Archive for March, 2009

Are American’s Responsible for an International Increase in Foreclosures?
If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!It is clear there are a number of problems in America right now. In less than 1 year, Americans have lost more than 1/4 of their net worth. Many of these losses come from the sharp, staggering drop in housing prices when home equity went down more than 5 TRILLION dollars. Many Americans who had been using their homes as ‘bank accounts’ were no longer able to do so and American’s who bought expensive homes without

Report criticises UK gov’t over crisis handling (AP via Yahoo! Finance)
The British government allowed Northern Rock to continue making risky loans for another six months after it became the first bank to receive a state bailout, a report by a public spending watchdog revealed Friday.

UK mortgage lending hits 8-year low in February (AP via Yahoo! Finance)
Mortgage lending fell to the lowest level in eight years in February, typically the slowest month of the year for home loans, the Council of Mortgage Lenders said Thursday.

The Wrath of a Patient Man
Gates of Vienna One of the advantages of maintaining the news feed is that I get to process a rapid-fire sequence of news stories. Every morning I wake up to fifty or sixty news tips that await me in our inbox — not to mention the ones in skype. As I flip quickly through the tips, copying and pasting them into the database form, I sometimes notice patterns in the news that I might otherwise miss. These days the most dystopian reports come from the UK. Britain has recently moved to the he

Bank of England: Britain Heading Towards 1930s-Style Depression
from The Daily Telegraph: The country is displaying early symptoms of being trapped in a so-called “debt deflation trap” where families find themselves pushed further and further into the red every month, according to a Bank report published today. The stark warning will cause serious concerns, since it was this combination of falling prices and soaring debt burdens that plagued the US in the 1930s. The Bank is using its Quarterly Bulletin to highlight the threat posed to the economy by

Q&A: What Lord Turner’s report means for mortgages (Guardian Unlimited)
Will there be a crackdown on big mortgages? Not immediately. It had been suggested that Lord Adair Turner would ban 100% mortgages and stop lenders from offering loans based on high income multiples, but although he said these played an important role in the financial crisis in the UK, he did not announce any new rules. Instead he said the FSA would be looking at ways to reform the mortgage …