The Wall Street Journal had a very disturbing story on Wednesday about the “Fast and Easy” loan program of Countrywide Financial Corporation, many of whose mortgages were bought up by Fannie Mae.
Category Archives: housing
Peter Hooper on the economic outlook
The speaker at our UCSD Economics Roundtable this week was Peter Hooper, chief economist for Deutsche Bank Securities. Here is a brief summary of his thoughts about the U.S. economic outlook.
Visualizing foreclosures
Via Mortgage News Clips, an interesting interactive map of Denver foreclosures in USA Today.
Maybe not so nonsensical after all
How far will house prices fall? Implications from the latest WSJ survey.
Asking too much of monetary policy
I remember a Federal Reserve economist once recounting a conversation with his young daughter, who asked him, “What do you do at work, Daddy?” He answered, “I help make important decisions.” “What kind of decisions, Daddy?” “Oh, things like how much money the government needs to print.”
House prices falling and worries rising
Today we received updates on U.S. house prices from two different sources. The OFHEO national house price index recorded a 1.3% decline in the price of a typical U.S. home during the fourth quarter of 2007, while the S&P/Case-Shiller home price index registered a 5.7% decline during the last three months of 2007. Here in San Diego, the respective numbers showed a 2.6% decline according to OFHEO and 9.1% decline from Case-Shiller during the quarter. For the year as a whole, Case-Shiller calculates that home prices fell 9.8% nationally and 15% locally.
Tracking home prices in San Diego
Earlier this week, I explained why real estate prices, rather than interest rates or credit workouts, are the critical determinant of how bad the foreclosure problem is going to become. Today I discuss some of the alternative measures of real estate prices that we might look at, illustrated using the latest numbers for my own community here in San Diego.
Project Lifeline
Why “Project Lifeline” is unlikely to help the mortgage mess.
No-doc loans
Just an anecdote, but an interesting one.
A “San Diego-style” recession
Alan Gin is an economics professor at the University of San Diego (a separate institution from the University of California at San Diego, where I teach). His San Diego index of leading economic indicators is sending a pretty strong negative signal.