Calling the Bottom — One Market at a TimeAsking whether “the housing market has bottomed yet?” strikes me a little like asking, “is it Spring yet?” The answer depends on where you are. So, it’s certainly Spring in the middle of the U.S. Meanwhile, at least this week in the Twin Cities, it certainly doesn’t...Read More
Can We Afford Wall Street?I’ve got a way to make palatable the $3 trillion (or is it $4 trillion? Or $6 trillion?) injected into Wall Street (so far). Don’t think of it as a bailout, think of it as alimony. Yes, alimony. As in, what you pay to divorce someone — or in Wall Street’s...Read More
Adding Back Checks & Balances If you haven’t been paying attention, there seems to be widespread consensus that much of the “recent unpleasantness” (what some people in the South called the Civil War) has to do with too few checks and balances in the financial system. So, one of the reasons that securitized mortgages became...Read More
Attributes of Tear-Down Neighborhoods I’ve posted previously about the somewhat counter-intuitive attributes of tear-down houses (“Tear-Down Economics,” “Contender . . . or Pretender?”), so I’m not going to revisit the analysis here. However, tear-down neighborhoods — areas with lots of tear-down activity — also have their own attributes. Here’s what they seem to have in...Read More
“You Know it When You See It” “Curb appeal” is one of those real estate terms that you really can’t define, but “you know it when you see it,” as they say. (That unscientific formulation also happens to be the Supreme Court’s definition of pornography — really!). At any rate . . . this brick,...Read More
Pundits Weigh in on Geithner Plan Thanks to the FDIC’s loan guarantee, there is a big upside if the assets do well. That upside is there to lure the rich guys in. That is why the big funds were happy; that is why the stock market went up. For the high rollers, this casino could...Read More
