Diana Olick found some interesting stats on the it offered: * 1.76 million taxpayers have filed for this credit in 2008 and 2009 * $12.45 billion in credit has been claimed * It appears as though the share of the homebuyer market consisting of first-time buyers topped out in November at almost 50% For more on our thoughts on this government subsidy and how it is affecting the market, see our recent post “The Anatomy of a Housing Bottom“.

Will it be another jobless economic recovery, like after the last recession? Or will the labor market bounce back strongly, as it did after the downturns of the 1970s and 1980s? Perhaps it will be a bit of both, concludes being presented Thursday at the by economists Michael Elsby of the University of Michigan , Bart Hobijn of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank and Ayşegűl Şahin of the New York Federal Reserve Bank . The labor market languished after the 2001 recession, with job losses continuing until late 2003. That experience, along with the tepid job market recovery following the 1990-91 recession, convinced many economists that something had changed about the economy and that in the wake of modern recessions, job growth was much slower in the past. But the economists’ research suggests that what was really different about the 1990-91 and the 2001 recessions wasn’t so much that they were modern, but that they were shallow. Job losses in shallow recessions, they argue, are driven primarily by a slowdown in the rate of hiring, as opposed to layoffs. In severe recessions, job losses have historically been driven by both layoffs and a drop in the rate of hiring, with the drop in hiring persisting longer than the increase in layoffs. The latter appears to be what’s happened this time around. So there’s a case to be made that the jobs rebound — which many economists expect will begin to register in the March employment figures — will be bigger this time than after 2001. But the economists also note that the labor market behaved in the early part of the recession much as it did in past recessions, it has begun to look different in the past several months. “The record rise in long-term unemployment… is likely to yield a persistent overhang of workers facing long unemployment spells, slowing the recovery,” they say. The extension of unemployment compensation “is likely to have led to a modest increase in long-term unemployment,” they add. The long-term unemployed typically...

"We have all heard complaints concerning appraised values being lower than selling prices in today’s recessionary environment. The buyer wants to buy a property and the lender wants to make a loan, but the appraisal stands in the way. There...

The Fed's favorite house price indicator from First American CoreLogic’s LoanPerformance ... From LoanPerformance: National home prices, including distressed sales, declined by 0.7 percent in January 2010 compared to January 2009, according to First American CoreLogic and its LoanPerformance Home Price Index (HPI). This was a significant improvement over December’s year-over-year price decline of 3.4 percent. Excluding distressed sales, year-over-year prices declined in January by 0.4 percent; while in December the non-distressed HPI fell by 3.3 percent year-over-year. Compared to a year ago, the month-to-month rate of decline is lessening – in January 2009, the HPI showed the largest one month decline in its more than 30-year history. On a month-over-month basis, the national average home price index decline accelerated, falling by 1.9 percent in January 2010 compared to 0.8 percent in December 2009, indicating the housing market still remains weak. Click on graph for larger image in new window. This graph shows the national LoanPerformance data since 1976. January 2000 = 100. The index is off 0.7% over the last year, and off 29% from the peak. The index has declined for five consecutive months.

Anton Troianovski/The Wall Street Journal This 2,700-square-foot house in Colorado is made of 17,000 old tires. Our story on today takes a look at how folks who want to build or buy homes with unusual materials are having a lot of trouble getting financing because underwriting standards are much tighter today. The problem: homes made of tires or houses caved into mountainsides don’t have any comparable sales. Without “comps,” banks won’t lend. Even home buyers living in regular homes might be more familiar with these struggles. Appraisals have emerged as a big obstacle for homeowners of all types during the housing downturn because with fewer transactions and rapid fluctuations in prices, putting a value on homes is more difficult. In some markets, prices are falling so fast that lenders won’t accept comparable sales that are more than three months old. And reeling from rising losses, lenders have urged appraisers to be conservative. Appraisals are designed to protect homeowners from overpaying for homes, but many agents and builders say that the pendulum has in the other direction. Lou Barnes, a mortgage banker in Boulder, Colo., says that tough appraisal rules, more than stringent underwriting guidelines, have made it much harder to get mortgages for million-dollar homes. Those homes don’t sell often as it is, and banks are requiring a tighter radius and narrower time frame for acceptable comps. Off-grid and specialty construction homes have long faced a challenging financing environment, but agents say that things today are unlike anything they’ve seen. “Dome financing has tightened up so much,” says Neal Langholz, a real-estate agent in Santa Cruz, Calif., which has a sizeable market for eccentric homes. “Now the lenders want to see more standard housing and more standard shapes—rectangles and squares.” Last fall, he sold a domed three-bedroom home in Aptos, a coastal hamlet, for $480,000, around $100,000 less than what the home sold for two years ago. He pulled...

