The Wall Street Journal just did a great tribute to one of the best movie car chases of all time. Some Friday awesomeness for you below: watch Steve McQueen as Bullitt going wild on San Francisco streets. I wish only for one day they’d let me do this. Also here’s an HD version but they
January 2011
Rates are down to about 4.75% today as turmoil in Egypt is causing stocks to fall and bonds to rise. The Dow is currently down 172 points and mortgage bonds are currently up 34 basis points (4% FNMA 30yr). When bond prices rise on this kind of rally, rates fall. HuffingtonPost has lots of Egypt
Our $14t Deficit Doesn’t Matter, Until It Does. Solving Fannie & Freddie’s 242k Foreclosure Backlog.
Yesterday the markets were concerned about S&P cutting Japan’s credit rating for the first time in 9 years to AA- to account for their mounting debt. What about here in the US, are we broke yet? Our deficit is over $14 trillion. This doesn’t matter … until it does. But when does that happen? When
Smart Money just published a good piece on how to determine if financial advisors, mortgage lenders, insurance agents and college aid advisors have your best interest in mind—or if they’re in it for themselves. It’s got some good basic tips for consumers. Below are the financial and mortgage advisor excerpts, and here’s the full report.
Rates are about even today after rising yesterday, and 30yr rates are about 4.875%. Yesterday, December’s New Home Sales showed a 17.5% increase in single-family home sales (way more than 3.1% expected), the Fed said the economy is still struggling, and there was a well-received 5-yr Treasury auction. The Fed announcement should have offset the
A team of scientists from Japan, Russia and the United States hopes to clone a mammoth, a symbol of Earth’s ice age that ended 12,000 years ago. The researchers say they hope to produce a baby mammoth before Freddie and Fannie get restructured. The Financial Times reports that Freddie and Fannie have been quietly lobbying
Markets often overreact. Like last May 6 when the Dow dropped 1000 points after Greece’s parliament voted on measures to control it’s out of control debt. Or even like today when rates rose .2% after New Home Sales rose 17.5%, making mortgage bond traders think the economy is fixed. It’s enough to drive you insane.
Below is the statement from the first Fed rate policy of 2011, which shows their view that the economic recovery and jobs situation is still unstable. They left overnight bank to bank lending rates the same at a 0-.25% target, and also said they’d continue their $600b quantitative easing program designed to lower business rates
An old lending joke says: the most accurate rate outlook is that rates will go up, down or stay the same. And with market heavy volatility since 2008, this could in fact be the most accurate outlook. But in all seriousness, below we examine these three scenarios since November 2008. This post is PART 1
Good graphics from ReformedBroker via NielsenWire showing how job and inflation concerns influenced what consumers spent money on last quarter.
It’s a day of conflicting data in rate markets. Consumer Confidence was up way more than expected and if this confidence translates into spending, it pushes rates higher. But offsetting this rate trade are two other pieces of data: home prices continue their decline, with today’s S&P Case Shiller report showing a sixth month of
The S&P Case Shiller November 2010 report of existing home sales showed average U.S. home prices declined 1.6% from November 2009. This is the sixth consecutive month of weaker data, which reflects sustained foreclosure volumes, high unemployment, and the drop off in activity following the federal homebuyer tax credit expiration. Home prices are down 30.3%
Future of Fannie/Freddie Postponed Again The deadline for a proposal to restructure Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, something required by the Dodd-Frank Finreg bill, has been pushed to mid-February. F&F own about half the $10+ trillion of outstanding home loans and the plan must address how the government continues backing existing mortgage-backed securities and how
In all of the post-bubble analysis of what went wrong lots of blame is placed on credit default swaps (CDS), which are fairly new, having not existed before 1994. Inauspiciously enough, CDS stemmed from a disaster. On March 24, 1989 the Exxon Valdez, an oil tanker headed to Long Beach, CA hit a reef in
Bank of America spent $1.5 billion on legal fees in the last three months of 2010. Sometimes we have trouble imagining big numbers. In the US, our median household pretax income is about $50,000. If a household were to work for 300,000 years, it would earn $1.5 billion dollars. More on BofA writedowns is in
The first picture below is Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan when he took the job in December 2009. The second picture is from his Bloomberg interview today … one year later.
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