About fourteen years ago Haligonians experienced an extraordinary event … Over the course of its 20-year life, the Sackville [Nova Scotia] landfill was the dumping ground for over four million tonnes of unseparated garbage, including organics such as food waste. Halifax Regional Municipality, which owns the landfill, closed the site in December 1996. Sprang up witRiver of Gulls Sprang up with the dawn a river of gulls xxa river of gulls flowing South all day Past the harbour straight to the offing xxbeyond the horizon away And the carillon on Fort Needham Hill xxstruck noon The cormorants’ mother covered her…
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Mr. Trend pressed his foot gently on the accelerator this week, with most of the numbers quietly growing by roughly between 5 and 15 percent. The Fed’s own holdings of MBS shrank by a slightly more significant $14.714 billion. Meanwhile cenbanks’ holdings of treasuries grew at a rather more exuberant rate and agencies continued their sell-off, this week at a bit less modest clip. This week’s Reuters report1 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 version3 of the agencies and treasuries foreign central bank holdings data set….
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Monday the Obama administration issued it’s October Housing Scorecard, which provides data and charts to show where the administration believes the housing market is.  They issued a press release with the following summary: The latest housing figures show continued signs of stabilization in house prices and high home affordability due in part to record low interest rates. In response to the scorecard, Doom has done one of it’s own.  We have a different take on the housing market.  Consider the following data: [With links to sources.] One in six mortgage loans is delinquent. One in four people who had a…
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Doomer friend Bill Maloni isn’t as familiar with Chris Whalen as we are here in the Castle.  Chris is co-sponsor with Alex Pollock of AEI’s valuable semiannual seminars on the subprime crisis that started in March 2007, and one of Alex’s crack team of super-bears. In our dreams (and after the election ) we see Bill and Chris putting aside their ideological differences over a couple of beers.  Chris’ bank industry knowledge would be a great complement to Bill’s political acumen. By the way, Igor’s got a “Doom Family Values” warning out for the link in the off-topic last paragraph….
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We’ve talked a lot about the “shadow inventory” held by the lenders.  According to RealtyTrac, lenders are currently holding back 600,000 properties.  Foreclosures are up and those numbers have to be growing. Back in the 1980s when the S&L crisis hit [It doesn't look much like a crisis given today's situation, does it?] the RTC dumped a lot of homes on the market at once, and a lot of properties went very cheaply.  Today lenders are keeping a lot of properties off of the market, apparently in the hope of avoiding a similar price meltdown. There is a price though…
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Things have been tough for homebuilders in the past few years. With foreclosures now about a third of existing home sales, builders have had a tough time competing on price.  Here’s one creative try from Meritage though: [From L's inbox- thanks L!]

60 Minutes did a segment on “99ers”- people who have run out of their 99 weeks of unemployment.  I watched it and thought, “How many of these folks are paying their mortgage?  How many of these folks qualify for loan mods? How can the housing market get better when the employment picture looks like this? [Hat tip Market-Ticker]

Bank of America has started going through their paperwork or admit to the following: Bank of America Corp. for the first time acknowledged finding some mistakes in foreclosure files as it begins to resubmit documents in 102,000 cases. The Charlotte, N.C., lender discovered errors in 10 to 25 out of the first several hundred foreclosure cases it examined starting last Monday. The problems included improper paperwork, lack of signatures and missing files, said people familiar with the results. In certain cases, information about the property and payment history didn’t match. Some of the defects seem relatively minor, according to the…
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San Diego area CRE appraiser Jeremy has an intriguing op-ed in the NC Times: Dubious land sales and unrecorded easements among “parcel owners” [in the desert of Bernalillo County NM] have created a Bizarro world in which nobody really knows who owns what, if anything. Residents —- mostly immigrants from Mexico of questionable U.S. residency status —- have erected cinderblock homes on land they believe (or have been told) they own.

I’m blaming my oldest daughter for this post.  Last night when I usually would have been perusing housing links looking for something worthy to discuss today, she sent me this link to a post she found on the NBA’s website. Shaun Powell wrote about his favorite game where the Suns lost to the Celtics back in 1976.  My daughter knew it was my second favorite game. [As a long time Suns fan, I have to say my favorite game was the third game of the 1993 playoffs where the Suns beat the Bulls in triple overtime.] I watched the Suns-Celtics…
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After remaining unchanged for three weeks The Fed’s own holdings of MBS shrank a significant $12.788 billion. Meanwhile cenbanks’ holdings of treasuries also grew at an exuberant, but not extreme rate and agencies continued their sell-off, this week at a modest clip. This week’s Reuters report1 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 version3 of the agencies and treasuries foreign central bank holdings data set. The yellow line continues its climb, just not quite straight up this week. Treasury Debt holdings grew by $18.166 billion, a big…
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Several upscale condominium projects went into foreclosure in Phoenix.  They have since been picked up by an investment group, renovated and put on the market.  The investment group is ST Residential, led by the FDIC: [Thanks L!] ST Residential is an investment and debt-resolution firm that is 60 percent owned by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Unlike the Resolution Trust Corp., which the federal government formed to dispose of failed lender-owned assets two decades ago following the savings-and-loan crisis, ST Residential also involves a group of private-equity firms, led by Starwood Capital Group. All three properties had been owned by…
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First of all, thank-you Admin for bringing us up again There’s been a ton of significant developments in the last while, and we’ll be commenting, or at least putting some of the best links for breaking stories onto our sidebar soon. However, what I take to be the most significant development in the time we have been down is a new series on MERS (the database that thinks it’s a mortgage servicer) that Richard Ascow started up yesterday: HuffyPo (10/20 ’10): “Pictures of MERS, Part 1: Corporate Documents Illustrate the Mortgage Shell Game” As the following images show, MERS is…
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My parents told me as I was growing up that I would need a college education in order to get ahead in the world.  Mom and Dad were wrong.  According to Tampa Bay Online, some robo-signers could make a lot in money and perks, and all they had to be able to do was sign their name- a lot.  Take for example Cheryl Samons, an employee of the law offices of David Stern: Twice a day, Scott [Kelly Scott, a former employee was Stern's assistant. Deposition is here.] said, the company’s chief operating officer, Cheryl Samons, would go into the…
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Old Doom friend Chris is a strong apologist for community banks and (sub-obscenely) rich Americans, but his group has a heck of a database of bank statistics and many years of interpreting them from a risk perspective.  In this long must-read article (get it now, goes behind the pay wall in a few days) he presents a  convincing case that tan man was actually one of the good guys. Big Idea: The FDIC should create a new subsidiary called Resolution Trust Corporation II headed by Mozillo and other industry veterans to purchase bad assets from banks, sell foreclosed assets and…
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