This, from a comment Thursday by one Peter Varhol, deserves its own post:
I’ve lived through a couple of real estate downturns now, and the cause always seems the same – lenders loosen standards (inflated appraisals, mortgages at 105% of selling price, inflating income, etc.) to chase more business. Will they never learn from the
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My new column is up online, and in the gloriously amazingly redesigned new Time (the paper’s thicker, too). It’s now in something called the “Life” section, which until the very last second we were simply calling “Part 3.” It’s accompanied by a photo of me looking slightly glum, or so I thought until I saw Richard Brookhiser positively …
Now I didn’t actually hear what former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan said today down in Boca Raton. But I couldn’t avoid reading about it, given that his words got big play on most of the financial news sites:
In a wide-ranging question-and-answer session at the Futures Industry Association meeting, Greenspan conceded it was “hard to find
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Robert Kuttner‘s big article on the economic future of newspapers in the current Columbia Journalism Review is a must-read–if, that is, you care about the economic future of newspapers.
A couple things stand out. One is Kuttner’s description of the daily reading habits of a certain scarily productive 22-year-old Mainstream Blogger.
I
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As best I can parse it, there are four ways to forecast the economic future. None of them works very well, but each has its uses. And with lots of people right now wondering whether the subprime lending mess and the global stock market jitters presage an economic downturn, I think it might be helpful to trot out my taxonomy (additions, …
This was in today’s W$J:
Seeing growing turmoil in the market for risky home loans as an opportunity, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is looking at pushing deeper into the business, ramping up its own subprime-lending operation and pondering the purchase of another.
To me this is an indication that the subprime mortgage meltdown isn’t going to …
I wrote Tuesday that the latest market-wide numbers on mortgage foreclosures and delinquencies showed them to be at lower levels than in 2002.
But there is a crucial difference between now and then. In 2002, the foreclosures and delinquencies were the product of an economic downturn and this time around they might turn out to be the …
There were a lot of headlines today about the bad news in the Mortgage Bankers Association’s quarterly delinquency survey. Fair enough–mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures are up, and the percentage of loans entering the foreclosure process in the fourth quarter of 2006 (0.54%) was the highest on record.
But still, the overall …
I thought this was interesting, coming as it does from a former chairman of President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers (Greg Mankiw, in case you don’t feel like clicking though).
Mankiw quotes a John McCain interview with National Review in which the Senator declares:
Tax cuts, starting with Kennedy, as we all know, increase
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A couple of weeks before Google announced in October that it was buying YouTube, Mark Cuban famously declared that “anyone who buys [YouTube] is a moron.” Speaking before a group of advertisers in New York, he went on:
They are just breaking the law. The only reason it hasn’t been sued yet is because there is nobody with big money to
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A reader had this to ask about my column on the shrinking federal deficit:
You say: “…federal expenditures are up 19% since 2004, to a projected $2.7 trillion in fiscal 2007 (on the whole, this has been the most spendthrift Administration since Lyndon Johnson’s).”
Yet, most programs that benefit or potentially benefit ordinary
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I shared my views on Halliburton and Dubai over in the Swampland comments section, and one reader asked:
How is that possible? As I understand it, they are working on cost-plus contracts, which means their profit is built in. Now whether it is skimmed off for bribery and malfeasance is another question, but if they purport they are not
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