I hope Ken Lay, Dennis Kozlowski, Bernie Ebbers, and others of their ilk are reading this. BEIJING (Reuters) – China executed four people, including employees of two of its Big Four state-owned banks, for fraud totaling $15 million, the state Xinhua news agency said Tuesday. The executions occurred in the midst a high-profile government campaign against financial crime. They followed… Read more →
Category: Economy/Finance
Pop Goes the Bubble
CNN/Money posted a great article today on the state of the housing market. Though it looks at the market on a nationwide basis, Orange County gets a special mention: Last week, real-estate tracker DataQuick said home sales in Orange County, Calif., the No. 2 U.S. market, slumped 17 percent from a year ago. The No. 3 market, Riverside-San Bernardino, Calif.,… Read more →
Real Estate Speculation
Visitors to the Golden State like to joke about “The Big One” turning Las Vegas into oceanfront property. But what if the “Big One” was an economic earthquake rather than a physical one? Like a salmon swimming upstream, I figured I was the only person to raise an eyebrow when Alan Greenspan stoked the flames of adjustable rate mortages by… Read more →
Is The Housing Market Cooling Off?
The money mavens at CNN seem to think so. I’m not sure I’d classify a 6.6% year-over-year increase as “cooling off”, especially when inflation is less than 3%. No, I’d put it more into the category of another irrational jump in a real estate market that’s already every bit as crazed as the NASDAQ composite at the turn of the… Read more →
The Housing Bubble
I recently came across an excellent study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research. It’s fifteen months old, but I think it’s just as valid now. Maybe more so, because real estate prices have continued to escalate since that time. Mr. Baker and I are in violent agreement about quite a few things. His study gives hard numbers to… Read more →
Goodbye Thanksgiving, Hello Christmas
And how was your Thanksgiving? No knock-down, drag-out family arguements, I hope? Lesley and I spent a simple but pleasant day together. We didn’t even cook–we ate out! Scandalous. It’s the first time I’d ever done that, and it was actually fun. Leaving the kitchen duties to someone else allowed us time to relax, laugh, and think about what were… Read more →
The Frenzied Housing Market Redux
A few days ago I wrote about the growing imbalance in many residential real estate markets and theorized that housing prices were going to have to decline sooner or later. But I couldn’t figure out exactly what would cause this “irrational exuberance” to snap. Obviously a huge spike in interest rates would do it, but how would such a thing… Read more →
The Frenzied Housing Market
Mathew Emmert’s commentary Housing Still Frenzied is a good read. I agree with most of what he says, but there were two glaring omissions. First, in the “Equity Schmequity” section, he misses the point of people’s argument when they say owning is superior to renting because you build equity. There are two ways to build equity in a home. One… Read more →