OK, so if we bloggers can’t make fun of serious issues, who will?  It’s not every day you get Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain! from WSJ and WaPo on different issues on the same day WaPo (8/30 ’10): “Top China bank official’s defection rumors quashed” WSJ (8/30 ’10): “Ignore Talk of a Housing Tax Credit ‘Revival’ “ Clearly it will take Zhou no more than five minutes on the phone with Carol Off to Popper-off the first feverish speculation, but the second one is a bit more ticklish.  Nick knows as well as we at Doom…
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Who’s to blame when a house goes into foreclosure?  We’ve been debating this one on Doom for quite awhile.  Recently we heard from Karen Pettit, who places the blame for her foreclosure on GMAC.  Here’s her story.  See what you think. **************************************************** Karen Pettit’s and her husband’s long struggle with GMAC over the foreclosure of their home is documented in this extensive comment under a post about an earlier GMAC foreclosure controversy. I have been documenting my experience as a 52 year old Slidell, Louisiana woman who is disabled and trying to acquire assistance with housing programs from our Federal…
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Well Igor, nothing special over the weekend.  Just a bunch of central bankers meeting in Wyoming and plotting to take over all their host governments Reuters (8/26 ’10): “Fiscal ‘alchemy’ must mimic monetary science” Tax and budget policies need the same regularity and independence as monetary policy if countries around the world are to cope with looming stresses from pension programs, world central bankers were told at a Federal Reserve conference on Saturday.

For anyone who thinks that the worst is behind us for the housing market, check out this graph from Michael David White:

New home sales last month were at an all time record low. Prices were at their lowest in 6 1/2 years.  Existing home sales dropped 27% YOY and saw their greatest MOM drop ever.  Given that, it’s kind of fun to watch the ever-wrong Jim Cramer declaring last year how the bottom would be in last summer:

Consumer attitudes are changing on the “rent vs. buy” debate. When Mr. Twist and I sold in 2005 and moved into a rental, the usual response when we told friends was “Are you guys doing O.K.?” Now the usual response is “You were so smart to get out when you did.” My personal experience is not singular. More and more people are swapping their mortgage for a lease agreement: (Thanks to Keith Jurow for forwarding us his latest. Article first appeared on the Real Estate Channel.) There is a far-reaching change occurring now which threatens housing markets around the country….
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It unwinds shelteringly. But there were dreams to sell, ill didst thou buy: I continued with John Ashbery through the weekend, and most of it was like reading raw sewage effluent.  However, every few pages some brief passage almost made sense.  The above is from page 46 of Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems, in the section titled “from FLOW CHART [section V of VI] (1991)“

According to Business Insider: (Thanks L!) The U.S. economy is in decline. The employment situation is going to go from bad to worse. Americans without jobs are Americans that cannot buy homes. Millions of Americans who are employed are finding it increasingly difficult to make it from month to month. The truth is that there is no way that Americans can afford the ridiculously inflated home prices that we have seen over the past decade any longer. So, yes, the U.S. housing market is headed for a complete and total nightmare. I couldn’t agree more, so here’s their list of…
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The CIA’s first challenge is Recombinant Ashbery.  The plain text consists of one stanza from John Ashbery poem “A”, and two stanzas from John Ashbery poem “B”.  The encoder places the single “A” stanza before, between, or after the two “B” stanzas.  The title for the cyphertext is the titles for poems “A” and “B” in random order.  Decoder must guess which is the “A” stanza and which is the “A” title. [fancy_box] Meaningful Love / Mottled Tuesday [I flipped a coin] by John / Ashbery There were morose gardens farther down the slope, anthills that looked like they belonged…
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“Dip” has been enjoying 24/7 saturation exposure in stories about imaginary economic progress and real backsliding.  The historical name for something like the quarter-century long depression that must follow the epic Panic of 2008 (which climaxed in the events of the afternoon and evening of Thursday September 18th) will, as usual, grow naturally out of a commonly used euphemism.  While the official narrative-mongers have been selling the snake oil of a Great Recession, overuse of this latest word may cause the period 2009 – 2033 to be remembered instead as The Great Dip. CS Monitor (8/20 ’10): “Forget a double…
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This is a link to Piggington’s. This is a link to Piggington’s that opens in another window. Both work as expected in the preview, let’s go live.

In the midst of a good Minyanville rant against Bill Gross and PIMCO, I found a quote too good not to share: Housing is a commodity like furniture and automobiles, and inducing citizens to buy more of it is no business of the state.

In a world where mortgages became sliced, diced and julienned into mortgage backed securities, one of the ways that homeowners have avoided foreclosure has been to question who holds the note.  In many cases, the trail is so convoluted, judges have ruled in favor of homeowners.  In fact, one blogger, Ellen Brown maintains that up to 62 million homeowners might be “foreclosure-proof” because of the way the mortgage industry has managed MERS, an electronic recording system for mortgages. Over 62 million mortgages are now held in the name of MERS, an electronic recording system devised by and for the convenience…
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Thanks for your patience as Doom slowly rebuilds. With luck we’ll eventually have the old posts in this series (latest was four weeks ago) back on the site in due course. This week the Fed’s own MBS holdings settled back $6.442 billion while total foreign central bank holdings surged on a very big buy of treasuries, tempered by a large sell-off in agencies. The FedMBS number is about where it was on May 26th, which isn’t surprising since the Fed’s MBS buying program is over, but they don’t seem to be in a big hurry to sell the stuff. This…
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