Yves here. It’s been astonishing to see members of the Fed in denial about their own handiwork, so when St. Louis Fed President James Bullard berates his fellow central bankers for their abject refusal to notice pre-crisis bubbles, it’s an all too rare departure from their usual insularity and willful blindness.
Read more...Larry Summers, like Tim Geithner, wants the public to believe that rescuing banks and leaving citizens to rot was the right crisis response. But neither experts, nor people who followed the crisis, nor voters at large are buying what Team Obama is trying to sell.
Read more...Yves here. Ilargi is duly skeptical of the enthusiastic financial press response to an increase in home equity liquidation, um, borrowing using home equity lines of credit, or Helocs. While the party line is that this development reflects an rise in home equity and increased consumer confidence, Ilargi stresses that prices appreciation that the Fed has created, the Fed can also take away. I have to wonder how many of these Heloc borrowers are doing so out of necessity or near-desperation.
Read more...One of the side effects of QE is that housing prices and sales levels for the top 1% in most markets are strong, while activity in the rest of the market is falling.
Read more...Student loans are a millstone that is crushing college educated young adults, and with them, key parts of the economy.
Read more...How Blackstone’ single family home rental business, Invitation Homes, is proving to be more slumlord than landlord.
Read more...Last time, all that craziness was called a “housing bubble” with hindsight. This time, it’s called a “housing recovery.”
Read more...I’m a little surprised at the overly coded reporting at the New York Times and particularly the Wall Street Journal, where Nick Timiraos provides top-notch coverage on the mortgage beat, on the implications of the failure of a widely-touted, Administration-backed GSE reform bill to get out of the Senate Banking Committee. Basically, it confirms what I’ve long believed but refrained from writing about, namely, that government sponsored enterprise, aka, GSE reform, was not going to get done in this session of Congress.
Read more...At this point, it seems hard to add insult to injury, given the terrible track record of the OCC Independent Foreclosure Reviews. But it’s nevertheless been done.
Read more...An article by Kate Berry in American Banker earlier this week hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves. Anyone who was paying attention to the mortgage beat in 2010 through 2012 knew that mortgage securitization originators and servicers were playing fast and loose with critical documents like mortgage notes because they couldn’t be bothered to observe […]
Read more...Private equity firms have been hoovering up houses all over the US to convert into rentals. But they were active in the New York City rental market before their big buying spree, and that experience gives a window on how they are likely to behave as landlords.
Read more...The yawning gap between private equity landlord sales talk and what they are delivering is finally being exposed.
Read more...I once had a good opinion of bank analyst Chris Whalen, despite having some reservations about him. But his error-filled screed against mortgage servicing regulations means he can no longer be taken seriously on the subject of banking. Whalen has become a textbook illustration of the Upton Sinclair saying, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Read more...Never underestimate the willingness of banks to find new and creative ways to cheat customers, particularly when big bucks are at stake.
Read more...It’s good to see that a lawsuit providing critical new evidence of systematic foreclosure abuses is getting the attention it warrants.
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