At least, not yet. That’s the assessment from Robert Samuelson, a commentator whom I respect: Regarding the economy, it’s hard not to notice this stark contrast: The “real economy” of spending, production and jobs — though weakening — is hardly in a state of collapse, but much of today’s semi-hysterical commentary suggests that it is. […]
A very clever lady taught me that our entire financial system works on trust. When traders are buying and selling stock or securities, there is an inherent bond of trust that the transaction is what it appears to be. While we hear stories of slimy dealings on Wall Street and in the financial power houses […]
My stalwart co-blogger, Bruce Henderson, has been waving his arms here on ASIP for roughly two years now about the coming financial crisis, with a particular focus on the subprime fiasco. Well, here’s a link to a funny, scathing, profane, yet quite accurate presentation (using stick figures) on how we got into the subprime mess […]
Today we use data from Hardtack to take a closer look at the market in Phoenix. The Phoenix metro area saw explosive growth during the housing bubble, including developments and communities built where they honestly did not make any sense. In addition many of the properties were snapped up by California “Equity Locusts” looking to […]
Once again it is time to turn loose a new set of statistics on a segment of our nation’s housing market courtesy of Hardtack. Hardtack now has been collecting data for about a year, and some trends are clearly identifiable in the data. Last time we were looking at details of the declines (and some […]
I am on the road for the beginning of this week, but I wanted to post some overview graphs of what is happening in the Sacramento housing market. As you can see there is quite a drop in the asking price per square foot listed in the MLS. You can click the chart above for […]
Congress has just passed the president’s stimulus package, and the increase of the conforming loan limit to include some “Jumbo” loans is in it. Once again the ID credits go to Professor Kevin Depew at Minianville: Congress gave final approval Thursday night to an economic stimulus package that would send government payments to more than […]
As most of the readers here know, my team has been working with new technology to extract, refine and exploit information that is all around us. We have named that technology Boomerang and one example of it is an application called Hardtack. We are approaching the 1 year anniversary of full scale data gathering with […]
A year ago there was a great deal of disagreement on this nation’s housing bubble, with the people invested long in real estate insisting that it was just “fair value” and that prices would continue ever higher, carrying those “wise” enough to get in at historically high costs to greater riches. To keen observers, the […]
Now it’s Google — the absolute favorite of Wall Street — that’s getting hammered: More than $11 billion (£5.5 billion) was wiped off the market value of Google late last night as the internet darling missed sales and profit targets after years of defying gravity. The performance over the final three months of the year […]
