Who dominates the U.S. mortgage market? Well, depends when you’re asking. I spent some time today playing with the Federal Reserve’s Flow of Funds data on home mortgage lending. Here’s what I found. First, the long-term picture: Graphic by Feilding Cage/TIME.com As you can see, thrifts (savings & loan companies and savings banks) were the [...]
The new Onion article “Recession-Plagued Nation Demands New Bubble To Invest In” is all over the Internets this afternoon. What I haven’t seen mentioned is that Eric Janszen of iTulip already made the same point more or less seriously in the pages of Harper’s in February. First, the Onion: WASHINGTON—A panel of top business leaders [...]
Why didn’t the Fannie-Freddie semi-rescue-plan announced over the weekend reassure the stock market? It wasn’t really meant to reassure the stock market. It was meant to keep the investors around the world who buy the bonds and mortgage-backed securities issued by the two companies from freaking out, and seems to have succeeded on that front [...]
Here’s a fun fact for the day, derived by Harm Bandholz of Unicredit from the Fed’s latest Flow of Funds data: Since the beginning of the financial crisis in mid-2007, … 130% of all newly issued home mortgages were financed by GSEs. GSEs mean government-sponsored enterprises, which mean Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the explicitly [...]
