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The San Francisco Bay Area’s ability to defy the slump in housing can be no better demonstrated than by this photo of a 3-bedroom home that “needs work” and will be sold “as is” for $825,000. To quote Bill Murray and Steve Martin “What the hell IS that?”
Archive for the ‘House-price bubble’ Category
August 27th, 2011
Category: House-price bubble
A great philosopher writes in the New Republic: Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner just published a major book, Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon. The book is excellent in explaining the misconduct of executives who ran Fannie Mae and Freddie Mack. Yet it goes off the rails by overstating [...]
June 11th, 2011
NAACP and the National Council of La Raza find themselves allied with financial industry figures in opposing new mortgage rules. Count me among the skeptics.
November 8th, 2010
Housing regulation in Texas inherited from Mexico.
August 27th, 2010
Category: Commerce and its discontents, House-price bubble
The median price of new and resale houses and condos sold in Las Vegas in July dropped by over $9,000 relative to (gulp) the prior month. The federal tax incentive to purchase a house was worth up to $8,000, meaning there are no doubt people in Sin City who have already had that inducement’s value [...]
January 6th, 2010
Category: Financial crises, House-price bubble
Megan McArdle has some serious thoughts about home mortgage modification, concluding that facilitating workouts that allow the homeowner to keep the house may be less useful than facilitating short sales. Speaking as a non-expert, I wonder whether this isn’t the (possibly) right solution to the wrong problem. Foreclosures are terrible for families, and not great [...]
September 18th, 2008
And now, let us hold hands across the blogospheric divide. My friend and colleague Steve Bainbridge is right: the President can, in fact, fire the SEC chair. What he can’t do is fire a commissioner, so he would have to choose a new chair from among the group of serving commissioners. The old chair would [...]
July 14th, 2008
Category: House-price bubble
The shareholders and bondholders, not the taxpayers, ought to take the hit.
July 3rd, 2008
Category: House-price bubble, Spirituality and Religion
If ReMax or Century 21 doesn’t work, the power of prayer can’t hurt, especially at $6.99.
April 13th, 2008
Category: Energy and Environment, House-price bubble
Kevin Drum correctly lands on the $25b homebuilder cookiejar in the Senate’s housing bill (passed on Thursday) with both feet. Is it fair to pile on? You betcha; anyway fairness has almost nothing to do with the part of this outrage Kevin doesn’t mention, which is the lunacy of subsidizing housing in any way with [...]
