March 2009 - Around The Web

Commercial real-estate loans are souring at an accelerating pace, threatening to exceed the commercial downturn of the early 1990s.

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said a make-shift tent city for the homeless that sprang up in the capital city of Sacramento will be shut down and its residents allowed to stay at the state fairgrounds.

Earlier today I posted some of new home sales, inventory and months of supply. A few key points: Please do not confuse a bottom in new home sales with a bottom in existing home prices. Please see: New home sales numbers are heavily revised and there is...

The Hope for Homeowners program introduced by the Bush Administration and HUD last year continues to be a major flop, as evidenced by a report from CNN. The foreclosure prevention program, which aims to put borrowers into more affordable loans via principal...

submits: The Mortgage Bankers Association continues its downward spiral. Last summer we wrote about the association’s : brand new HQs constructed, at the top of the market, by former President and CEO Jonathan Kempner. Not helping matters was MBA’s trouble...

From San Francisco Fed President Janet Yellen: . Dr. Yellen does an excellent job of describing the economy (pretty grim comments!), but I'd like to focus on just a short section: With the caveat that my forecast is subject to exceptional uncertainty...

The big-bank model isn’t going to last much longer, banking industry analyst Meredith Whitney said at the Journal’s Future of Finance Initiative , and said a more sustainable approach would be bigger regional banks.

As Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner orchestrated a plan to help the nation's largest banks purge themselves of toxic mortgage assets, Citigroup and Bank of America have been aggressively scooping up those same securities in the secondary market, sources...

California home prices dropped 41 percent last month from a year earlier, more than double the U.S. decline, as surging foreclosures drove down values, the said today. The median price for an existing, single-family detached home in California sank to $247,590 in February from $418,260 a year earlier, the Los Angeles-based group said in a statement. The U.S. median price fell 16 percent during the same period, the second-biggest drop on record, according to the National Association of Realtors.

"Everybody is stalled 100%; the lenders aren't doing anything" with modifications, said Moe Bedard, president of Loan Safe Solutions, a Corona, Calif.-based firm that does mortgage auditing for attorneys. Some shadow inventory may not be...

Washington, March 25, 2009 The American Bankers Association today expressed its concern over the mixed messages that are resulting from the various federal programs designed to address problems with the financial system.

WASHINGTON - Just over a month after President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 into law, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban announced today that, subject to HUD approval, public housing authorities can begin spending...

Sales of newly built U.S. single-family homes unexpectedly rose at their fastest pace in 10 months in February, while prices fell by a record margin from a year ago, a government report showed on Wednesday. The Commerce Department said sales rose 4.7...

When Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner unveiled details of the government's plan to help banks get toxic assets off their balance sheets, the plan got an instant boost when such investment firms as PIMCO and BlackRock expressed enthusiasm over the program...

A number of shopping developments are slated to open this year, even though many will be less extravagant than initially envisioned.

Applications filed to refinance an existing mortgage rose an unadjusted 41.5% last week, compared with the week before, after an announcement by the Federal Reserve caused fixed-rate mortgage rates to fall, according to the latest Mortgage Bankers Association...

Flint Michigan typifies the plight of inner city urban decay. Inquiring minds are wondering what if anything can be done. MLive explores that issue in an article discussing . The view through an abandoned house's broken window looks out on a boarded...

With the IMF expecting world output to shrink by up to 1 per cent this year and the economies of the advanced countries to shrink by between 3 and 3.5 per cent, this is the worst global economic crisis since the 1930s. So far the congressional response...

The once-booming real estate market that made Jorge Perez a billionaire is crumbling around Miami's "condo king" in what may be the biggest U.S. condo glut.

Testimony before the Committee on Financial Services, U.S. House of Representatives, Washington, D.C.