Breaking: Homeless Have No Homes

An odd feature at NYT reports that homeless shelters are seeing a rise in former home owners who were foreclosed on. Only three years ago, foreclosure was rarely a factor in how people became homeless. But among the homeless people that social service agencies have helped over the last year, an average of 10 percent lost homes to foreclosure, according to ...

Divorces Drop Along with Housing Prices

The financial crisis has had one silver lining: fewer divorces.  Josie Cox for Reuters: Fewer British couples are filing for divorce as the sharp drop in property prices makes it hard for couples to sell a joint home and the credit crunch dampens a desire to fund two separate households, according to a study on Monday. The study, published by Grant Thornton ...

Nothing But Houses!

Megan McArdle starts off a post by summarizing a column: James Surowiecki has a very interesting column arguing that this bubble was different because unlike the earlier banking booms, there was no point to the wild spending.  The bubble didn't bring us railroads and electrification; it brought us . . . houses.  Lots and lots and lots of houses. Megan goes on ...

Housing Foreclosure Map

A recent study seems to confirm a point that Dave Schuler has been making repeatedly for months:  the housing bubble is a narrowly targeted geographic phenomenon: Via  Andrew Sullivan [Yes, him again. -ed.], who summarizes, "66 percent of potential housing value losses in 2008 and subsequent years may be in California, with another 21 percent in Florida, Nevada and Arizona, for ...

Brett Favre’s House

[caption id="attachment_26479" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Former Packers quarterback Brett Favre's home. Corey Wilson/Press-Gazette"][/caption] A story in the print edition of Sports Illustrated on the sale of Brett Favre's house in Green Bay captured my attention.  I can't find it online but it appears to have taken its cue from an October 2 piece in the Green Bay Press-Gazette. There’s no “for sale” ...

Financial Crisis and Moral Hazard

Lance Paddock, in his best Mr. Rogers imitation, asks, "Can you say moral hazard?" Unfortunately, the notion of "too big to fail" means that those who behave badly often keep the benefits when things go well but pass off the negative consequences of failure. UPDATE: Via Greg Ransom, I see that Cato's Gerald Driscoll has a good analysis of the proposed Fannie ...

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Bailout Debacle

The widespread rumors of a government bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have already had dramatic consequences, perhaps creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Iain Dey and Dominic Rushe, writing for The Times of London, note that, "The two companies lost almost half their market value last week as rumours of a government bail-out swept the stock markets, hammering share ...

Obama’s ‘Sweetheart’ Home Loan

The Manufactured Outrage of the Day comes to us from Joe Stephens and his page A3 piece for today's Washington Post, "Obama Got Discount on Home Loan." Shortly after joining the U.S. Senate and while enjoying a surge in income, Barack Obama bought a $1.65 million restored Georgian mansion in an upscale Chicago neighborhood. To finance the purchase, he secured a ...

Subsidizing Home Ownership

Ezra Klein jumps on a growing meme the home ownership isn't all it's cracked up to be and that the government should stop subsidizing it. He points to Paul Krugman, who argues in today's NYT that it's time to rethink our decades-long bipartisan consensus that home ownership should be encouraged. While everyone stresses the advantages of owning ...

President of the United States: Chief Job Placement Official

It's not change when he offers four more years of Bush economic policies that have failed to create well-paying jobs,… --Barack Obama, Remarks of Senator Barack Obama: Final Primary Night I heard that and the first thought that went through my head was, “Since when did the President of the United States become in charge of placing people in well paying jobs?” ...

Economic Hysteria

Alan Reynolds over at the Cato Institute puts the current financial crisis into perspective, and notes that the current financial crisis isn't nearly as a bad as many people seem to thing. Media hysteria over the mortgage crisis is almost certainly misleading countless people about prospects for the real economy. The US economy is likely in recession. Yet even that conclusion may ...

McCain the Interventionist

I've long thought that American politics and the fact that we have an activist/interventionist government when it comes to economic policy leads to a race to see who can pander the most to voters, or at least a sub-class of voters. John McCain's new "plan" to bail out the greedy and stupid when it comes to mortgages is another ...

Recession, Depression, or Neither?

There's no doubt that the U.S. economy is in a downturn. The cost of petroleum has skyrocketed, creating all manner of ripple effects throughout the economy. The "housing bubble" has burst in several cities and the sub-prime mortgage industry has gone bust, leaving many people upside down in their houses or facing -- or experiencing -- foreclosure. Bear-Stearns sold ...

Buyers Trashing Houses After Foreclosure

A "significant" number of people are willfully destroying their homes before complying with eviction notices as a means of exacting "revenge" on banks for foreclosing on them. This, in turn, has created a black market cottage industry where bankers bribe people with cash payments for leaving peaceably. Megan McArdle doesn't understand the pointless destruction, observing that it's "hardly the bank's ...

ARMs for the Rich

The NYT informs us today that, "The Affluent, Too, Couldn’t Resist Adjustable Rates." They took out adjustable-rate mortgages at the peak of the housing bubble to buy homes they would otherwise not be able to afford. Or they refinanced existing mortgages to take cash out. And now, two or three years later, the day of reckoning is here. These are not lower- ...