Tuesday, September 30, 2008

A quote from Tony Blair's last day as PM

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I think of Blair very much the same way as I think of LBJ--as a great man of many important accomplishments who made a tragic mistake with r...
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Coleman, Lacour-Little and Vandell argue that house prices made sense until 2004

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The abstract of their new paper: The cause of the "housing bubble" associated with the sharp rise and then drop in home prices ove...
3 comments:
Monday, September 29, 2008

LA House Prices again

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Brad Delong has the Case-Shiller house price index for LA going back to 1987 on his blog today . Nominal house prices are now about double ...
2 comments:

The Fannie/Freddie Conservatorship seems to be working OK

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Let' see: -Interest rates on conforming loans have dropped substantially, helping both homebuyers and sellers in the conforming market. ...
1 comment:

Can't anyone play this game?

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A few years back, I reads Robert Caro's Master of the Senate. The thing about the book that most stuck with me was the political genius...
Sunday, September 28, 2008

Is Lincoln Forecasting its own Demise?

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So I'm watching the Bears-Eagles game, and I see this ad for a Lincoln featuring the David Bowie song, "A Space Oddity," a son...
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Note to Self: Always listen to Warren Buffett

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During my brief stint at Freddie, an occasional question for discussion at lunch was the company's vulnerabilities. I think it is fair t...
3 comments:
Friday, September 26, 2008

A readers asks where to get data about Fannie Mae loan performance

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Every month, Fannie Mae (as well as Freddie Mac) puts out a monthly volume summary . The most recent summary, for July, has 90 day loan del...
3 comments:
Thursday, September 25, 2008

Full Disclosure

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In light of some of my recent posts, I should repeat my disclosure that I worked at Freddie Mac between September 2002 and January 2004. I ...
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Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Morris Davis writes to me

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Morris is currently at Wisconsin-Madison, and was formerly at the Fed. Why I am opposed to the bailout, by Morris A. Davis First, I...
4 comments:
Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Charles Calomiris and Peter Wallison blame Fannie Mae for the Subprime Mess

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Hmmmm. The loan performance on Fannie's book of business is substantially better than the overall mortgage market. And starting in 200...
7 comments:
Monday, September 22, 2008

Could we please stop saying that it was the hybrid feature of Fannie/Freddie that caused them to fail?

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I think we have enough failures across enough different types of financial institutions (Investment Banks, Commercial Banks, Thrifts,Insuran...
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Demanding some Accountability is not Partisan Squabbling

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The TED Spread (still above 200 bp at this writing) tells me that something must be done quickly to restore investor confidence. But someth...
1 comment:
Saturday, September 20, 2008

How big could a new RTC be to remain comparable to the old RTC?

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When the Resolution Trust Corporation was created in 1989, nominal GDP was about 40 percent of what it is currently. That RTC took over abo...
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Degrees of Freedom

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I am reluctant to weigh in on proposed solutions to the financial crisis, because Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson are a lot smarter than I an...
3 comments:
Friday, September 19, 2008

Are we at the Bottom in SoCal?

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For the second month in a row, Dataquick shows pretty robust sales growth for housing sales in Southern California--along with sharply lower...
1 comment:
Tuesday, September 16, 2008

I should write something about Lehman...

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... and I will, but probably not for a few days. There is a lot I need to think through. I also dropped my younger (by 45 minutes) daughter...
1 comment:
Friday, September 12, 2008

If not a hybrid, then what?

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I kind of liked the hybrid model of mortgage funding. The pure public sector doesn't do that well (FHA underwriting is not all it shoul...
3 comments:

The Power of Simplicity

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I gave a talk in New York yesterday morning, and then spent the afternoon/evening with my daughter. We were walking down Park Avenue, and c...
Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Megan McArdle doesn't like fixed rate mortgages.

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She argues that because house prices are more volatile than interest rates, variable rate mortgages make more sense . This argument makes no...
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