Maybe the whole state of California isn’t going into default, but it’s starting to feel like it: [Thanks L!] About 1 in 10 Californians with a home loan is now in default, and there’s growing evidence that the mortgage meltdown is spreading to commercial real estate. The home mortgage delinquency rate — the percentage of borrowers who have missed several payments and are in the first stage of foreclosure — climbed in June to 9.5% in California and 9.9% in Los Angeles County, according to First American CoreLogic. The staggering number of home mortgage defaults probably will lead to large…
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To those who would claim the First-Time Homebuyer Credit without qualifying for it, beware: [Thanks T.M.!] WASHINGTON — The Internal Revenue Service today announced its first successful prosecution related to fraud involving the first-time homebuyer credit and warned taxpayers to beware of this type of scheme. On Thursday July 23, 2009, a Jacksonville, Fla.-tax preparer, James Otto Price III, pled guilty to falsely claiming the first-time homebuyer credit on a client’s federal tax return. Price faces the possibility of up to three years in jail, a fine of as much as $250,000, or both. To date, the IRS has executed…
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Foreign central bank holdings of Treasury Debt nudged past $2 trillion for the first time ever, but those buyers of US obligations mostly sat on their hands last week. This week’s Reuters report [1] chalked up just a $3.473 billion rise in total holdings, with both numbers improving slightly. The report was, as usual, based on the weekly update from the NY Fed’s H.4.1 table site.[2] Here is Doom’s updated CSV version of the agencies and treasuries foreign central bank holdings data set.[3] Treasuries rose $4.289 billion, not much better than last week. With massive supply of T-bills coming down…
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