Showing posts with label freddie mac. Show all posts
Showing posts with label freddie mac. Show all posts

August 29, 2007

Are you a Desperate Homedebtor trying to sell your depreciating housing asset for more than $417,000? Good luck with that. Jumbo mortgages now AWOL.

I've got baaaaaaaaaaaaaddd news for anyone who is trying to sell a home for more than the Jumbo max ($417k). Your pool of prospective buyers, already freaked out by collapsing home prices, now can't get a mortgage even if they wanted to. God forbid an interest-only, no-down mortgage either. Those days are O-V-E-R. And so are 2005 prices.

Yes, the housing crash really goes into overdrive now, thank you Mortgage Meltdown, and the realities of Jumbo mortgages and the death of confidence.


Subprime Mortgage Woes Spreading - Subprime Mortgage Crisis Spreading to High-End Housing Market

NEW YORK (AP) -- The subprime mortgage crisis is spreading to a somewhat unexpected place: homes costing more than $500,000.

As lending has rapidly gotten more restrictive for borrowers taking out large loans, sales of expensive homes have fallen sharply around the country during what should be one of the busiest seasons for buyers and sellers, mortgage bankers and real estate agents say.

"Showings are down, contracts written are down, and sellers are just as backed away as buyers are," said Lou Barnes, a partner in mortgage bank and brokerage Boulder West Financial Services in Boulder, Colo. The company arranges for financing on many higher-priced condominiums and houses in the state.

"I think the psychological damage is worse than the financial damage" which is already bad enough, he said. Even for buyers who have plenty of cash or can easily afford higher mortgage rates, the sudden change in the financing environment reduces "the ardor to buy a house unless you have to," he adds.

August 10, 2007

We knew what was going to happen. And now it's here. This liquidity crush is simply "revulsion" and "discredit". Housing panic is here.

It's panic folks, and it is here. Panic. In all your lives, you'll never see such a thing again. After the biggest financial bubble in the history of humanity, the biggest crash follows. It hath been foretold.

It's time to head to the cellar. Right on schedule, housing panic is now here.

Again, from the textbook:

Ultimately, the markets stop rising and people who have borrowed heavily find themselves overstretched. This is 'distress', which generates unexpected failures, followed by 'revulsion' or 'discredit'.

The final phase is a self-feeding panic, where the bubble bursts. People of wealth and credit scramble to unload whatever they have bought at greater and greater losses, and cash becomes king.


And just one of the headlines from reality today:

ECB injects €98bn but markets are gripped by panic

The European Central Bank released nearly €100bn (£68bn) in emergency funds into the banking system yesterday in an effort to kick-start the crippled credit markets, but its move only sparked panic selling on stock markets across the world.

The sudden cash injection was the largest since 12 September 2001, when the central bank released billions to stabilise the market after the terrorist attacks in New York.

The trigger for the €98bn package was a major overnight spike in inter-bank lending rates that if unremedied threatened to disrupt the normal functioning and stability of Europe's financial system.

As with the other market upheavals in the last month, the root cause was traced to America where the fallout from the meltdown of the market for risky, or sub-prime, loans continues to widen.