“Sellers Who Don’t Have to Sell,” or Picking Up Their Marbles & Going Staying Home Would-be forecasters trying to divine the future of home prices, post-pandemic, would be wise to remember the aftermath of The 2008 Financial Crash (sorry, I never bought “The Great Recession” label). Namely, housing prices weakened much more slowly than stocks, employment, and...Read More
Lehman’s “Not So Big” $600,000,000,000(!) Balance Sheet “The 2008 financial crisis itself was centered not on big banks but on “shadow banks” like Lehman Brothers that weren’t necessarily that big.” –Paul Krugman, “Sanders Over the Edge”; The NYT (4/8/2016) No matter what you think of big banks or who caused The 2008 Crash, I think...Read More
“Sellers Who Don’t Have to Sell,” or Picking Up Their Marbles & Going Staying Home It’s always nice to discuss housing market statistics with a fellow quant — which is why it was nice chatting with fellow Edina Realty agent (and now technology consultant) Aaron Dickinson earlier this week. His/my take on housing prices following The...Read More
From Steep Premium to Discount In the wake of the 2008 Financial Crash, rates on jumbo mortgages (over $417k in most parts of the country) skyrocketed to 7% or even higher. Assuming you could find one. Fast forward to Fall 2015, when jumbo’s can now be had for as little as 3.75% — a slight discount to...Read More
Defective Designs — & Their Fallout Usually when a nuclear reactor is first shut down, an electric pump pulls heated water from the vessel to a heat exchanger, and cool water from a river or ocean is brought in to draw off that heat. But at the Japanese reactors, after losing electric power, that system could not...Read More
