Bank Foreclosure Sales Recall ’90’s IPO’s We’ve seen this movie before. Specifically, many of the practices embraced today by banks selling foreclosures, or Real Estate Owned (“REO”), echo tactics used by Wall Street more than a decade ago to sell “hot” tech IPO’s (“initial public offerings”). Consider these 3 parallels: One. Artificially low prices. At...Read More
WSJ: ‘Homes are Poor Long-Term Investments’ Today’s Wall Street Journal is running the latest in what has become a perennial real estate subject: how do homes fare as investments? (“Is Your Home a Good Investment?”). Its (non-groundbreaking) conclusion: long-term, homes barely beat inflation. In fact, depending on your starting point, statistics indicate that annual home...Read More
Posner: ‘Blame Regulators (& Economists)’ Let’s place the blame where it belongs. Not on the bankers, who are not responsible for assuring economic stability, but on the government officials who had that responsibility and failed to discharge it. They failed even to develop contingency plans to deal with what everyone knew could happen in a...Read More
Banks Price Low to Elicit Multiple Offers Real-estate brokers say multiple offers on certain homes have recently become more common in parts of California and Arizona and the Washington, D.C., and Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan areas. . . Brokers say banks appear to be deliberately setting asking prices low in some cases to provoke bidding battles...Read More
Noonan: ‘Goodbye Bland Affluence’ Peggy Noonan, who writes a column for The Wall Street Journal, is as thoughtful a social observer as there is. Notwithstanding her conservative, *Manhattan-centric take on things — which she freely concedes — she is consistently insightful, and a good barometer of where center-right thinking is at. So it’s noteworthy that...Read More
Ticketing Wall Street? Financially strapped local governments, in an effort to make ends meet, avoid layoffs, etc. apparently are now adding service fees for such mundane things as police responding to car accidents. The bill, which arrives in the mail, can be as much as $400 per incident. I think that’s a great idea. But...Read More
