Global Market Commentary, Analysis and Investments
The Zombie Triumph of 2008…
We’re writing ahead of the close on Monday…stocks are up, but we’ll have to wait to find out how it turns out. We’re writing earlier than usual because we have to head back to France, to a funeral, alas. The burial will take place in Pere Lachaise cemetery…which we’ll tell you about.
[Read more...]The foreclosures that led to financial crisis began with homeowners falling behind on their mortgage payments. Yet, have all the factors behind the foreclosures been uncovered?
To date, much of the blame has been assigned to predatory lenders. However, a new and strikingly simple finding explains another significant factor. The Atlanta Federal Reserve has recently released a paper that shows that the numerical skill of homeowners has a meaningful impact on the rate at which they fell behind on mortgage payments.
[Read more...]Poor Ol’ Goldman…
Just trying to do ‘God’s work’…
And everybody treats it like the devil.
The Washington Post yesterday carried a front-page headline, portraying the firm as though it was Satan himself:
“Cheers at Goldman as housing market fell.”
[Read more...]There’s been ample speculation of late about the possibility of a huge bubble forming in China’s residential real estate market. Today, US Global Investors’ director of research John Derrick and senior china analyst Michael Ding argue why that may not be the case at all.
From the Frank Talk blog:
[Read more...]FICO, the outfit that computes your vaunted “credit score,” has just noticed that consumers with high scores are more likely to default on their mortgages than their credit cards.
Last year, the firm says, folks with FICO scores of 760 or higher defaulted on real estate loans at three times the pace they defaulted on plastic.
[Read more...]The first time I spoke with real estate entrepreneur Andy Miller was in late 2007, when I asked him to serve on the faculty of a Casey Research Summit. And there was no one in the nation I wanted more than Andy to address the critical topic of real estate.
My interest in Andy was due to the fact that he has been singularly successful in pretty much all aspects of the real estate market, including financing and developing large projects – such as shopping centers, apartment communities, office buildings, and warehouses – from one end of the country to the other. His expertise has also allowed him to build an impressive business providing assistance to large financial institutions that need help in dealing with problem commercial real estate loans. As you might suspect, business is booming.
[Read more...]Earlier today we looked at how the housing market is teetering atop artificially created price levels engineered through bailout and stimulus. Now, we turn our attention to the official evidence of it. In its latest Quarterly Report to Congress (pdf), the Office of the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP) documents how, “Supporting home prices is an explicit policy goal of the Government.”
[Read more...]Back in the height of the bubble, just three short years ago, this plot of land, glass and concrete represented the biggest real estate deal in US history:
World’s biggest foreclosure?
The chill that has settled down on us here in the Midwest, has tried to settle in on the currencies going into the end of the year… But… Here we are, it’s 2010, a new year, and new ideas for the currencies… We’ll have to wait-n-see what comes out this week and next, for there will be plenty of pundits, analysts, writers, and so on, that come out with their forecasts for 2010… Me? The song remains the same, folks… Fundamentally speaking, there’s only one direction the dollar should go… But, then, we need to get to fundamentals again, eh?
[Read more...]
S&P On the Kill List
“Paybacks are a bitch,” as they say.
What was Standard & Poor’s thinking back in August 2011, when the ratings agency took the Red, White, and Blue’s AAA rating away? A rating the most powerful government in the history of the world had held for 70 years. S&P downgraded long-term US debt to AA-plus. That score ranks lower than over a dozen governments, including Liechtenstein’s, and is level with Guernsey’s and France’s.
[Read more...]Click for detailed story