Mar 1st 2011 4:45PM
California has hit a record for buyers striking all cash deals for houses, particularly on the ultra-high end. Apparently, some 31 percent of all buyers in California paid cash -- and the higher up you go in the price category, the greater that percentage. For example, 62.2 percent of people buying homes worth at least $5... Continue Reading »
Mar 26th 2010 12:15PM
Yesterday, I wrote a post titled "Who Killed M3?" that explored a Bush-era decision to stop tracking a key measure of money supply, and its link to the housing bubble. Today, I explore that further. What did George W. Bush have against M3 that made it important enough to risk the world economy to get rid of? It was an... Continue Reading »
Mar 25th 2010 11:00AM
Not long ago I wrote a post about a National Bureau of Economic Research study that blamed the Great Recession on a bank panic rather than that usual suspect, the sub-prime mortgage crisis. There was a sub-prime crisis, sure, but it was just the catalyst for the much more damaging bank panic that followed. All this... Continue Reading »
Dec 17th 2009 2:39PM
If you think the tiny bump up in interest rates over the last week was bad, wait till you see rates a year from now. No one can predict the future, of course, but there's good reason to think that average interest rates for 30-year home loans will be well above 5 percent or even 6 percent by the end of 2010. The average... Continue Reading »
