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The economy and the stock market may be recovering from their swoon, but more homeowners than ever are having trouble making their monthly mortgage payments, according to figures released Thursday. Nearly one in 10 homeowners with mortgages was at least one payment behind in the third quarter, the Mortgage Bankers Association said in its survey. That translates into about five million households. The delinquency figure, and a corresponding rise in the number of those losing their homes to foreclosure, was expected to be bad. Nevertheless, the figures underlined the level of stress on a large segment of the country, a...

WASHINGTON — In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting. Goldman's sales and its clandestine wagers, completed at the brink of the housing market meltdown, enabled the nation's premier investment bank to pass most of its potential losses to others before a flood of mortgage defaults staggered the U.S. and global economies. Only later did investors discover that what Goldman had...

Here are the news stories, editorials, and videos that conservatives dugg yesterday, Thursday, August 20, 2009. Please take a moment to digg these articles at Digg.com, then get back over here! What is Digg? And why should I care?

Despite signs that the real estate market is bottoming out, millions of homeowners are likely to find themselves in worse shape within the next two years. Nearly half of the nation’s 52 million mortgage borrowers will have negative equity by the end of the first quarter of 2011, up from the 14 million at the end of this year’s first quarter, according to estimates in an Aug. 5 report by Deutsche Bank (DB). With so many borrowers underwater – or owing more on their home than it’s worth – the risk is high that they’ll default and their homes will...

Almost half of homeowners with a mortgage could be underwater by 2011, says Deutsche Bank. We asked how that will play out. NEW YORK (Fortune) -- Karen Weaver, global head of Deutsche Bank's securitization research division -- responsible for analyzing credit default swaps, collateralized mortgage obligations, and other exotic Wall Street products -- said last week that 48% of U.S. mortgage owners will end up owing more than their home is worth by 2011. The figure may have left many Americans wondering how this could be possible. But consider that 27% of U.S. homeowners with a mortgage are already "underwater."...

Anyone referring to the "subprime crisis" has got to get with the program. The subprime wave of defaults is basically over. Now the question is, what about all the other types of mortgages? You know, OptionARM, Alt-As and of course, good old fashioned prime mortgage. The big wave of OptionARM resets has yet to come, and given the drop in home prices, refinancing won't be realistic. Let's hope the homeowners can afford their new monthly payments. Here's Mr. Mortgage discussing the problem last year.

The American people are pretty well convinced that the mortgage meltdown was the fault of greedy bankers, stupid borrowers, and the odd Friend of Angelo Mozilo like Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-CT). That's hardly surprising, since the mainstream media has shown a vivid disinterest in getting to the bottom of it all. That's why we have Thomas Sowell. His latest book, The Housing Boom and Bust, is a workmanlike analysis of the housing crisis. It's short enough, at about 50,000 words, for anyone to get through on a weekend. Needless to say, Dr. Sowell does not find that the meltdown was...

Another great misconception is on its way to becoming translated into a great, liberal lie that must be confronted before it becomes part of the political landscape of lies that are repeated over and over again – and believed by a body politic that doesn’t think for themselves. Here are just a few of the backdrop of hundreds of liberal lies that come quickly to mind.

Thomas Sowell on how government policies made the housing crisis possible Thomas Sowell, prolific public intellectual and the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, is one of America's greatest economic thinkers and educators. He's taught the fundamentals through such books as Economic Facts and Fallacies and Basic Economics and chronicled economic history through such scholarly works as Marxism: Philosophy and Economics and On Classical Economics. In his classic work Knowledge and Decisions, he espoused a sophisticated, largely Hayekian approach, revealing how the efficient spread of relevant knowledge is shaped by our social institutions, and often warped...

