Bentham’s Panopticon crossed with Posturegate, Doom appreciates the many levels of irony in the Pickett’s Charge of Tech Bubble 2.0 happening as an oh-so polite but massive introverts’ riot peaking at 6:30 in the morning.  While Generation Y’s Fitzgerald will eventually feature this moment in a serious candidate for The Great American Novel, we can confidently count on Coupland to have a beta version up in plenty of time for this year’s Xmas ebook season.  That weren’t no Cemetery Ridge they done tooked But let’s not allow a side show to distract us from the main event.  It would seem…
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Wall Street, we have a problem: USA TODAY (5/18 ’12): “Facebook shares jump, then fade as trading opens” (Google News still showed “Facebook shares jump as trading opens on Nasdaq market” at 16:15 GMT) GOOGLE NEWS TOP TEAZER: By Matt Krantz, USA TODAY Shares of Facebook jumped 13% to $43 on a frenzied first day of trading Friday, as investors stormed Wall Street to grab shares of the world’s leading social networking company. REVISED LEAD PARA AT 16:07 GMT: Facebook jumped an initial 13% to $43 as the stock opened for trading for the first time Friday morning. But almost…
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In many ways we seem to have entered into one of the more dystopian Orson Scott Card novels, and quite a few commentators don’t think this kid’s for real … But on the other hand back in ’06 my 13-year-old niece held her own in a lecture hall in Cambridge MA with a couple of hundred MIT and Harvard types in attendance, so you never know

For an animal lover like me, it’s heartbreaking to see how many animals are abandoned when their owners go into foreclosure.  It happens more often than you might imagine.  An organization called Lost Our Home Pet Foundation started in Phoenix as a resource for realtors who keep finding abandoned pets in foreclosed homes.  They have taken in 2000 animals in the past four years as well as starting a “pet food bank” to try and help people in difficult financial situations be able to keep their pets.  Now the organization has their own large shelter: [Thanks L!]   It’s heartwarming…
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After a day of Whale Watching it’s simply awesome how the powers that be always seem to circle the wagons and keep the status quo together (how’s that for cliches? ).  Anyway, the Fed’s own holdings of MBS remained stalled, rising but by just $0.006 billion while foreign central bank holdings of US obligations swung to a $1B / day drain. This week’s Reuters report1 is, 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 treasuries…
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I remember playing games out on the playground with all the neighborhood kids back when I was small.  It always seemed that there would be some annoying kid who couldn’t stand it when things didn’t go his way and it looked like he was likely to lose.  If he struck out or a ball went out of bounds he would demand that most annoying and juvenile of solutions– the “do-over”. Lenders, who have been playing for high stakes since the robo-signing scandal, aren’t good losers either.  They can’t afford to be.  Consequently, in states that have judicial foreclosures, they have…
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Perhaps this old Doom friend could have chosen a better graphic on the 20th anniversary of Westray BL/BW (5/9 ’12): “Housing Bottom? Fannie Mae Won’t Seek Tax Dollars” Evidence is mounting that U.S. home prices are finally hitting bottom, and now comes the best news yet: Fannie Mae says that for the first time since 2008, it won’t need money from the Treasury Department to balance its books. The last time we checked the Fed was holding just south of $848 billion of MBS. Brothers and sisters, this thing has a long way to go.

About a year ago, and much to the bemusement of the majority of our housing market readers, I spent much time speaking to the aftermath of 3/11.  By the summer this series was pretty much exhausted, as you can see from this feeble Aug ’11 effort. But if the story went underground the danger has continued, as perhaps best summarized in this short YouTube (which because of Mr. Matsumura’s pronounced accent requires close attention before you realize the dire implications): This narrative has been passed around the blogosphere at second and third hand and up as far as HuffyPo with…
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OK, how do you do it? With half a year to the election you’ve settled on Gov Coke vs Pres Pepsi and after a refreshing six months of full contact TASTES GREAT!! battling LESS FILLING!! you’re guaranteed of a result that changes, well, nothing.  Heck even if the recent mischief with delegates turns out to be the first faint sign of democracy waking from its coma you’ve got to remember that the real POTUS is still Doc Dudley and unless something totally unexpected happens (e.g. Four Sierra Papa falling over) West Egg shouldn’t even start hearing footsteps until about 2045….
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We’ve had a few debates here on how ethical it is for a homeowner to walk away from their home and mortgage.  Homeowners, however, are not the only ones who sometimes find it to their advantage to walk away.  In south Florida, there have been thousands of cases where a lender starts to foreclose– then backs out rather than get stuck with property maintenance: A months-long Sun Sentinel investigation of property code violations involving abandoned homes uncovered case after case in which banks launched foreclosure lawsuits but then stalled or avoided taking ownership. In effect, the banks legally sidestepped responsibility…
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The Fed’s own holdings of MBS swung to a $7.565 billion shrinkage, reversing over a third of last time’s big increase. Meanwhile the foreign central banks’ treasuries number floated up to a fresh all time high while the agencies number relaxed just back to a level we haven’t seen since the Shoot the Moon era of May 2007. This week’s Reuters report1 is, as usual, based on the weekly update from the NY Fed’s H.4.1 table site.2 Reuters is back to semi-automated neglect of their weekly weather report and this week there is a sca ttering o f randoml y…
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If you’ve read anything at all about housing this year, you’ve read that the housing market is “improving”.  Offered up as evidence is the fact that inventories have been falling across the nation.  Clearly buyers are snapping up properties again, right? Sales have improved in a number of markets — for example in Phoenix sales were down only about 10% YOY in March which is still above the lows of the bust years –  but that’s not the entire picture.  For some reason new listings (not total listings but the ones added during the month) have been dropping for the…
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The numbers for this week have the feel of a monster truck rally with large smelly vehicles spinning their wheels furiously while mostly going in circles without any particular direction indicated. The Fed’s own holdings of MBS surged up $18.568 billion, bringing the holdings of America’s largest (and most “solvent”) unintentional housing GSE back up to late October 2010 levels. Treasuries swung to a new all time record, but that improves on last August by less than $12B while the accelerating drop in agencies has now purged all the gains for the year in that number.  Indeed the net US…
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There’s all kinds of investors these days who see themselves as the latest Donald Trump of foreclosures.  A number of them use “Email blasts” to market their latest “fix-and-flips”.  L graciously pulls some of the more interesting ones out of his spam trap and sends them on to us.  Here’s one of them: So what’s interesting about it?  It’s just another “conventional” sale, right?  Not this baby.  It’s not only flipped– but flopped– and back again.  Check out how often this thing has been foreclosed on: Granted, this isn’t typical.  We’ve seen a fair number of double foreclosures though. Often…
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Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moodys and frequent “talking head” says that housing will start to make a comeback next year.  Why? [Thanks L!] First he likes the prices: “House prices are now low enough relative to incomes that single family housing is about as affordable as its ever been in the data we have going back to World War II,” Zandi says. And then there’s the “fear factor”: Demand to buy homes will also increase when potential buyers get a whiff of rising interest rates. I don’t share Zandi’s optimism.  However “affordable” homes may be, financing remains difficult to…
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