International Investing

From the WSJ, showing scary near-term projections:

From today’s WSJ. I keep searching for the punchline but it appears to be real:
Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair is finalizing a legislative proposal that would allow the Treasury Department to make direct loans for close to one million homeowners in the latest government initiative to stabilize the slumping mortgage market.
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For loans to [...]

Caroline Baum places the blame where it belongs:
From legislation to root out discrimination in mortgage lending, to the resultant relaxation of lending standards, to the tax-advantaged status of housing, “the aggressive pursuit of homeownership as a benchmark for success is at the root of the problems we’re seeing today,” says Mark Zandi, chief economist at [...]

Understanding the credit crisis means acknowledging that while the financial instruments involved may be new, the government sponsored inflation and regulation that brought it on is not. The classics of Bastiat, Mises, and Rothbard read like they could have been written this week. This great find by the Mises Institute is by Thomas Paine:
One of [...]

Bloomberg has the sad stats:
Home prices declined in 21 U.S. cities in January, led by Sacramento and Las Vegas, as banks sold foreclosed homes at bargain prices.
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San Diego was the third-worst U.S. market, with prices dropping 21 percent, and Los Angeles was fourth, with a 17 percent decline, Radar Logic said.
In Tampa, Florida, prices tumbled [...]

From the WSJ:
In some major markets, including Las Vegas and San Diego, foreclosure-related sales have accounted for more than 40% of all sales in recent months.
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The median price dropped 8.2% from a year earlier to $195,900, the biggest drop recorded by the Realtors in the current slump.
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The Detroit Board of Realtors recently found that home [...]

From Mauldin:
This shows that part of the bubble in housing was in the number of transactions that occurred during the bubble years. In 2005 alone, there were 48% more housing transactions that occurred than should have been expected based on historical average sales per household. In large part this was caused by “investors,” many of [...]

Excellent paper on the mortgage crisis and its likely market impact:
We confirm the conventional view that the current problems in financial markets are concentrated in institutions that have exposure to mortgage securities. We use several methods to estimate the ultimate losses on these securities. Our best (very uncertain) guess is that the losses will total [...]

This WSJ article about ACA Capital Holding, shows financial firms adeptness in managing their balance sheet. ACA, ostensibly an insurance firm, was undercapitalized from the beginning. Based on the firm’s ‘A’ credit rating, the firm has a veneer of security which fell apart when S&P downgraded them to triple-C in December – a canary in [...]