At the heels of one of the worst financial and housing meltdowns in the history of this country, rising unemployment and shrinking GDP the sentiment has surprisingly jumped from doom and gloom to mindless optimism. One does not need to look far to overhear bullish sentiment about the US stock market and little bits of chatter asking hopefully whether this recession is slowing down. Not to be outdone, this irrational exuberance (Greenspan would be proud) goes beyond the local talking heads or financial gurus at the water cooler, our own government hot shots have now proudly announced a reversal in...

bill clintons repeal of Glass Steagall

Barney Frank's Rental ReversalApril 21, 2009 BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Now, we've got a couple Barney Frank spites here. He's always good for a couple sound bites. We thought about getting a Barney Frank translator in here but that would sorta destroy it. I mean, I can do it myself but sometimes it's better to leave Barney Frank un-translated. He was on Tavis Smiley's show, PBS, last night, and Smiley said, "What did you do today relative to low-income housing?" FRANK: One of the causes of the terrible crisis we had over the last few years, which has given us today's...

David Keller was found dead in his home Tuesday morning in an apparent suicide. Keller, 41, has served as the acting chief financial officer (CFO) for Freddie Mac since September. Kellerman reportedly hanged himself in the basement of his Reston, Va. home. The Fairfax County Police Department said there are no signs of foul play. Keller took over as CFO when Anthony “Buddy” Piszel resigned in the wake of the government takeover. The news comes on the heals of Freddie Mac CEO David Moffett's resignation last month. The government-controlled Freddie Mac owns or guarantees about...

The spectacle of the very same people responsible for one of the nation's great financial calamities angling to be given even more control to fix the problem would be funny if it weren't so tragic. Rep. Barney Frank, the Democrat who sits atop Congress' efforts to deal with the financial crisis, has enough chutzpah for 100 politicians — which is saying a lot. In comments before testimony from both Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Fed chief Ben Bernanke Tuesday, Frank said he wants to regulate pay on Wall Street — even for companies that aren't getting bailouts. And he called...

A story in NY Times today suggests that plans by the administration will be unveiled soon detailing the most far reaching and intrusive regulations to date. The first sentence of the story sets the tone for what is sure to be a highly contested and controversial proposal. "The Obama administration will call for increased oversight of executive pay at all banks, Wall Street firms and possibly other companies as part of a sweeping plan" With this introduction, banks and similar institutions that do not fall under the auspices of the TARP plan will be subjected to government oversight in all...

Barney Frank is a lying sack of excrement. Oh, we beg your pardon. Did we say that? It just slipped out by accident. Here’s a Bloomberg News story from March 5, 2009: “U.S. House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank said he wants to see people prosecuted for wrongdoing related to the financial crisis as lawmakers overhaul regulation of Wall Street.” “Frank will call on attorneys general, bank regulators and officials from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to outline plans for prosecuting and recovering funds from those responsible for the crisis, he said today at a news conference in...

This was taken off of You Tube due to the liberal media. This link is to the same video, but is routed through Canada.

California Rep. Joe Baca has long pushed legislation he said would "open the doors to the American Dream" for first-time home buyers in his largely Hispanic district. For many of them, those doors have slammed shut, quickly and painfully. Mortgage lenders flooded Mr. Baca's San Bernardino, Calif., district with loans that often didn't require down payments, solid credit ratings or documentation of employment. Now, many of the Hispanics who became homeowners find themselves mired in the national housing mess. Nearly 9,200 families in his district have lost their homes to foreclosure. Congressional districts with large Hispanic populations often feature heavy...

U.S. housing crisis also hitting the wealthy Sun Dec 7, 2008 11:31am EST By Nick Carey HINSDALE, Illinois (Reuters) - Less than a year ago, few people in this affluent Chicago suburb expected the subprime U.S. housing crisis would hit close to home. "We thought Hinsdale was virtually immune and we wouldn't see any foreclosures, but we have," said Dave Hanna, managing partner of Chicago-based Prudential Preferred CRE and president of the Chicago Association of Realtors. "Nowhere is immune." With a pretty red-brick downtown lined with stores, good schools and a railway line to nearby Chicago, Hinsdale has been popular...

