Bank Of America (BAC): An Audacious Plan To Pay Back The Government
Bank of America (BAC) is hinting strongly that it plans to pay back the US government the $45 billion that it owes by the end of this year. Bank stress tests showed that B…
Housing
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Newest first · Page 204The Joy Of Reading The Minutes Of The Federal Open Market Committee
The FOMC minutes are like most other documents produced inside the government’s bureaucracy. The bulk of the information has been gathered long before the report reaches the public. In the case of the Fed’s…
Vulture Investors May Be The Key To Arresting Falling Home Prices
The housing market and housing starts are still facing deep and intractable problems. Mortgage rates may be low, but bank standards for home loans are higher. No financial firm wants to be stuck owning…
A Twist of Fate in Housing Starts
April Housing Starts just came in 458,000 on an annualized basis, which represents a drop of 12.8%. The March data was also revised from 510,000 to 525,000 annualized. What is interesting is the multi-family…
Foreclosures Soar In April
Foreclosures took a frightening jump up in April. A report from RealtyTrac says that the number moved up 32% over April of last year and hit 342,038. Homes defaults and auctions rose 47% over…
Will Renting Be The Undoing Of Home Prices?
CNBC ran a brief segment on the number of people who have decided to rent homes and apartments rather than buy them. The point of the reporting was simple. People who need to move…
Twenty Percent Of Homes Now Underwater
Warren Buffett and Ben Bernanke may believe that housing prices are stabilizing, but the number of Americans who owe more on their mortgages is growing. Those people are certainly more likely to default on…
Despite Signs To The Contrary, Real Estate Will Get Worse
Warren Buffett said that the real estate business his company Berkshire Hathaway owns is seeing a small improvement in housing demand. The National Association of Realtors seemed to confirm his observations when it announced…
Pending Home Sales Show Great Comfort (XHB)
If you are an investor or a buyer in the market for a new home or if you are a homebuilder, there may be some good news after waves and waves of bad news…
Home Sales Show No Sign Of Recovery As Mortgage Rates Hit New Lows
Freddie Mac (FRE) reports that mortgage rates are at record lows with 30-year fixed-rate loans down to 4.78% The drop does not seem to be doing much for the housing market. Recent data released…
Case-Shiller: Just Being Less Poor In Housing Prices (XHB)
There is some good news on the housing front, although this “good news” may only be a relative issue and we are having to go back to February in this data. The S&P/Case-Shiller home-price…
Will The Fed Finally Move Interest Rates Below Zero
Over the last year, there has been speculation that the Fed would drop interest rates below zero, paying its borrowers to take money. Analysts believe that credit is so tight that even with interest…
Homebuilder ETFs Run On Housing Data (XHB, ITB)
The new home sales data is showing a very mixed bag, with a bit of a positive twist to it. We are seeing a run up in the SPDR S&P Homebuilders (NYSE: XHB) and…
Some Relief In Homebuilder Data (XHB)
The National Association of Home Builders monthly index for this month took a huge leap from 9 to 14 to get the index out of single digit territory and at a 6-month high. The…
Big Banks Work To Crater US Housing Market (JPM)(WFC)
After all of the assistance that the government has given large banks, the least that the firms can do is extend liberal terms to homeowners to support the housing market. According to The Wall Street…