Earlier today I was talking with Donald Grimes, an economist at the University of Michigan, and we got to playing around with some data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. He was making the argument that a lot of the things in the stimulus bill meant to help people whose livelihoods are threatened—things like extending unemployment …
We knew the housing market was bad, especially in Florida, but you’d still think Dick Fuld would be able to get more than a hundred bucks for a house that cost him and his wife $13.75 million less than five years ago.
On Friday, Cityfile.com, a web site that bills itself as “a guide to the most notable and influential New Yorkers,” …
I’ve got a new story on Time.com. It begins:
There’s good news in the housing market—for renters. What you pay is on the way down. The average rent in the U.S. fell by 0.4% in the last three months of 2008, according to a survey of large apartment buildings in 79 metro markets by the real estate analytics firm Reis. Even though
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In the past 20 minutes two different friends have emailed me to say they’re about to gather in their corporate auditoriums to watch the inauguration. We’ve got that going on here at Time Inc., too, though, you’ll notice, I’m still working away. Someone’s got to keep an eye on labor productivity.
For slightly more informed inauguration …
In October, JP Morgan Chase said that it would start more aggressively changing the terms of home loans in order to try to prevent foreclosures. At the time, I wondered if this might be taken as a sign that the free market still works—that federal programs forcing servicers to rewrite mortgages in order to keep them affordable might …
Freddie Mac said today that the average rate on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage is down to 4.96%, the lowest rate on record (their records go back to 1971). In recent weeks, low mortgage rates have kicked up applications to refinance, though that’s not translating too smoothly into actual refis. This morning the WSJ had a great figure from …
Here is the smartest thing I’ve read yet about how to stabilize the housing market through loan modifications. If you want the short version, check out the testimony Columbia Business School’s Christopher Mayer gave in front of the House financial services committee on Tuesday.
The argument, made with colleagues Edward Morrison (from …
All day long the top story on Time.com has been this one about a spike in shark attacks in Australia. It starts:
Swimmers at Australian beaches are usually reassured by statistics that indicate they are more likely to be struck by lightning than chomped by a shark. But after three non-fatal shark attacks in the country in less than 48
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Here’s a link to a story I wrote about how our puny human brains aren’t particularly up to the task of comprehending big numbers—e.g., $700 billion bailout, $1.2 trillion deficit—and what we can do about it. The piece is designed to be accessible to a broad audience, so I stuck with back-of-the-envelope math that you don’t have to …
Mortgage servicers (who in many cases are also the original lenders) have long been saying they can’t simply cut interest rates or reduce principal balances on loans to help people avoid foreclosure, because they’ll get sued by investors in mortgage-related securities. I find it interesting that this argument has been largely absent from …
A reader has asked me to link to this article about what price-rent ratios are telling us about the state of the housing market. Price-rent ratio is basically the price of a house divided by the cost of renting an apartment—a measure of whether houses are more expensive than they should be. Here’s a taste:
At first pass, the data
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UPDATE: Justin rings in with a story on Time.com.
The spate of retailers reporting devastating December sales this morning provided a nice backdrop for President-elect Obama’s speech in Virginia about why we need to spend another $775 billion to fix the economy. About 40% of that sum comes in the form of tax cuts, but the bulk of the …
