Free Republic

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. lawmakers will question some leading government and industry economists about the perils of a possible 'housing bubble' in a Wednesday hearing. Lawmakers wanted the session "because we've heard a great deal about the possibility of a housing bubble for several years now," said Sen. Wayne Allard, a Republican from Colorado. The hearing, "The Housing Bubble and its Implications for the Economy," will be held in an open session of the Senate Banking Committee at 10 a.m.. Next week, the same committee will hold a hearing on the growth of innovative mortgage products that have mushroomed along...

OFHEO House Price Index Shows Largest Deceleration in Three Decades. http://www.ofheo.gov for full PDF report click here http://www.ofheo.gov/media/pdf/2q06hpi.pdf

Mortgage trouble is creating some of the biggest bargains this side of eBay, allowing buyers to snap up homes for tens of thousands of dollars less than what they might have paid just a few months ago. "People are doing whatever they can to sell" in order to avoid foreclosure, said Brad Geisen, president and chief executive of Boca Raton-based Foreclosure.com. Notices of pending foreclosures are piling up, in what many believe to be the first wave of a trillion-dollar tsunami: The dollar volume of home loans with interest rates that will be ratcheted upward over the next several months....