For some reason the Countrywide brand doesn’t have quite the place in America’s heart that it used to. Since Bank of America bought the beleaguered mortgage giant in January 2008, consumer surveys have shown public opinion go from good to bad to worse. So today B of A jettisons the Countrywide brand. We are all Bank of America Home Loans …
I’m starting to report a story about how the Obama Administration’s plans to save the housing market are playing out (if you have any inside information on that, let me know). One of the first things I’ve figured out is that I’ve failed to keep you up-to-date on our government’s generation of funny crisis-related acronyms. For a while …
I know we know that weekly unemployment claims bounce around a lot and that we shouldn’t freak out too much that they have, again, climbed higher. The Department of Labor does a good job of underscoring that by always highlighting the figure’s four-week moving average—which for the week ending April 18 fell by 4,250, to 646,750.
This …
The attorney general of Michigan thinks that if GM or Chrysler file for bankruptcy protection, they should do so in the state of Michigan. Seems he sent a letter (PDF) to the two companies about that. This is my favorite part:
I am gravely concerned about the impact of any bankruptcy filing in a jurisdiction outside Michigan. Since
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I have a story up on Time.com which Justin called “actually really interesting.” I thought that was “actually really insightful” on his part, so I decided to do a post. The story begins:
General Motors desperately wants to avoid bankruptcy. But at the same time the automaker is preparing for that possibility. One thing on the to-do list:
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One of my favorite things about American industriousness is how often we use it to bilk each other out of money. Today a bunch of federal agencies and the Illinois attorney general announced that they’re going after a rash of mortgage modification frauds and foreclosure scams. From the AP story:
Government officials said Monday that
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The last time the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) came out with a report on mortgage servicers changing the terms of loans to try to keep people in their homes, the headline was, You can try to help folks out, but chances are, they’re just going to miss payments again anyway. This …
I’ve been flipping through the images of the NYTimes.com’s Picturing the Recession project. Folks from around the world are sending in photographs that show how the recession is playing out in their neck of the woods.
I got to a shot of people waiting in line for a Philadelphia check-cashing shop to open up for the day, and I had a …
I wrote a story for Time.com. It begins:
As the economic slump persists, companies are becoming stingier with the severance packages they offer laid-off workers. At the same time, more employees are asking their firms to tweak the terms of their parting pay — a shot to get more as they head for the door…
The landscape of severance
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One of the big constituencies involved in negotiating GM’s fate is, of course, GM bondholders. Last I read, GM was looking for its bondholders to turn in at least two-thirds of their debt in exchange for equity and new debt. Ford, that anomalously self-sufficient American car company, is reducing its debtload, too—buying back or …
Since I’m a big fan of charts showing asset-backed security issuance, I was quite excited when Justin pointed out this set of graphics. Especially since they indicate that the rest of the world has, for the most part, escaped the more serious ABS fall-off we’ve had in the States. Check it out:
The folks at this web site used the data …
As part of my ongoing effort to give publicity to interest in companies selling people things contingent on those people remaining employed, I’d like to call your attention to this Seattle Times story about a condo developer that will pay your mortgage for six months if you lose your job. Probably has something to do with the fact that …
