The Wall Street Journal wrote an editorial on the dangerous growth at Ginnie Mae on August 11th: “The Next Fannie Mae”. It makes the same points I made the other day in “Ginnie Mae Accounts for 20% of New Mortgages In 2009”.
There is one discrepancy in the two WSJ pieces. The editorial says Ginnie Mae guaranteed $680 billion of mortgage backed securities through July. The other WSJ article said the number was $298 billion through August. Big difference.
After 17 straight quarter point rate hikes going back to June 2004 the Fed paused on Tuesday leaving the federal funds rate at 5.25% (from 1% back in June of 2004). In this post I want to try and explain…
The Wall Street Journal ran a noteworthy article on Monday (subscription required) citing evidence that middle income consumers are slowing down their spending in the face of high gas prices and a slowing housing market: … Ms. Liebmann [president of…
The Wall Street Journal today published an editorial, “The House the Fed Built” (subscription required), echoing the interpretation of recent Fed history I posted a couple weeks ago: This is the housing market the Federal Reserve built. That is to say,…
After the bell on Wednesday women’s retailer Chico’s FAS (NYSE: CHS) warned that August same store sales are showing a decline of about 3% and that it sees dismal same store sales for its third quarter, according to the Wall…
Stephen Roach, Chief Economist at Morgan Stanley, had some noteworthy things to say about the bursting of the housing bubble and its effects on the US and global economies in his most recent two commentaries at Morgan Stanley’s Global Economic…
A couple weeks ago DataQuick, the excellent real estate information firm providing data primarily for the California market, came out with its July 2006 numbers. The Sacramento Bee ran a sobering article based on the report: July … saw the biggest drop…