Considering the collapse in home prices in 2007 and 2008, you might think that housing would have gotten more affordable. You would be wrong.
More Americans found housing unaffordable last year, even though home prices across the U.S. have taken a major fall. More than 40 million spent 30% or more of their household income on housing costs, 600,000 more than in 2007, according to 2008 Census data released Monday. That includes homeowners with and without mortgages, as well as renters.
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From 2007 to 2008 the homeownership rate fell more than half a percentage point, to 66.6% — the lowest level since 2002, says Mark Mather, a vice president at the Population Reference Bureau in Washington, D.C.
(AP) — Regulators may borrow billions from big banks to shore up the dwindling fund that insures regular deposit accounts.
The loans would go to the fund maintained by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. that insure depositors when banks fail, said industry and government officials familiar with the FDIC board's thinking, who requested anonymity because the plans are still evolving.
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The fund, which insures deposit accounts up to $250,000, is at its lowest point since 1992, at the height of the savings-and-loan crisis. Ongoing losses on commercial real estate and other loans continue to cause multiple bank failures each week.
Well, Public Citizen just put up a new blog post explaining WTO trade rules and how these rules might lead to the WTO trade complaint case against the SEC. The WTO might claim banning high frequency trading (known as HFT) is a barrier to trade.
HFT would almost certainly fall under the definition at Annex’s 5(a)(x): “Trading for own account or for account of customers, whether on an exchange, in an over-the-counter market or otherwise.” Even if it didn’t, the list in the Annex is illustrative, not exhaustive.
A bill offered by Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., and expected to pass easily would provide 13 weeks of extended unemployment benefits for more than 300,000 jobless people who live in states with unemployment rates of at least 8.5 percent and who are scheduled to run out of benefits by the end of September.
The 13-week extension would supplement the 26 weeks of benefits most states offer and the federally funded extensions of up to 53 weeks that Congress approved in legislation last year and in the stimulus bill enacted last February.
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Some 5 million people, about one-third of those on the unemployment list, have been without a job for six months or more, a record since data started being recorded in 1948, according to the research and advocacy group National Employment Law Project.
The Conference board has released their LEIs for August 2009. Their leading economic indicator index (LEI) is up 0.6% for August. July was 0.9% and June was 0.8% respectively.
"Since reaching a peak in July 2007, the LEI fell for twenty months – the longest downtrend since the mid 1970s – but it has been rising since April and its gains have become very widespread," says Ataman Ozyildirim, Economist at The Conference Board. "The six-month growth rate of the LEI continues to accelerate. At the same time, the downtrend in the coincident economic index, measuring current economic activity, seems to be stabilizing, with the index flat so far this quarter."
For anyone with even a passing familiarity with issues associated with economic inequality, The Wall Street Journalfront page story last week was shocking. Its use of bad data was a misuse of this important forum. In effect, the article says that economic inequality was never really a problem, and even if it is we no longer have to worry about it. These conclusions are just plain wrong.
The slight slowing of decline in early summer is over.
Commercial real estate prices…renewed steep declines and low transaction volume in July… The [Moody's/REAL Commercial Property Price Index] was down 5.1% from June after having declined by only 1% the prior month. It is now 30.8% below what it was a year earlier and 38.7% below the peak measured in October of 2007.
Bloomberg not only quoted a financial math geek in this article but also alerted us that one of them is a bloggin' fool.
Financial markets have grown too dependent on mathematicians who use models to anticipate price moves and need to start injecting common sense into the equation, said Paul Wilmott, a London-based author and quantitative finance instructor.
“There is too much mathematics in this business,” Wilmott, author of “Paul Wilmott on Quantitative Finance,” said in a Bloomberg Radio interview. “I just want people to stop and think for once.”
Wilmott, based in London, has warned that so-called quants who use mathematics to forecast how markets will behave can overlook errors in the models, leading to flawed predictions.
Are you out of denial yet? Maybe this graph from Moody's will shock you out of it. What are the 5 stages of grief again? Oh yeah, denial, rage, bargaining, depression.....acceptance. Below are the time estimates for when housing prices will recover to their all time highs.
The source is Moody's, who kind of missed the entire housing bubble.
Now this is thinking outside the box. An online auction for patents.
The world can be a rough place for independent inventors. They can often find themselves in court, battling big corporations, spending piles of money on lawyers and leaving it up to judges and juries to determine the value of their hard-won patents.
That could be changing. Wrangling over patents is beginning to move out of the courtroom and into the marketplace. A flurry of new companies and investment groups has sprung up to buy, sell, broker, license and auction patents. And venture capital and private equity is starting to pour into the field.
The arrival of these new business-minded players, according to patent experts and economists, could lead to a robust marketplace for patents, where value is determined not so much by court judgments but by buyers and sellers, perhaps, someday, like eBay.
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