Uh, how many flights to go in the Space Shuttle program? Wall Street Journal (4/29 ’11): “We Have Liftoff: No Money Down Is Back” The NASA Federal Credit Union earlier this month launched a special promotion that allows borrowers to make no down payment for a primary home purchase of up to $650,000, or just 5% down on a loan up to $850,000. // The deal applies only in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. Borrowers can also do refinance loans up to $650,000 with just 5% down and up to $850,000 with 10% down. The credit union will offer adjustable…
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hat tip Tyler … … might just serve as the video accompaniment for this.

Curiouser and curiouser. Yesterday Tyler reported that foreign central banks seemed to have little appetite for treasuries … ZeroHedge (4/28 ’11): “Indirects Flee From Poor 7 Year Auction Which Pushes Bond Curve Wider” … But the most notable metric as usual was the Indirect Bid, which traditionally strong at the belly of the curve, saw only 39.1% of the auction going to foreign bidders. This compares to 49.31% in the last auction and 51.45% on average. … However, in the previous seven days they’d seemingly been gorging on the stuff at a rate not seen since last November (perhaps some…
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Remember when Bob Toll, CEO of Toll Brothers, famously said back in 2006  that housing was “dancing on the bottom”? Analysts have been calling various “bottom dances” ever since.  The most recent appeared in Bloomberg yesterday: “The housing market basically has bottomed, but it’s not going to recover any time soon,” Harm Bandholz, chief U.S. economist at UniCredit Group in New York, said before the report. “The housing market is just treading water.” Granted, the wording is a little different here.  Ordinarily dog paddling and the limbo wouldn’t be considered synonymous, but you get the general idea.  While there are…
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Like all Arizona eighth graders, I took Arizona government. [We won't go into how long ago that was.]  I remember having to learn how a bill progressed through the legislature.  I don’t, however, remember that a bill could proceed like SB 1259 has.  SB 1259′s proposed effect: Provides a chain of ownership during foreclosure proceedings and allows reimbursement of lawyer fees for injunctions or court cases that fail to prove ownership. In other words, lenders would have to be able to actually prove that they owned a mortgage before they could foreclose on a property: You see, the Arizona State…
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Yesterday CNBC decided to seriously discuss an idea we’ve joked about for the past few years– bulldozing excess supply.  Erin discusses this with Rick Santelli and Joe LaVorgna, chief economist with Deutsche Bank: [Hat tip ZeroHedge]   I find it interesting that LaVorgna says that he’d have liked the idea a couple of years ago, but doesn’t really think it’s necessary now that housing has bottomed and things are turning around.  Here’s what he actually said in 2009: The momentum in the economy is moving forward. We are much closer to a housing bottom than many believe. It’s not surprising that…
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After staying constant for three weeks, the Fed’s own holdings of MBS fell, but by only a paltry $3.933 billion. Meanwhile, foreign central bank holdings of agencies remained flat, but their treasuries number inexplicably surged. 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. Treasury Debt holdings have now advanced $48.565 billion above their 11/17 ’10 level, with more than a quarter of the increase coming in the last week. Treasury Debt blasted…
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ASU Realty Studies has released its most recent report (PDF), authored as always by Dr. Jay Butler.  Butler indicated that foreclosure activity was “only” 38% of the market, as opposed to the 43% posted in February.  Here’s what Butler said about the drop: Because the change is so slight, the fundamental uncertainty remains as to whether the initial months of 2011 represent short-term response in unclogging the pipeline after the moratoriums or a continuation of a market being dominated by foreclosures. For those of you who might also be wondering if the market will remain dominated by foreclosures, you might…
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Many Americans have had to delay retirement and put off moving plans because their homes have lost value, although the trend has moderated recently: “After several difficult years for the professional moving industry, it looks like we may end 2010 on the upswing,” said Linda Bauer Darr, AMSA [American Moving and Storage Assn.] president and CEO. “Although individual shipments were flat for October, they were up about five percent for the entire year.” The tendency is to assume that these problems can be limited to “working Americans”, and not to more affluent Americans. Apparently, this is not the case. ST…
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UPDATE: most be something in the water this morning, because this sort of thing just isn’t supposed to be possible … CNN Money (4/18 ’11): “U.S. credit rating outlook lowered by S&P” The outlook means that there is one-in-three likelihood that it could lower the long-term rating on the United States within two years, S&P said. New York markets down over 1.5% in early trading on this.  But of course it’s all theater, as the OMB is still in denial about all that MBS and we don’t really exit Fantasyland until we acknowledge the US National Debt is really twice…
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Flipping foreclosures can be risky, but that’s not the only way to make money off of abandoned or neglected homes:   Given the direction of the housing market, “Asset Preservation” [Gotta love it- that sounds so much classier than "foreclosure sanitation" or the like.] should be a growth industry for awhile.

UPDATE: Twist sends along this further link for context … GlobalResearch.ca (4/15 ’11): “Killing the Unborn … With Radiation” ======================== If 3/11 taught us nothing else, it’s that it’s totally insane to store (only about 10 percent-) spent nuclear fuel assemblies jammed together in swimming pools full of boron infused water.  Whenever in the course of maintaining these storage pools you lose water, power or the human staff they rapidly become zirconium-accelerated dirty bombs capable of dead-zone contaminating the environment for tens of kilometers in every direction and sending lesser amounts of radioactive fallout around the world. A heck of…
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How much water is in Lake Mead anyway? With talk of Vacantvilles all over the great American South-West you’d think they could easily host 13-odd million members of the Guy Suits International Fan Club while they wait for Charlie Sierra Papa to cool down over the next few centuries. There’s actually nothing wrong with Jane Jacobs’ new dark age, except that it looks like we have this small problem getting the dark bit to work properly; … sometimes while visiting the Green Street Sally Ann Thrift Store I awfully get tempted to cross the street and address the staff: Perry…
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A big hat tip to L for this very funny ad.  KB Homes is advertising a “secret sale” in Phoenix and warns that overnight camping will not be allowed. My guess is that they’d be thrilled to see overnight campers, but I’m afraid they’ve gone the way of the passenger pigeon.

We’ve been experiencing some technical difficulties here at HD; we are currently testing a fix. Rather than a generic “This is a test” message, I have chosen something (hopefully) a little more interesting. You may have noticed some of the advertising for Portal 2 on various billboards and other locations. For those unfamiliar with the “Portal” franchise, it is a physics-based puzzle with quite a bit of dark humor in it. Despite being only a few hours long, it is one of the most critically acclaimed games of all time. They recently released a short promo clip – for those…
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