Underwater Homes Drops In Q1 CoreLogic reflected some good news about the housing market. The number of homes where borrowers owe more on the mortgage than the house is worth has dropped to about 11.2 million in the first quarter, down from 11.3 million last year. But we still have about 24% of all residences [...]

Wild Tuesday Market Recap Yesterday was quite the day for the financial markets. For an appetizer, we started with S&P cutting Greek debt to junk and downgrading Portugal. For the salad course, US home prices slipped, but Consumer Confidence rose. For the main course, Goldman Sachs representatives sat in front of the Senate and fended [...]

Interpreting Latest Existing Home Sales Data Everyone has an opinion about home sales. But most agree that new home sales are at record lows and will be slow to recover until inventory of existing homes and the foreclosure overhang are worked off in many locations around the US. Some indicators for existing home sales, however, [...]

The S&P Case Shiller January 2010 report of existing home sales showed year-over-year -0.7% price declines averaged across 20 major metropolitan areas (see table below). This is the closest to positive since January 2007. San Francisco and Minneapolis are 15.2% and 12.9% above their trough values, and notable declines for the year-over-year period were Las [...]

Can Mortgage Rates Actually Improve? Although we receive a break from the auctions this week, on Thursday the government announces the schedule for next week right ahead of Friday’s unemployment data. And of course tomorrow is the last day of the Fed purchase program – we end with the current coupon mortgage yield, spread to [...]

There’s been an interesting debate about blogging economics the last couple of days between financial blogging heavyweights Felix Salmon, writer for Reuters and Henry Blodget, editor in chief of BusinessInsider. There are many layers to the debate, but each man’s core position is as follows: Salmon believes that quality of content and reporting are how [...]

Dear Cody: I checked into your Happy Hour show yesterday on FoxBusiness and saw you cut your hair. I’m writing to say: good choice and keep it short. I know you’re a rocker by night and all that, but you were looking eerily like the UPS guy (a side-by-side visual aid provided here), and as [...]

Bond markets were crazy last two days (mostly bonds selling off, pushing rates higher) so we didn’t have time to update site much, but below is Bernanke’s full House testimony with the latest on the Fed’s exit strategy from mass stimulus. See the very last paragraph, that pretty much sums it up: the Fed will [...]

Geithner’s Testimony on Future of Housing Finance Yesterday the House Financial Services Committee held a hearing to discuss the future of housing finance, trying to start answering questions about what the new system should do. Many people spoke, although Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was the headline witness with 17 pages of testimony. “It’s important as [...]

This was week 56 of a mortgage bond purchase program by the Federal Reserve—here’s week 55. From January 21 to January 27, the Fed bought $12b net of mortgage bonds. This is just above the weekly low for the entire program set four weeks ago with $9.3b in net buys, and clarifies a trend of [...]