The stimulus package has failed to halt the rise of unemployment and has done little to improve investment spending by businesses. Real estate prices are still dropping and the default rates on credit cards…
Analysts who thinks that the housing market may rebound this summer better think again. Home sales have been slow and now there is evidence that homeowners are having so little success moving their residences that…
The Administration has gone to great lengths to put together a package of programs to allow worthy homeowners who are having trouble meeting their mortgages to modify home loans to cut monthly payments. This allows…
Any time you have three economic reports hitting at once, you have a risk for confusion or for diverging data. That is the case today as the Institute for Supply Management gave the June…
Thursday is shaping up to be a miniature one-day version earnings season this week. This is likely the last of the major earnings reports we’ll see for another three or four weeks until the…
The data on new home sales for the month of May is going to be a disappointment even for the green shoots crowd, at least on the surface. Sales of new homes in May…
A huge number of home value appraisals may be wrong, with most of them being much too high. That is causing banks to back away from mortgages. A house that has been appraised for…
While existing home sales are not a true barometer of new home sales, there was at least a bump up in existing home sales for May. This rise of 2.4% to 4.77 million annualized…
There is a study from the Mortgage Bankers Association showing that the outlook for the mortgage market in 2009 is going to be weaker than it previously expected. Not by a bit, either. The…
It is a nifty, logical, and overly optimistic theory. Housing demand will rise as the children of the baby boomers hit their late twenties and thirties and need homes where they can raise their offspring. According to…
Housing Starts came in much better than expected, on the surface. We saw a reading of 532,000 on housing starts on an annual basis. This is a gain of 17.2% and we were only…
The confidence among home builders looked like it was creeping higher, but the most recent data from the National Association of Home Builders showed a decrease in June. This drop put the index down…
Large credit rating agency Equifax believes that the rate at which mortgage delinquencies have been rising has moderated and may have found a bottom. According to Reuters, “While the year-over-year increase is dramatic, the…
The optimist’s view of the May foreclosure data from RealtyTrac is that the rate dropped 6% from April. The realist’s view is likely to focus on the 18% increase from May 2008. Neither view…
The Federal Reserve’s Beige Book is noting improvements in most local economies, although as you might expect there is the normal pause or caution still underlying the combined reports. The overall economy was still…