The Blog of Author Mark MacKenzie: It's The Housing Market, Stupid!

Luke Mullins with U.S. News & World Report is reporting on his blogthat the Obama administration is proposing to limit the mortgage interest deduction for households in the 33% and 35% tax brackets. The Wall Street Journaldetails the plan as, "Households paying income taxes at the 33% and 35% rat...

If the events over the past couple of weeks have left any shadow of doubt that the era of big government intervention is upon us, Obama's housing plan will put that to rest. According to an article put out by Reuters, Obama's housing plan includes two massive and sweeping initiatives that will ch...

The NAR reported yesterday that existing home sales continue to face strong headwinds as the pace of sales contracted -5.3% from last month and -8.6% from last year to a seasonally adjusted pace of 4.49 million existing home sales.  This is the slowest rate of home sales in over a decade. As I wr...

According to the Census Bureau, the current pace of new home sales, which fell -48.2% from last year (and -10.2% from last month) to 309,000 at a seasonally adjusted pace, is the lowest on record going back to 1963.  This despite the fact that there are over 100 million more Americans today than ...

Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke said yesterday what I have been saying for several months now, "Affordability is not the issue it was a few years ago" in terms of the housing market.  In fact housing affordability, according to data that the NAR collects, is the highest on record going back...

Last week I wrote a post about how mortgage purchase applications remained alarmingly low despite Congress passing the recent $8,000 first time home buyer tax credit. The goal of the $8,000 first time home buyer tax credit was to get people off the fence and to stimulate demand for real estate.  ...

Tomorrow, Wednesday the 25th, the NAR will publish their monthly existing home sales report. Here are three things to look for in the report tomorrow: 1.)  Existing home sales.  "Tell me something I don't know, Mark!"  Specifically what you want to look at is the seasonally adjusted annual rate o...

According to Reuters, the Conference Board announced that consumer confidence cratered from 37.4 in January to 25 this month; this is the lowest reading on record since they began tracking the data in 1967.  The expectation was for a reading of 35.5. The amazing part about this report was that on...

According to an articlein Bloomberg.com yesterday, American Express is offering some cardholders $300 to pay off and close their accounts. The article went on to say that charges-offs rose to 8.29% in January from 7% in December. What this means is that American Express is anticipating losses gro...

If the size and scope of the current financial crisis was at all uncertain or ever in doubt, the past couple of days of news headlines should have made things very clear, we are going to need a bigger boat. There are two major breath-taking headlines that should have caught your attention. First,...