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Housing market literally hits the bottom (video)
In Victorville, California and several other places the housing market is literally hitting the bottom as banks are finding it more cost effective to bulldoze foreclosed houses rather than selling them. As the clip below shows, Guaranty Bank decided to demolish four model homes and 12 nearly finished houses in Victorville because they were facing…
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The Financial Crisis explained in 11 minutes
Jonathan Jarvis did a great job at creating an easy to understand animation that explains some of the main causes of the credit crisis: Gold is back over $1,000 by the way. Too bad I didn’t pick up a couple of those glimmering coins a few years ago, that investment would have actually made me…
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CDOs made simple (video)
Just come across a nice video on YouTube that illustrates what CDOs (collateralized debt obligations) are: A CDO is a very complicated way to spread risk and many people in the financial industry didn’t fully understand the risk until it was too late. More and more companies are starting to get hit by toxic credits, earlier…
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“If you were dead, they’d still give you a loan”
NY Times published an interesting story about the criminal lending practices of WaMu that resulted in billions of dollars worth of bad loans, you can read it over here. Shaky loans were big business for banks like WaMu; lending to people who weren’t credit-worthy resulted in big bonuses but had very nasty consequences for the…
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10 outrageous economic claims for 2009
Saxo Bank has published a list of ten outrageous economic claims for 2009. The Danish investment bank says this is their annual attempt to predict rare but high impact events that are beyond the realm of normal market expectations: The Copenhagen-based online trading and investment specialist’s predictions are an annual attempt to predict rare but…