Mr. Twist and I were trying to invision what could possibly bring about a soft landing at this point.  I found this soft landing theory on the Toll Brothers Message Board – I’m not quite certain if they are serious or not:

This from the "Too Little, Too Late Department": In December of 2005, the Federal Financial Regulatory Agencies  requested comments for their proposed guidance on nontraditional mortgage products.  (Also known as exotic, toxic or poison loans these days.) They indicated their concern:

The helium has not yet entirely leaked out of the party baloons at 3900 Wisconsin Avenue, NW. Fannie Mae won a tremendous victory when the DoJ stopped its criminal investigation against the company. Their stock immediately surged something like five percent on the news last Thursday and held steady as a rock through all the carnage to the sub-prime lenders in the two trading days since. This company lives and dies by political risk, and that risk is at a multi-year low this week. Nevertheless, I worry. They are in a real business after all, and some nasty stuff is…
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Have you ever thought, "Boy I’d love to call Twist, or Debi the Doomsayer, or whatever you call her, and give her a piece of my mind?"  Well here’s your chance.

WHO’S BEEN SWIMMING NAKED? One fine evening earlier this month I was sitting in Tim’s [1] at Penhorn with my old friend D____ after a stroll through his lovely Dartmouth neighborhood. I was just biting into my double-chocolate when he said, "John, you’ve been telling me for years that the GSEs exist to support mortgages to people of modest means that banks wouldn’t otherwise touch. Now you’re telling me in part V that these ‘private label’ lenders are buying huge amounts of loans that don’t even meet Fannie’s standards. Should I be scared?" After some hemming and hawing and a…
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Hello BubbleHeads, We are testing out a new HTML editor (FCKeditor, for those who are interested) with this site.  This site is powered using WordPress; however, there are a number of things the built in editor lacks.  This upgrade will allow for a variety of new presentation options.

Yes Nurse? Mr. Lereah is here? Ask him to come in and lie down on the couch, will you? Mr. Lereah- Thank you for coming in today. I heard from Keith at Housingpanic, who indicated that you have been making a lot of progress toward your recovery. He said that I should see your Powerpoint presentation on Realtor.com discussing- can you bring yourself to use the word yet? -the housing bubble. You know that admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery, and I think we can safely say that you are beginning to take some baby…
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Housingdoomers- For the past several months- my laptop and I have not been separated. My posts have not only originated from their usual home in the Phoenix East Valley- but from hotel rooms around the West as I’ve traveled. As you read this however, Mr. Twist and I have packed up the little twists, and have headed to the mountains of Eastern Arizona. The laptop is resting on my desk at home- while I spend a couple of glorious days without any kind of housing in sight at all. (Unless you count the tent.) There’s no electricity, no internet, and…
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A tip o’ the cap to twist and a reader for getting me started on this one. Well, they sure didn’t hide [1] their light under a bushel on Thursday. As I am writing, there are more than 200 stories on how Fannie Mae’s legal problems with the US Justice Department are over, although perhaps not those at the SEC.[2] Furthermore, most formal investigations into their accounting scandal are being wound up. Typical of the celebratory mood was this quote from Thursday’s Washington Post [3]. ‘The whole story with Fannie Mae now is progress, progress progress,’ said Ed Groshans, an…
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According to this morning’s Las Vegas Review Journal, home sales weren’t looking so hot in Las Vegas this July. New home sales in July dropped 41 percent from the same month a year ago and existing home sales fell 35.1 percent as the market continues its downward slide after two years of record-breaking sales and price appreciation. The 1,808 new home closings were the fewest since April 2003 and slightly more than half of the 3,474 closings in the previous month, local research firm SalesTraq reported Wednesday. "I was kind of shocked when I saw 1,800 new home sales," SalesTraq…
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In the musical Annie, The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow was the happy tune Annie used to keep her spirits up. Gloom and Doomers have their own ray of sunshine- David Lereah, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors. (NAR) Today the NAR released existing homes sales data for July: Total existing-home sales – including single-family, townhomes, condominiums and co-ops – dropped 4.1 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 6.33 million units in July from a downwardly revised pace of 6.60 million June, and were 11.2 percent below the 7.13 million-unit level in July 2005. Those could…
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The Chicago Federal Reserve has come out with a paper, The Great Turn of the Century Housing Boom by Jonas Fisher and Saad Quayyum. The paper is 16 pages and length, and filled with puzzling (if thoroughly graphed) data. Fisher and Quayyum conclude that “fundamentals” such as household formation, migration and the rising wealth of Americans caused prices to rise- not speculation. They rather thoroughly cover causes of demand- but do not address supply. Here are excerpts from their conclusion:

I never suspected when we opened the doors here at Housingdoom what an overwhelming response we would have.  Back here behind the homepage, we get to see all the traffic, the links to the site, and some wonderful email- it makes our efforts here worthwhile. The only one who hasn’t appreciated all the traffic is our poor old server, who was quite frankly, feeling overwhelmed.  Our response time had gotten miserably slow.  Tech support moved us to a new server Sunday night, which has helped speed things up considerably.  The only problem is, some comments seemed to have been dropped…
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It has become clear to many stakeholders in the housing industry that the five fat years of the housing bubble have now ended, and will be followed by five or so lean years of steadily retreating house prices. They are radically changing their posture and reconfiguring themselves for hard times. Last Thursday and Friday it was revealed that Mortgage Industry Companies of America (MICA), the private providers of US mortgage insurance, had become alarmed by the situation and were pleading with regulators to rein in risky mortgages. In a letter [1] to the FDIC, the Fed, the Comptroller of the…
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MAIN STREAM MEDIA: MISSING IN ACTION? Last Friday the web site of station WJLA-TV, the Washington DC affiliate of ABC, carried a routine sounding story [1] about how delisting stocks can hurt investors. An attentive reader might have stumbled on these remarkable statements about halfway down. “Fannie Mae, which finances one of every five home loans in the United States, has been out of compliance with New York Stock Exchange listing standards since 2004– the last time it filed a quarterly earnings report. Yet NYSE hasn’t delisted the stock.” “Federal regulators in 2004 accused Fannie Mae of serious accounting problems…
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