Free Republic

It's not stagflation, but what is it? Rising inflation, rising unemployment and slowing growth in the 1970s created stagflation, a phenomenon that led to double-digit interest rates in the early 1980s as the U.S. Federal Reserve tried to fix the damage made by loose monetary policies in the previous decade. Then as now, there was unrest in the Middle East and an oil shock that drove energy prices sharply higher. There were also steep U.S. budget deficits. The dollar was falling and commodity prices were rising. But economists say it is unlikely that the economy will slump into the painful...

Herb Weisbaum -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- • Profile • E-mail There’s no denying it any longer. In most parts of the country, the sizzling house market has cooled. The latest numbers tell the story: Sales of existing homes are expected to drop 6.8 percent this year. The people who make their living selling homes prefer to put a more positive spin on these numbers. They say the marketplace is just going back to normal. “It’s not normal to have 15 offers on a property,” says Jim Warkentin, a Realtor in McLean, Va. “That’s just crazy.” For the most part, those crazy days are...

Twin Cities home sales for May were down from a year ago, as the housing inventory continued its record growth, the local Realtors associations reported Monday. There were 5,039 closed home sales in May in the 13-county metro area. That is down 9.3 percent from a year ago, but up 28.6 percent from April. The median sales price rose 1.1 percent to $230,000 in May, compared to $227,501 a year earlier. There were 5,749 pending sales in May, down 14.5 percent from 6,726 a year ago. New listings continued to soar in May, jumping 16.6 percent to 11,419. Following several...

Stock News: Homebuilders/Construction Builder Pain Spreads to WCI By Nicholas Yulico TheStreet.com Staff Reporter 6/12/2006 10:40 AM EDT Click here for more stories by Nicholas Yulico 1. Know Speculation From Investing 2. The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week 3. Rotate Out of Tech and Get Defensive 4. Crude Oil Moves Higher 5. TechWeek: Microsoft Gets Smart Homebuilder WCI Communities (WCI:NYSE - commentary - research - Cramer's Take) said second-quarter earnings would likely disappoint because of dismal orders at many of its high-rise condo and single-family housing communities in Florida. The Bonita Springs, Fla.-based company said new orders...

They are the new breed of mortgages, and home buyers in high-cost real estate markets can't get enough of them: interest-only and payment-option plans that cut monthly payments sharply in the early years of a loan. Lenders have marketed both types of mortgages aggressively -- often to people who need to stretch their incomes to afford homes -- but have said often that their borrowers have solid credit histories and excellent credit scores and that they fully understand the risks once payments reset in a few years. In some parts of the country, the share of buyers using interest-only and...