathew Padilla notes that foreclosures in Orange County -- which includes such glamorous spots as Newport Beach and Laguna Beach -- are soaring. In fact, it only took the first five months of 2008 to surpass the total number of foreclosures filed during all of 2007.
A look at a scary graph that would be good news if it were profits, and not foreclosures:...
File this under too good to pass up: it turns out the National Association of Realtors got their quarterly sales numbers wrong in New Jersey, and not just by a little bit. On May 13, the NAR's first quarter sales summary was released with the requisite highlighting of those few remaining "pockets of strength" in key metropolitan areas.
One such area was New Jersey, which apparently had seen sales jump 4 percent on a year-over-year basis. Except for one problem: they didn't.
...
Here's an interesting thought: walking away from your unaffordable mortgage might actually prop up consumer spending. At least, that's the conclusion of Tom Lee, chief U.S. equity strategist at JPMorgan Securities.
"In a perverse way, people who are leaving homes are actually helping the consumer spending picture," Lee told the Reuters Investment...
If you haven't figured it out just yet, the second quarter earnings about to be reported by more traditional banks and Wall Street's i-banks isn't exactly shaping up to be a pretty one. The latest case in point are woes at Cleveland-based regional bank KeyCorp, which shook up the financial headlines this week with news that it would raise $1.5 billion in capital and cut its dividend.
What's amusing...