Damn Banks: Damned if they don't, Damned if they do Alternative headlines: Community Organizers Sue Businesses for Believing Community Organizers' Propaganda Government Forces Banks to Make Bad Loads to Minorities; Minorities Hardest Hit This is what Happens When Government Tells you how to run your Business Remember the good old days when banks were allowed to decide for themselves who to lend to? They would consider old-fashioned factors like the amount of the down payment, the borrowers' employment history, credit scores and otherwise come to a conservative expectation of the future profitability of a given loan. And they profited. And...

WASHINGTON — Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke acknowledges he was wrong in believing that there would be limited fallout to financial markets from risky mortgages that soured after the housing market's collapse. "I and others were mistaken early on in saying that the subprime crisis would be contained," Bernanke said in an article in the Dec. 1 issue of The New Yorker magazine. "The causal relationship between the housing problem and the broad financial system was very complex and difficult to predict," he said in the piece titled "Anatomy of a Meltdown." Subprime mortgages made to people with tarnished credit...

On any night of the week if you look hard enough on The Alameda, Santa Clara and Monterey Road, main streets of commerce in San Jose you might find Cindy*. Cindy, aged 40, is a prostitute: selling sexual services for as low as ...............

Tammy Soudbakhsh was one of the first people to move into her subdivision more than 10 years ago. She bought a modestly priced house in a stable neighborhood where her daughter had plenty of peers to play with. Several homes around Soudbakhsh are now empty because of foreclosures. The vacated houses sit inside a northwest Las Vegas ZIP code that has more than 1,500 foreclosures. "We knew who our neighbors were," Soudbakhsh said. "Now, we don't even know who's next to us." Against that backdrop Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid talked up the new Neighborhood Stabilization Program, which provides...

CORRALES, New Mexico (AP) -- It was a side trip through a destitute, ramshackle neighborhood in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, that detoured Brian McCarthy from building houses in Albuquerque to an idea to offer the very poor a chance to own a home. His answer lies in a humble steel shipping container 40 feet long, 8 feet wide and 8½ feet tall. McCarthy, 30, and three partners, Pablo Nava, 22; Kyle Annen, 23; and Mackenzie Bishop, 22, have made a prototype out of a standard shipping container that hauls goods worldwide -- a 320-square-foot home with a kitchen, bath with toilet,...

Housing prices would never have risen so high without multiple Washington mistakes. Many believe that wild greed and market failure led us into this sorry mess. According to that narrative, investors in search of higher yields bought novel securities that bundled loans made to high-risk borrowers. Banks issued these loans because they could sell them to hungry investors. It was a giant Ponzi scheme that only worked as long as housing prices were on the rise. But housing prices were the result of a speculative mania. Once the bubble burst, too many borrowers had negative equity, and the system collapsed....

1. The Federal Reserve cut interest rates to as low as 1% so that after inflation we had negative interest rates.

This is the video that is sweeping the internet. It is a John McCain promotion that also explains the causes of the housing bubble and the mortgage crisis. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5tZc8oH--o

Of the current financial debacle, we can be sure there’s plenty of blame to go around both sides of the political aisle. To the chagrin of main street conservatives, however, a whole lot of the blame can be laid at the feet of renegade conservatives who sit in the highest seats of government — renegades, because they behaved like liberals. An undeserved insult to those conservatives? No, because their behavior with respect to the corruption at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac can’t be distinguished from that of Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, et al.

Ken Lay and Jack Abramoff must be green with envy over the all the mischief that has been accomplished by Jamie Gorelick, with scarcely any demonization in the press. Imagine playing a central role in the biggest national defense disaster in 50 years. Imagine playing a central role in one of the biggest economic disasters in your country's history. Imagine doing both as an un-elected official. Imagine getting filthy rich in the process, and even being allowed to sit self-righteously on a commission appointed to get to the bottom of the first disaster, which of course did not get to...

