{"id":197037,"date":"2008-03-06T17:53:00","date_gmt":"2008-03-06T22:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/03\/06\/economics-update-507\/"},"modified":"2008-03-06T17:53:00","modified_gmt":"2008-03-06T22:53:00","slug":"economics-update-507","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/03\/06\/economics-update-507\/","title":{"rendered":"Economics Update"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, we don’t need to feel so alone any more, U.K. house prices Fell 0.3% in February<\/a>. What the French call “Anglo-Saxon” capitalism seems to be working wonderfully.<\/p>\n

Back in the US, the housing market is not looking up, with Foreclosures hitting an all time high<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Over 900,000 households are in the foreclosure process, up 71% from a year ago, according to a survey by the Mortgage Bankers Association. That figure represents 2.04% of all mortgages, the highest rate in the report’s quarterly, 36-year history.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Even if you are paying your mortgage, you are probably still losing home equity<\/a>. Total home equity is below 50% for the first time ever. It was 49.7% in Q2 2007, and 47.9% in Q3 2007, and the total equity dropped from $9.65 trillion from $9.93 trillion, or about $1000 for every man woman and child in the united states.<\/p>\n

There is not a whole bunch of confidence in real estate now, so the spread on mortgage backed bonds is at its highest level in 22 years<\/a>, and S&P has downgraded WaMu to BBB from BBB+<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We don’t have a stampede out of mortgages and real estate yet, but there are now rumors that UBS dumped $24 billion in Alt-A residential mortgage backed securities<\/a> (RMBS). If this is reality, we could very see a stampede for the door, and Alt-A, which is for people with credit ratings above 700, will go the way of subprime.<\/p>\n

So it’s no wonder that Fannie has dropped to a 12 year low<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It looks like the world is noticing this because the Dollar hit another record low<\/a>, and oil hit another high<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This may have been driven by the European Central Bank and Bank of England not lowering rates, when it is expected that the Fed will.<\/p>\n

We do have some mildly positive news retail sales were good in February<\/a>, and new unemployment claims have fallen<\/a>, though continuing claims are still going up.<\/p>\n

It seems that Ambac is going to be a laugh a minute, see here<\/a>, here<\/a>,
and here<\/a>. Basically, they have a plan to raise much needed capital, but no one thinks that it will work, and the markets halted trading at one point due to volatility over rumors.<\/p>\n

Finally, in a case of the weak helping the even weaker, GM will provide $3 billion in loans to Delphi in an attempt to help them emerge from bankruptcy<\/a>. <\/p>\n

If that ain’t good money after bad, I don’t know what is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, we don’t need to feel so alone any more, U.K. house prices Fell 0.3% in February. What the French call “Anglo-Saxon” capitalism seems to be working wonderfully. Back in the US, the housing market is not looking up, with Foreclosures hitting an all time high: Over 900,000 households are in the foreclosure process, up …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1261,1004,1265,1045,1088],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-197037","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bubble","category-finance","category-housing-crash","category-insurance","category-real-estate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197037"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197037"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197037\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}