Manufacturing in the Philadelphia region expanded in March at the fastest pace so far this year as factories lead the U.S. economic recovery.

From Binyamin Appelbaum and David Cho at the WaPo: [H]undreds of community banks have yet to return their bailouts. More than 10 percent of the 700 banks that got federal bailouts and are still holding the money even failed to pay the government a quarterly dividend in February. The list of 82 delinquent banks is significantly longer than the 55 banks that failed to make payments in November, according to an analysis by Linus Wilson, a finance professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Wilson calculated that the missed payments totaled $78.1 million in February and that banks now have missed a total of $205 million in dividend payments to the government. Many of the community banks still holding aid from the Troubled Assets Relief Program are struggling with losses on real estate development loans. Here is the from the Treasury. And in excel format under . There are three permanent deadbeats on the list: CIT Group (filed bankruptcy and wiped out its $2.3 billion in TARP debt), UCBH Holdings Inc. was seized by the FDIC (TARP lost $298.7 million), and Pacific Coast National Bank was also seized by the FDIC (TARP lost $4.1 million).

Two years after the Bear Sterns rescue and 18 months after Lehman Brothers' bankruptcy, Congress moves closer to passing legislation to renovate the financial-regulatory system—finally.

Click on graph for larger image in new window. A frequently asked question is how do new home sales compare to single family housing starts (both series from the Census Bureau). This graph shows the two series - although they track each other, the two series cannot be directly compared. For starts of single family structures, the Census Bureau includes owner built units and units built for rent that are not included in the new home sales report. From the Census Bureau: We are often asked why the numbers of new single-family housing units started and completed each month are larger than the number of new homes sold. This is because all new single-family houses are measured as part of the New Residential Construction series (starts and completions), but only those that are built for sale are included in the New Residential Sales series. We categorize new residential construction into four intents, or purposes: Built for sale (or speculatively built): the builder is offering the house and the developed lot for sale as one transaction this includes houses where ownership of the entire property including the land is acquired ("fee simple") as well as houses sold for cooperative or condominium ownership. These are the units measured in the New Residential Sales series. Contractor-built (or custom-built): the house is built for the landowner by a general contractor, or the land and the house are purchased in separate transactions. Owner-built: the house is built entirely by the landowner or by the landowner acting as his/her own general contractor. Built for rent: the house is built with the intent that it be placed on the rental market when it is completed. However it is possible to compare "Single Family Starts, Built for Sale" to New Home sales on a quarterly basis. The showed that there were 71,000 single family starts, built for sale, in Q4 2009, and that is less than the 82,000 new homes sold for the same period. This data is Not Seasonally Adjusted...

submits: Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has warned that the Federal Reserve’s decision to end its $1.4 trillion mortgage debt purchase program this month is going to worsen the slump in the US housing market by driving up interest rates. There has been no recovery in the US housing market this year, the biggest item of expenditure in the world’s biggest consumer market. New home and previously owned home sales are still falling. House prices continue to fall.

Who in our lifetime would have thought that owning a home, the largest financial investment most families ever make, would spew so much financial misery when the housing bubble exploded?