July 23, 2008, 1:00 a.m. Our Government Problem-SolversAt election time, pols can't help but "do something" — even if it makes matters worse. By Thomas Sowell We don’t look to arsonists to help put out fires but we do look to politicians to help solve financial crises that they played a major role in creating. How did the government help create the current financial mess? Let me count the ways. In addition to federal laws that pressure lenders to lend to people they would not otherwise lend to, and in places where they would otherwise not invest, state and...

Lewis Carroll, call your office. Or, better still, the author of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" should call Washington, where the government's determination to solve the housing "crisis" produced this lead paragraph in a recent New York Times story: "Federal agencies are intensifying a criminal investigation of the mortgage industry and focusing on whether some lenders turned a blind eye to inflated income figures provided by borrowers." Perhaps some lenders who were lied to were culpably indifferent to dishonesty because they planned to sell to others mortgages that the lenders knew were risky. But the victimization narrative that is turning turbulence...

I am no fan of the war in Iraq, but it simply has not been a major contributor to the financial crisis and the impending recession. The high price of oil is largely the result of strong demand, notably from China and India, pressing against a limited supply. The global oil supply is growing more slowly than it could because of politics and policies in many places — Russia, Mexico, Nigeria and Venezuela as well as the Middle East. Fears that the turmoil in Iraq might spread have probably given a boost to oil prices, but nowhere near enough to...

It's ironic that the industry that caused the housing crisis in America is refusing to allow it's high end debt to be discharged in a Bankruptcy Proceeding. Granted, filing for bankruptcy protection is not the cakewalk it once was but if you are going to have to file you should not have the reason you are having to file excluded from being discharged...the home mortgage. This exclusion is the result of a cozy little lobbyist relationship between the American Bankers Association and Congress. It's the same sort of thing that spending 95 million dollars got them in the new Bankruptcy...

The mortgage loan modification plans put forward by the governor and, at various times and by the U.S. Treasury Department all failed to fix the problems. Why? They pretended that the problem is the structures of the mortgages used to buy houses ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The real issue in today's housing markets is that prices currently sit at levels that are unaffordable given income levels.... Take Los Angeles County, where the median price of a house peaked higher than $530,000. With a 6% interest rate and assuming a 10% down payment, the total annual cost...

It took six months for Liberation journalist Ondine Millot to get to the truth about the most sordid side of France's housing crisis. Look through some property websites and you can see the advertisements: the phrase you are looking for is contre services - when a room in an apartment is offered, sometimes "free", in exchange for services. Sometimes the service is perfectly innocent - cleaning the apartment or washing clothes, to defray some of the high cost of renting property. But sometimes it is not: instead the requests are sexual, demeaning, bordering on the perverse. "Sex twice a month,"...

NEW YORK (AP) -- Investment bank Morgan Stanley said Wednesday it sold a portion of itself to China Investment Corp., an investment arm of the Chinese government, for $5 billion to raise capital after taking $9.4 billion in writedowns on mortgage-related investments. Morgan Stanley said the investment will help bolster its capital position and allow it to continue growing its Chinese operations. China Investment will receive equity units that convert into as much as 9.9 percent of Morgan Stanley common stock. The equity units carry a fixed annual payment of 9 percent before converting to shares of common stock Aug....

CALIFORNIA, has always been a forerunner of the newest trends and proud of it. Hearing that next-door Nevada had squeezed into first place in home foreclosures was heartbreaking news. But, never underestimate the tenacity of the average Californian who has once more regained the record with 148,147 foreclosures in the third quarter. Nevada is screaming “Foul, foul,” and is pointing out that California has an unfair advantage because, “There’s more of ‘em to foreclose against.” One astute Nevadan was quick to point out that numbers can be tricky, and “as a percentage of households per capita, we’re still way out...

<p>SACRAMENTO (AP) - When voters backed Proposition 46 in 2002, supporters told them it would boost an ailing economy, build an abundance of subsidized housing without raising taxes, keep children in school, senior citizens out of nursing homes and stop battered women from being turned away at domestic violence shelters.</p>