John and I have faithfully scoured cyberspace and the MSM in search of wisdom, enlightenment and the occasional laugh – hoping to bring you useful housing bubble information.  Try as we might though, we can’t find all the good stuff ourselves.  We appreciate the links, the experiences and comments running the gammut from sobering to silly. Here’s your chance to let us know what we’ve missed.  This thread’s for you!

I have seen several complaints recently about mercenary bubble bloggers.  Patrick charges for links now, other sites have ads and Paypal buttons. (Including this one.)   Heck, Ben Jones even bubble blogs (Can you use that as a verb now?) for a living.  The occasional comment I’ve seen accuses bubble bloggers of trying to profit from the bubble, and trying to drive traffic to their sites in order to make money.  (I’ve even seen that accusation for a site with no advertising!)  So what gives, anyway?

It’s Op-Ed Friday here at Doom as we slide into a long weekend. Mark from Canada has sent in this report on developments in Alberta. We’re off to cook the Thanksgiving Turkey, now. We wish all of you south of the border a happy Columbus Day weekend!

All the excitement about Moody’s "Tipping Point" report [1] may have overshadowed a housing bubble development of potentially great long term significance. In what looked like a routine press release,[2] [3] [4] bond rating agency Fitch announced a new version of its methodology for estimating the risk for things like the MBS bonds that arise out of sub-prime and alt-A mortgages. Let’s take a closer look.

September Sales Down 43.5% From Last Year Every month around the 10th, Jay Butler of the Arizona Real Estate Center (AREC) releases the sales numbers and report for the previous month.  A few days later, the Arizona Multiple Listing Service has a report on their site, showing listings and sales. Impatient every month for the most recent data, I decided to pester our favorite realtor for an unofficial sales number.

If you believe David Lereah, the worst may be behind us.  Our sense is that home sales may have reached a low in August, said the National Association of Realtor’s chief economist.  He reached this conclusion in part because of the pending home sales numbers for August: Pending sales of U.S. homes rose 4.3 percent in August in a sign the nation’s housing market might be stabilizing, a trade association said on Monday. The National Association of Realtors said its Pending Home Sales Index, based on contracts signed each month, rose to 110.1 from 105.6 in July. As is my…
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MORAL HAZARD AND MBS Mortgage finance is conceptually simple. A saver lends money to a homeowner so he can buy a house. He then pays her back in installments, principal and interest, until the loan is extinguished. These flows of money were traditionally piped back and forth between savers and homeowners by local savings banks, or thrifts, designed for the purpose. Over the years, however, the "plumbing" to convey these flows has evolved into a nightmarish Rube Goldberg machine of securities, derivative instruments, vehicles, and intermediary markets. Moral hazard neatly encapsulates one thing that can go wrong with this complex…
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If you have ever read David Lereah’s biography (Chief Economist for the National Association of Realtors) you will realize that he must be a really smart guy.  So of course when I see that he has written an article on the housing market for the October issue of Realtor, I’m anxious to see what he has to say. For some reason though, there are a few points that he makes that don’t make sense to me.  Perhaps his higher grasp of economic principles is beyond my comprehension.  I thought I would review a few  of his comments here, and maybe someone…
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