Real Estate Blog

Its time to take some time off and recharge. All the excitement of the “08:08″ events wore me out.

And while we are considering lower oil prices, lets actually try to consider fixing the financial system problems of today. It really calls for a series of meaning regulatory overlays, not a bunch of restrictions. Here’s an interesting point of view:

Professor Shiller thinks our bankrupcty laws need to be overhauled as one of the fixes for financial system meltdowns:

Current bankruptcy law, and the system of bankruptcy courts, were put in place by Congress with the help of organizations like the American Bankruptcy Institute, the International Swaps and Derivatives Association and the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association. It’s not shocking that these groups seem to have approached the problem of bankruptcies largely as narrow specialists, thinking mostly of the interests of their clients, rather than of the economy as a whole. We can’t expect securities lawyers to focus on issues like threats to consumer confidence or, for that matter, disruptions in the labor market.

But someone needs to do it.

An like any period of upheaval, there are winners, and there are losers.

Or better yet, think about our ability to to craft new laws to solve our problems.

And while you’re at it, think about this as a complete sentence while I am away:

Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.

Does this make sense? Of course, not. That’s why I am taking a break.

Read the original here:
[Matrix Hiatrix] 08:08:08:08:08 Aftermath, It’s All Buffalo

This week, I decided to set a table and look at what is happening in the market as measured by dollars, not percentages in Three Cents Worth, my regular post on Curbed. Without a chart, I am expecting a lot of grief. Take a number, not a percentage.

Click to view post.

Check out previous Three Cents Worth posts.

Excerpted from:
[Curbed] Three Cents Worth: Table Change By Dollar, Not Percent

Source: RedKid

Just when I was able to cite “OFHEO” and Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (who comes up with these names?) from memory, along comes a new agency created from the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 recently passed into law.

FHFA: Federal Housing Finance Agency. No web site yet - I tried www.fhfa.gov

It has to compete with a bunch of others organizations that use the same acronym:

FHFA Fairfax Hispanic Firefighters Association (Virginia)
FHFA Fairly Homogeneous Farming Area
FHFA Family Health Foundation of America
FHFA Federal Housing Finance Agency
FHFA Florida Health Freedom Action (South Miami, FL)
FHFA Florida Home Furnishings Association
FHFA Florida Housing Finance Agency
FHFA Foot Health Foundation of America

I am hopeful the new agency will be better suited to provide better oversight than OFHEO did. OFHEO was essentially a rubber stamp for the GSEs until a few years ago when the FNMA accounting scandal woke it up. A new director took the reigns at OFHEO, James Lockhart, who seems to be doing all the right things (and one heck of a lot of press releases).

From the latest press release, it looks like the current director of OFHEO had a big hand in creating the new agency, FHFA. Since Lockhart has been pretty coherent, I’ll try to consider this as a good thing.

No web site, no information on the structure. Nothing but a press release so far. We’ll have to wait. Of course, credit and liquidity are very limited and need to be fixed before housing takes a turn for the positive, so I hope its not too long.

Takeaway: Odds are government will move too slow to provide meaningful solutions to the credit crunch in a world that moves much faster. In fact, the lack of action over the past several years set the stage for the condition we are currently in so I am not sure what we are waiting for.

By the way, freecreditreport.com …isn’t.

Credit:
[Acronym Update] FHFA From OFHEO Over GSE With HUD And FHFB

Good grief, I am in slow motion this month.

The Federal Open Market Committee kept the rate at 2% for the second straight meeting yesterday. The WSJ breaks out the announcment FOMC statement in a regular feature called Parsing The Fed.

Hint: Falling Oil Prices AND Falling Housing Prices

Two meetings ago, I suggested the Fed would hold for a while. I’ll stick to that with the slight modification that I would think they will raise rates after the November election. It’s a tough call because inflation concerns, while real, are…well, inflated.

Mortgage rates are not doing much and banks are being forced to enjoy the spread between what they can borrow from the Fed (federal funds rate) and what they can lend (mortgage rates). The large losses are likely being released by financial institutions piecemeal: so as to not scare their stockholders combined with the lack of mortgage rate reduction suggests a lot more losses that are going to be announced over the next few quarters.

On top of it, a bleeding Freddie Mac will need to capitalize too.

Forget drinking milk, here’s how to win at rock, paper, scissors.

Excerpted from:
[FOMC 2%] Milking The Pause