In America, housing IS the economy – The Automatic Earth
During the past one or two decades, America’s economy has been, and increasingly so as it went along, dependent on the housing market. Homeowners and -buyers got to feel like they were making money every day just living in a home, brokers were raking in cash selling more and faster then they ever would have thought possible, and Wall Street took all that ant-like activity and leveraged it up the hilt in securities and other “innovative instruments”.
Why another fiscal stimulus won’t do – Mohamed El-Arian
In sum, the current policy approaches here and abroad are unlikely to deliver a durable and robust U.S. recovery and, critically, create sufficient growth in jobs. Yet the main debate in Washington is whether to do more of the same — namely, another fiscal stimulus and another round of quantitative easing by the Federal Reserve. This clearly conflicts with evidence that a broader and more holistic response is needed.
Marques claimed that he could sue Wells Fargo for breach of contract, referring to the contract between the federal government and the HAMP participating servicers, because he argued that he… and in fact all eligible homeowners in this country, are “intended third party beneficiaries” to that contract.
Wells Fargo’s lawyers said a bunch of stuff, but to paraphrase they basically said, “Noooooooooooooooo!”
US Bond: Our Hearts Belong to Big Daddy – Jesse
As crowded trades go this flight to safety trade into the long end of the curve and the 30 Year Bond, Big Daddy, is about as jammed up as it gets. It will be interesting to see what happens with the equity markets over the next two to three months given this measure of fear and uncertainty.
Why Are Home Sales Plummeting? – Washington’s Blog
Instead of fixing the real problems with our economy or genuinely helping struggling homeowners, the government has made everything worse by trying to artificially prop up asset prices in a way that only helps the big banks.
Banks’ Self-Dealing Super-Charged Financial Crisis – ProPublica
They created fake demand.
The Case Against Homeownership – Time Magazine
Perhaps worst of all, it helped us become casually self-deceiving: by telling ourselves that homeownership was a pathway to wealth and stable communities and better test scores, we avoided dealing with these formidable issues head-on.
Housing market continues to decline – Christian Science Monitor
If we are smart, we will finally embrace the notion of unfettered market clearing and reject government intervention in a process that is CLEARLY out of the control of the whims of Washington Bureaucrats, Keynesian do-gooders and interested industry groups.
The housing double-dip and real “organic” trends are back and with them come a major dose of REALITY.
Does the Recovery Depend on Housing? - NYT
The basic story is very simple. For a hundred years, from 1896 to 1996, nationwide house prices just tracked the overall rate of inflation. This is a very long period in a very big market. If we see a trend like this persist for a hundred years it is reasonable to expect it to continue into the future, unless something big in the fundamentals changes. And, no one has produced any evidence that passes the laugh test that anything in the fundamentals of the housing market has changed.
This means that we should expect house prices to continue to fall, with nationwide prices dropping another 15 to 20 percent to complete the process of deflating the bubble. This price decline is inevitable and in many ways desirable. I don’t know why any of us would be happy if our kids had to pay more to buy their first house.
Procrastination on Foreclosures, Now ‘Blatant,’ May Backfire – American Banker
Ever since the housing collapse began, market seers have warned of a coming wave of foreclosures that would make the already heightened activity look like a trickle.
The dam would break when moratoriums ended, teaser rates expired, modifications failed and banks finally trained the army of specialists needed to process the volume.
But the flood hasn’t happened. The simple reason is that servicers are not initiating or processing foreclosures at the pace they could be.
