There’s been some good-ish news on the housing front the past couple of days. First, the National Association of Realtors said that existing-home sales rose 5.1% in February from January (the caveat is that 40-45% of those were distressed sales). Today, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) is saying (PDF) that home prices were up …
This morning the Department of Commerce reported (PDF) that housing starts jumped 22% in February to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 583,000. January’s figure, 477,000, had been a record low. Some commentators are taking the uptick as a sign that the housing market may be bottoming, though other MSM regulars—a couple of whom are …
Yesterday the Fed came out with its quarterly report on household wealth, showing that we were $11 trillion less rich at the end of 2008 than we were at the end of 2007. Our collective wealth has now dropped six quarters in a row—largely due to declines in stock prices and home values. (I should point out that technically this data is …
Yesterday afternoon I wrote a quick piece for Time.com about the great day the stock market had. Here it is. The gist:
The stock price of the beleaguered financial giant Citigroup jumped 38% today, to a whopping $1.45 per share. Shares are now down only 93% from a year ago.
That sort of context might prove useful for thinking about the
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Yesterday the Treasury Department released the specifics about how mortgage servicers are to be coaxed into rewriting loan terms to keep struggling borrowers in their homes. This, as you may recall, is one part of the government new three-pronged housing crisis fix. (The other two are letting some underwater borrowers refinance and using …
The details are out on the government’s trillion-dollar program to spark lending by financing the sale of securitizations. Originally, we were just going to do securities backed by loans to consumers and small businesses, but now we’re also looking to give a boost to loans for heavy industrial equipment, rental-car fleets and …
The number of people claiming unemployment benefits for the first time jumped again last week, to 667,000, with the number of people receiving unemployment for more than one week hitting 5.1 million—the highest percentage of the workforce doing so since July 1983. If you’re tired of hearing those figures go up week after week, you …
Check out this interactive graphic on USAToday.com. As Justin mentioned, I’ve been traveling, which means this morning I read USA Today cover-to-cover. (Thank you, Fairfield Inn!) That’s where I came across this piece, by Brad Heath, which tells us that even in 2007 nearly a tenth of all borrowers were taking on mortgages worth more than …
Justin has a column in the new issue of the magazine (the one with Kate Winslet on the cover) about how rising incomes on Wall Street drove the surge in income inequality. One of the finance professors Justin spoke with makes the argument that Wall Street’s pay bump was largely driven by market forces. That as “the sums of money managed …
Merrill Lynch economist David Rosenberg has found some good news in January’s worse-than-expected 17% drop in housing starts. In a report, he argues that builders have finally pulled the growth rate of new housing supply below the growth rate of new demand—which means we’re entering “a new and final chapter of this unprecedented …
Colleague Steve Gandel wrote a great story. So I asked if he’d be up for blogging about how it came to be. He agreed. Steve writes:
I have a story up on the website today and in the magazine next week about how the government could go about stress testing the banks and what they would find if they did. I got interested in doing the …
I have an idea. It’s an entirely impractical idea. But so is running a democracy where minimizing what you pay in taxes is a badge of honor, as opposed to a blatant shirking of one’s patriotic duty. I might not always like what our government spends money on, but that’s why I vote and get involved and do all those other things that hold …
