All Posts Tagged With: "housing crisis"
Foreclosure Predictions: Is the Housing Bust Over?
With the housing crisis in full swing Americans are frantically searching the internet for foreclosure predictions.
Foreclosure predictions, of course, have a nasty habit of turning out wrong.
According to AP, although the foreclosure rate in the US began to accelerate in 2006, “people lost their homes at the highest rate on record in the first three months of this year, and late payments soared to a new high, too – an alarming sign that the housing crisis and its damage to the national economy may only get worse.”
House Price Crash UK: Prices to Fall 10% by 2010
A new report by Paris-based economic think tank the OECD warns of a severe house price crash in the UK.
The report predicts that UK house prices will crash by 10% by 2010 and that, with consumer spending slowing, the Bank of England will eventually need to cut interest rates by three-quarters of a percentage point to 4.25% next year.
Ben Traynor in The Daily Reckoning explains how a house price crash in the UK will affect the country’s economy…
After Subprime, US Faces Crisis in Construction
They’ve already taken a hit on subprime, now major US banks, including troubled Wachovia, could be facing a similar crunch in the construction-lending market.
Part of Wachovia’s problem — apart from its residential-mortgage woes — is the $23.9 billion in outstanding debt it holds in relation to commercial-property projects at the end of the first quarter, according to The Wall Street Journal.
“Teaser rates of just 1% interest, left almost one-in-ten subprime borrowers unable to meet their monthly mortgage bills,” says Adrian Ash in The Daily Reckoning UK.
83,000 Workers Fired by Financial Firms Since Last July
Since the beginning of the subprime crisis last July, financial companies around the world have fired a total of 83,000 workers, sparking fears that the global recession could be worse than expected. This from Bloomberg:
It’s as if the entire workforce at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley vanished in less than a year.
From Tokyo to London to New York, financial companies announced plans to shed more than 83,000 jobs since last July as revenue and compensation pools evaporated, according to figures compiled by Bloomberg.
Housing Crisis: Case-Shiller Index Reveals 13% Price Drop
The US housing crisis looks sets to deepen after S&P’s/Case-Shiller Home Price index showed that home prices in 20 US cities fell almost 13% in February from a year earlier. This from AP:
“Month-to-month, it gets consistently worse,” said David Blitzer, chairman of the index committee at S&P, noting that February also marked the sixth straight month that all 20 cities experienced declines. “The slope is one direction. There is no sign of a bottom.”
Up to 300 US Banks Could Fail Before 2010
As the subprime crisis bites, experts predict that as many as 300 US lenders will go out of business in the next two to three years. This from MarketWatch:
At least 150 banks will fail in the US during the next two to three years, according to a projection by Gerard Cassidy and his colleagues at RBC Capital Markets.
Housing Crisis: 243,000 US Homes in Foreclosure and Counting
US foreclosure filings climbed 65% and bank seizures more than doubled in April from a year earlier as mortgage industry efforts to modify loans fell short, reports Bloomberg.
More than 243,300 properties were in some stage of foreclosure, the highest monthly total since RealtyTrac Inc., a seller of default data, began in January 2005. One in every 519 households received a filing and Nevada, California and Florida had the highest rates. Filings rose 4 percent from March.
Case-Shiller Index Spells Disaster for US House Prices
Data from the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller Home Price Index released today reveals that US house prices are rapidly accelerating on their way down.
According to a report in the San Francisco Chronicle:
The group’s 10-City Composite index covering major U.S. markets traced the same trajectory, falling 13.6 percent in February, 11.4 percent in January and 9.8 percent in December.
Home Depot Votes for “Things aren’t so Bad”
“Sales of new homes plunge to lowest level in 16½ years,” reports the Commerce Department, throwing another log of bad news onto the burning housing market. And by the time you read this, we’re sure another story of the weak housing market will hit the newswire. It’s what makes the current strength in shares of Home Depot so interesting.
Shut Out of the Housing Market?
It’s amazing how rapidly the prospective losses from the credit crunch keep climbing.
It was only a couple of weeks ago that the G7 said that losses from sub-prime would rack up at $400bn. A week or so later, another analyst had piped up with $500bn as the likely toll.
Now this morning’s Telegraph quotes a Credit Suisse analyst as putting a $600bn figure on the final reckoning.
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