So you are going into foreclosure and are thinking of selling everything to the bare walls- and the bare walls, and the pipes? We’ve seen a number of Craigslist ads where people have done just that, but now the Feds are cracking down: [Hat tip to both M and L for this one!] The Northeast Valley’s battered real-estate market is getting a federal bailout of sorts from an unusual source. FBI agents and local law-enforcement personnel have arrested five people in the past month for stripping their foreclosed homes of appliances, cabinets, countertops and plumbing fixtures. That includes cases in…
Read more…

On Wednesday Nouriel Roubini posted a NYT Op-Ed [1] predicting that the US dollar was in danger of losing its world reserve currency status to the Chinese Renminbi. On the other hand, Brad Setser noted later that evening [2] that for the present foreign central banks seem to have a hearty appetite for T-Bills, regardless of what they’ve been saying about them. [UPDATE: Setser's response to Roubini [7] is now up.] I outlined my concerns about the constant agencies holdings value we’ve been following here in a comment under that second article, and Brad was kind enough to address that…
Read more…

It’s Friday, and a big hat tip to John for this very funny article from Reuters: PARIS, May 14 – The U.S. government’s recent bank stress tests were all about clarity. With hard data and clear facts, they shone a bright light on the shadowy uncertainties of complex financial transactions. The question now is: Will this sort of clarity be a part of doing business in the financial industry? Bank regulators in the European Union should look at the U.S. example and make results of their upcoming stress tests of European banks transparent to the public. Currently, they intend to…
Read more…

Say something often enough, and apparently three out of four people will believe it:  [Thanks L!] Three out of four U.S. homeowners think the worst is over in the housing market. And half of the homeowners in Southern states – including Texas – say home prices will stabilize in their areas in the next six months, according to a new survey by Zillow.com. Researchers for the Internet real estate marketing company quizzed almost 1,400 homeowners around the country in early April about where they thought the housing market was headed. What does Zillow make of this optimism? "While homeowners are…
Read more…

A big hat tip to poster AZSaluki for sharing this story with us. According to a recent report by CBS news, real estate is booming in San Francisco.  [Video is not embedable, but I suggest checking it out here.] In the video, to show what a frenzy the market is in now, they showed one agent who said he had received 42 offers on one property. The website Socketsite however, gives us just a little more insight into that 42 offer property: The sale of CBS5’s infamous "42 offer" home at 555 Edinburgh closed escrow on 4/22/09 with a reported…
Read more…

Reggie’s putting his cards on the table [1] with respect to a powerful indictment of the Fed Stress Tests. I thought this was important enough today to pass it up the line for Implode-O-Meter to consider, but since then it’s gotten thumbs-up from both Doomer V and one of SeekingAlpha’s top commenters, so it probably should go above-the-fold here too. UPDATE: today (Thursday) the co-CEO of SAP, the world’s leading vendor of business software, simply makes the pretense that the tests’ validity is an accomplished fact.[2] PARIS, May 14 – The U.S. government’s recent bank stress tests were all about…
Read more…

While various moratoriums have delayed a number of foreclosures, it looks like the chickens are finally coming home to roost: [Or maybe we should say the chickens are about to lose the roost, whatever.] TEL AVIV (MarketWatch) — U.S. foreclosure filings in April rose to a record, affecting one in every 374 housing units, and bank repossessions in particular may spike in the next few months, RealtyTrac reported. Foreclosure filings — defined as default notices, auction-sale notices, and bank repossessions — were reported on 342,038 U.S. properties in April, up less than 1% from March and up 32% from April…
Read more…

He told the committee [French], looking into how the Caisse lost $40 billion in the value of its portfolio last year, that Caisse managers considered the commercial paper to be safe, an opinion reinforced by the DBRS bond-rating service, which blessed it with its top AAA rating. Warning signals came, Bergeron said, when Coventree,[2] a Toronto company the Caisse held shares in, and an issuer of commercial paper, warned its products contained four-per-cent subprime mortgages. That was July 24, 2007. [1] Quebec’s provincial legislature is presently holding hearings [3] into how the manager of their civil service pension monies could…
Read more…

May 12 (Bloomberg) — Home prices in the U.S. dropped the most on record in the first quarter from a year earlier as banks sold seized homes and foreclosures in California and Florida dominated sales. [1] Oh, well.  Sometimes things don’t work out quite as advertised.  Twist is busy with other priorites so will be out of internet range for a day or too, and the above tip from Doomer JimAtLaw couldn’t wait. The big story is NAR’s latest survey.[2] The impact of foreclosures on the market is obvious, so this would indicate the cycle is moving to a new…
Read more…

… just one more thing  Just in case you have been at a Cistercian retreat since Thursday evening [oops! Friday evening -- things have been happening too fast ... jm], this article is likely in the top 5 most important pieces the WSJ will ever publish, and the extensive debate that has grown out of it will shape all of our futures. "Banks Won Concessions on Tests: Fed Cut Billions Off Some Initial Capital-Shortfall Estimates; Tempers Flare at Wells", by David Enrich, Dan Fitzpatrick and Marshall Eckblad, Wall Street Journal, May 9, 2009. Citigroup’s capital shortfall was initially pegged at…
Read more…

Some things are universal, and apparently a tendency to call a market bottom at the drop of a hat is one of them.  Many thanks to my friend Ken in New Zealand for this great link: There are indications today that house prices – falling since late 2007 – may finally have bottomed out. The property market stabilised in April and even managed to register a tiny increase in an index measure of the national market, according to QV Valuations. There was a 9.2 per cent decline in property values over the last year in the April figures, which was…
Read more…

There are a number of voices out there calling for more government backing the lending industry,but Richmond Federal Reserve President Jeffrey Lacker is calling for this backing to be scaled back: WASHINGTON/BEIJING, May 11 (Reuters) – A Federal Reserve policy maker called on Monday for U.S. government protection of the financial industry to be rolled back because it had encouraged excessive risk taking at the heart of the current crisis. "The financial safety net, especially those parts that were more implicit and perceived than explicit and written into the laws, played a significant role in the accumulation of risks that ultimately led to the…
Read more…

It’s Mother’s Day, and with luck, I’m getting breakfast in bed, some handmade cards, and perhaps something made out of popsicle sticks.

While I support protecting the environment, I don’t think the federal government needs to seize private property to do it: [Hat tip Freedom's Phoenix!] The excuse for this seizure is:

“This is a problem, …” [1] Yes I have retired from posting on Doom, at least from contributing opinions, but there’s a potted series of articles or two that still require cycling once in a while. In the course of updating our H.4.1 series I don’t intend to do more than present the numbers (most of the real work is twist’s anyway  — and thanks for your continuing support all these months ) and point to the occasional interesting article like the above, which reports an uptick in T-bill yields. UPDATE: charts now inserted, thanks twist This week’s Reuters report…
Read more…