Housing Doom Housing Bubble Blog

From yesterday’s Inner City Press.[1]

The newest nominee to the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, which is under fire for inaction leading to the subprime lending and foreclosure crisis, comes from a notorious subprime lender, Capital One.

Larry Allan Klane, whose nomination was announced on May 15, before that worked at Deutsche Bank, an institution whose involvement with lenders sued for predatory lending such as New York’s Delta Funding has, like Capital One’s record, been an issue considered but not acted on by the Fed.

Capital One’s corporate marketing of HELOC products would seem to have been just a bit aggressive [2] in the past.

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The National Association of Realtors (NAR) has been working hard to lure home buyers back into the water, but they are preaching to the wrong crowd.  There are plenty of potential buyers out there- at the right price.  All they need is a motivated seller.  The problem is, all those assurances to buyers that the market is hunky-dory are backfiring.  Home sellers are reluctant to lower their price, convinced that in this "normal," but slow market, they will be able to get the price that Joe next door got at the peak of the frenzy.

Here’s what the NAR is preaching:

National media coverage of sluggish real estate markets has sapped buyer confidence, despite the fact that severe declines have been confined to a limited number of markets and other economic factors, including wage gains, are favorable.

That means it’s up to individual real estate practitioners to show consumers that the national story probably doesn’t mirror their local realities, said Lawrence Yun, senior economist for the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS®. “Consumers have to get the message that all real estate is local.”

Yun goes on to list ways "to lessen the effect of bearish real estate reports" While I laud some of his suggestions on statistical reporting, I disagree with his conclusion:
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The US Dollar has been heading down the escalator even as the markets are all headed up. Is there a company on Earth that hasn’t been bought out by a hedge fund or private equity in the last ten days?

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