Josh Brown at TheReformedBroker is fascinated by and scared of the Chinese growth story for good reason. On the truly scary side, he highlights the home market paragraph below from David Leonhardt’s NYT feature on China. Post-boom U.S. Realtors take heart: you’ve (probably!) never resorted to setting up shop on the sidewalk. This reminds me [...]

Rates Open Down, Preview of Trading Week During Friday’s short bond trading day, mortgage and Treasury bonds rise as investors sought safe havens from a euro zone debt crisis. 10-yr notes were 12/32 higher in price to yield 2.87%. 5-yr notes, probably a better proxy for MBS prices given the life of new-production mortgages, were [...]

Repeat after me: Fed Funds are set by the Federal Open Market Committee, don’t vary daily, and have no direct bearing on 30-yr mortgage rates. 30-yr mortgage rates are set by supply and demand through the bond markets, vary every day, and prices are adjusted by what investors & servicers want to see flowing into [...]

I usually try to keep my opinions out the daily commentary. But I am really becoming irked by the press. One day they complain about our industry having foreclosure problems and the credit crisis here in the US and in the world. And then the next day they complain about the declining rate of mortgage [...]

CityCenter, the largest construction project in U.S. history, opens in phases this month. MGM claims it will pull Vegas out of it’s recessionary spiral. They also claim they have the right to and ability to buy out their partner Dubai World, who is seeking their own bailout right now.

An uncle once told me, “I’ve had bad luck with both my wives. The first one left me. And the second one didn’t.” In a story from Reuters, both Deutsche Bank and France’s BNP Paribas SA separately sued Bank of America last Wednesday, “claiming that the largest U.S. bank breached its obligations on a total [...]

As usual, Nouriel Roubini’s RGE Monitor does a great job of summarizing issues, in this case the Dubai debt crisis: Dubai World’s request for a standstill on interest payments contributed to market corrections November 26-27 as investors worried that it implied a broader default on the debt of Dubai’s government linked institutions. While local markets [...]

Late last year, Dubai was crashing hard and the reason seemed obvious. Now The Economist says Dubai can’t be counted out: The debt of Dubai’s government and government-controlled companies is about $80 billion. Almost $11 billion comes due this year (including interest) and $12.4 billion next. Nakheel alone must refinance a $3.52 billion bond in [...]

Home price expert Robert Shiller, co-founder of the S&P Case Shiller home price index and author of The Subprime Solution and Irrational Exuberance, has a famous anecdote about when it’s time to get out of a market. It was when he was in a cab and the cab driver was telling him all about how [...]