All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis (Joe Nocera, Bethany McLean) – 30 year history about the run-up to the mortgage and financial crisis. Fooling Some of the People All of the Time: A Long Short Story (David Einhorn) – Hedge fund manager explains how he saw taking the short… [Read more…]
October 19, 2010
Found the book via Megan McArdle’s recent post – “Should We Just Call a ‘Do-Over’ on the Mortgage Market?“. (The answer is a resounding “no” BTW… There are other more painful, but more effective ways to solve the problem.) Benjamin Roth was a lawyer in Youngstown, OH through the Great Depression and kept a running… [Read more…]
September 27, 2010
About a year ago, I picked up a copy of Andrew Ross Sorkin’s “Too Big to Fail” and wrote about it here. Sorkin was back on the Charlie Rose show a couple weeks ago discussing more concepts on debt, but how it applies to public debt – are countries too big too fail? Given the… [Read more…]
July 29, 2010
Good news – monkeys would have taken option ARM and pay-as-you go mortgages too: http://www.ted.com/talks/laurie_santos.html For more about Human Irrationality, check out Dan Ariely’s blog and his book – Predictably Irrational.
April 19, 2010
Just finished reading “The Big Short” by Michael Lewis – a nice explanation of CDOs and their contribution to the housing bubble. Lewis takes a head-shaking-you-won’t-believe-this-happened viewpoint than Gregory Zuckerman’s “The Greatest Trade Ever.” (Zuckerman takes more of the holy-crap-you-won’t-believe-that-this-Paulson-guy-figured-out-the-trade! approach.) Lewis only mentions John Paulson and his hedge fund once in the entire book… [Read more…]
May 5, 2009
More fun stuff… NPR was looking for some to talk expertly about the national real estate market and the recent March numbers released from the National Association of REALTORS. Instead, they got stuck with me… Here’s a link to the short segment – Scott Sambucci on NPR.
April 9, 2009
Ingrid Beckles, Senior Vice President of Default Asset Management at Freddie Mac, opened SourceMedia’s 3rd Annual Mortgage Servicing conference this week in Westlake, TX with perspectives and plans regarding the US housing market and foreclosures. Here’s a summary of the key points of her presentation [along with some personal commentary]. The statistics presented here are… [Read more…]
March 31, 2009
This is kind of neat, and in the spirit of vanity (or more likely to help my self-esteem), thought I’d point out the article published on BusinessWeek.com this weekend where I was quoted:Zip Codes with the Biggest Listing Price Gains by Prashant Gopal We (meaning Altos Research) helped him out in his research by providing… [Read more…]
March 31, 2009
John Hussman posted his weekly comment article yesterday that provides one of the most lucid descriptions of why the poorly constructed mortgage assets on bank balance sheets pose such as problem, and a clear set of solutions that would probably work if implemented. Of particular interest, Hussman explains why allowing the banks to charge the… [Read more…]
March 31, 2009
From John Hussman, of Hussman Funds, this article provides one of the most lucid descriptions of why the poorly constructed (I hate using the word “toxic”…) mortgage assets on bank balance sheets pose such as problem, and a clear set of solutions that would probably work if implemented. Hussman explains why allowing the banks to… [Read more…]
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December 16, 2010
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