Anyone who’s ever watched any late night television has seen those commercials for reverse mortgage.  They are always touted by older celebrities claiming how safe these things are.  For those who actually believe that there’s little risk to a reverse mortgage, here’s a cautionary tale from our faithful longtime correspondent in Tucson- M.R.: Recently I passed a vacant house with a NOTS posted on the front fence. I know the owner of this property — she’s an elderly lady who took out a reverse mortgage in 2006. The NOTS gave the amount, $285,500. Twist, in no way, even during the…
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  It’s Friday, and we finally have a solution to stabilizing the housing market- eat out.  After all, a bad economy makes for a bad housing market, and dining out will help fix that:  [Thanks L!] Gov. Jan Brewer took the stage Thursday with rocker and restaurateur Alice Cooper to convince Arizonans that dining out is good for the state. Announcing a three-month public-awareness campaign called Dine 4 AZ, they said going to restaurants  supports businesses and helps preserve jobs. Brewer noted that restaurants generate 10 percent of Arizona’s tax revenues. "We are working hard to lead the Grand Canyon…
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Moody’s said in a report it doesn’t expect any downgrades of countries with triple-A ratings — the highest possible — in the "near future," adding that only a sustained increase in government debt over several years, which it doesn’t anticipate, would warrant such a decision. – WSJ1 Well, the good news is that this week’s Reuters report2 suggests if the US wants to sell a lot more debt, foreign central banks might not be in a mood right now to buy the stuff. The report was, as usual, based on the weekly update from the NY Fed’s H.4.1 table site.3…
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  You can watch the news to find out how the new home sale market is "stabilizing" and homebuilder sentiment is "improving", or you can do like I do and take a peek into L’s junk mail for a more realistic view of where builders think the market is headed: [Thanks L- it's great to have you back!]

The problem, of course, is that people have been given new, trading tools of mass destruction.. – WSJ1 This must-read article has just about every gun lobby trick of rhetoric deployed in defense of high-frequency trading. And as a special added bonus, they slide in that silent assumption, that’s been saturating the story arc, that Sergey Aleynikov actually did something.

Rental prices are low in the Phoenix area- and are headed lower: Rent prices are likely to fall significantly in the coming months as a growing number of commercial real-estate investors buy up struggling apartment communities, according to some local real-estate analysts. The same phenomenon that has driven down home-sale prices appears to be occurring in the apartment market, they said, with cash buyers lowering prices as much as is necessary to attract paying customers. As a result, average rent prices have dropped an estimated 15 percent or more in the past year, and they could fall another 15 percent…
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Doom Transcripts: Index & Guide This is an open thread for the Housing Doom Page Transcript Index & Guide, a collection of navigational aids for Doom’s collection of transcripts of web audio / visual resources. Pages are not set up to have their own comment threads, so it was necessary to create a separate thread where comments on the Guide could be posted.

This video, "Larry Tabb on High Frequency Trading," is on a site, Data Center Knowledge, that’s obviously promoting the underlying tech itself.  Towards the end we get the usual "OK, Flash we can sacrifice" meme, but mostly it’s a soothe-fest trying to damp down concern about the implications to the general public of HFT. . .

If you think that the flippers of homes in places like Las Vegas and Phoenix have been burned you haven’t seen anything.  Check out what has happened to Boston’s Hancock Tower: The I.M. Pei-designed sliver of glass doesn’t seem like a place where several hundred million dollars can vanish in a few months. But that’s exactly what happened at the 62-story building, now under its fourth owner in six years. In January, an aggressive young wheeler-dealer defaulted on a portion of the building’s $1.3 billion mortgage just 24 months after buying it. In March, two firms that had purchased chunks…
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Don’t Be Evil ™ Happy 25th, George. I slept through this one, but there’s still lots to be seen sifting through the debris.  Twist, and a lot of other people, were transfixed last night by a headline flying around Bloomberg’s ticker: "Anything-But-Treasuries Gains as Credit Rebounds After AIG Death in China" Indeed, I recently found it floating here at http://www.bloomberg.com/news/worldwide/ But when twist clicked on the link last night, the story wasn’t there.  Indeed when I first tried the link this morning, this is what I got too, … … although most recently I got the official1 8/8 version of…
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Five months ago, we published an article on Arizona’s anti-deficiency statute to explain our state’s law on the potential liability a homeowner may face if their home is sold for less than they owe. … As quickly as it passed, Senator Pierce asked that his own bill be repealed. Did anyone read the bill? There is another bill at the governor’s office (HB 2008) awaiting signature to repeal the original bill and add some protection for people who are renting homes that go into foreclosure. 8/25 Payson Roundup1 Thanks to Doomer AZSALUKI for alerting us to this story.  He adds,…
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Rules put in place in late 2008 by Fannie Mae and similar rules adopted by Freddie Mac are less favorable to borrowers who put down 20 percent to 25 percent, considered to be the industry minimum. – NYT1 And borrowers who put down less than that are safer.  Right. … "The underwriting rules from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac consider borrowers in the 20 to 25 percent down payment category to be the riskiest, in part because they are not required to carry private mortgage insurance." Ah, mortgage insurance.  Here’s what crack UBS analyst Tom Zimmerman was saying2 about mortgage…
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No wonder China is so angry about the derivatives losses being realized by their State Owned Enterpises. The manipulation around key prices and dates in many US markets has been apparent for some time, with a wink and a nod around option expirations for example. Thank heavens for Creative Commons. "Jesse" is outraged here about some of the things I’ve been ranting about lately.  But "his" rants are so much more elegant   "Let’s Just Whack the Oil" Jesse’s Café Américain   “The markets used to be about capital formation,” said Mr. Quast, the consultant. “Now 80 percent of trading…
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He said he had never played an active role in the companies, "so it was hardly something that was top of mind." – CBC report1 on Canada’s Minister of National Defence — "Ethics commissioner Mary Dawson called the issue a ‘serious contravention’ of the Conflict of Interest Act." Meanwhile, the other guy who destroyed the Progressive Conservative Party is confident2 that his place in history is secure.