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

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Real Estate Broker/Owner

ARCHIVED BLOG POSTS

2009 

Exactly $300 billion of what did taxpayers guarantee when the Fed stepped in to provide support to Citigroup in November of 2008? According to CNBC, that is the question that Rep. Alan Grayson is asking Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general for TARP. It is a fair question considering that ...
06/26/2009
The Reuters/University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers said that consumer confidence rose to 70.8 in June, the highest reading since February of 2008. This of course begs the question, why? As I wrote about last month, it appears that the tail is wagging the dog with these numbers. There are thr...
06/26/2009
According to the Census Bureau, new home sales disappointed expectations by declining -0.6% in May compared to April when they fell to a 342,000 seasonally adjusted annual rate. The current rate of new home sales continues to hover around the record low pace that was set in January of 2009 at a s...
06/26/2009
Apparently Warren Buffett didn't get the memo from Ben Bernanke, Jim Cramer, or Larry Kudlow about the "green shoots" in the economy. "I wasn't seeing anything.  I had a cataract operation on my left eye about a month ago and I thought maybe now I'll be able to see green shoots.  We're not seeing...
06/25/2009
So this is the housing bottom that Jim Cramer is talking about? You know you have a problem when the NAR numbers for home value declines start to approach the Case-Shiller numbers. The NAR announced yesterday that the median home price fell -16.8% year over year.  The fastest rate of decline that...
06/25/2009
In the latest sign that the housing market is indifferent to sub 5% mortgage rates, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association, the mortgage purchase application index jumped 7.3% to 280.3, the highest reading in over 10 weeks.  This was despite the fact the average 30-year fixed rate mortgage...
06/24/2009
The National Association of REALTORS announced today that the seasonally adjusted rate of existing home sales posted a 2.4% gain from the previous month to a rate of 4.77 million units.  However, sales were still down -3.6% year over year. While the inventory of homes for sale declined -3.5% from...
06/23/2009
There are housing analysts, and then there is Jim Cramer. For those of you who don't know, in August of 2008, CNBC's Jim Cramer predicted that the housing market would bottom in June of 2009.  Well, here we are in June of 2009, and rather than Cramer swallow his pride and admit that he was wrong,...
06/23/2009
According to Reuters, Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary said today, "I think the president has said this, and I would certainly say this, I think you're likely to see unemployment at 10 percent within the next couple of months." Yeah, like NEXT month. Thank you Captain Obvious. That w...
06/22/2009
Wait a second, I thought the economy was recovering? Isn't that what everybody has been saying? What about all of those "green shoots" and mustard seeds that Bernanke and Larry Kudlow have been talking about? Didn't the new administration tells us that unemployment would only peak at 8% because o...
06/22/2009
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