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

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the PPIP, the Public-Private Investment Program that was designed by Geithner, the Fed, and the FDIC, may actually never come to fruition. The program was designed to leverage billions of TARP money into nearly $1 trillion worth of tax-payer backed loan g...

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the "real" unemployment rate, the U-6 rate, jumped from 15.8% in April to 16.4% in May as the labor market shed another "projected" 345,000 jobs during the month.  The U-6 rate has jumped nearly 7 basis points from May of 2008 when it was 9.8%. As I ha...

The Mortgage Bankers Association announced on Wednesday that the 30-year fixed rate mortgage jumped from 4.81% to 5.25%, the highest rate since the week of February 3rd when the 30-year hit 5.28%. While this may be a concern for some in Washington or at the NAR, the past several months of home sa...

Despite mortgage rates surging from 4.81% to 5.25% for the past week, mortgage purchase applications increased 4.3% to a reading of 267.7. While 267.7 is still not indicative of strong demand for real estate, what is interesting is that at least for the interim, demand was not negatively impacted...

"Yeah, it's here."  Says CNBC's Jim Cramer as he calls a "bottom" to the housing markets despite home values plunging a near record -15.4% in April while there is still a 10.2 month supply of housing despite massive foreclosure moratoriums (Source: NAR). Citing low, but rising, interest rates, th...

A month ago I wrote a post about how the NAR's pending home sales index was becoming less and less of a leading indicator of existing home sales and more and more of an anecdotal data set (at best). With the NAR's most recent release of the April pending home sales index showing a 6.7% month over...

In light of Wall St.'s sucker rally last month in response to NAR's wildly inaccurate pending home sales index results, I wrote a post detailing just how irrelevant this data was becoming. Here is what I have found in terms of the relationship between the pending home sales index and the followin...

According to a report put out by the National Association of REALTORS, home sales are down in 45 states (including the District of Columbia) on a year over year basis from the first quarter of 2008 to the first quarter of 2009. Only six states showed increases in home sales this pat year, you can...

About three months ago the Mortgage Bankers Association published their quarterly national delinquency survey which showed that a record 11.18% of mortgages were at least 30 days late. Now, here we are 90 days later and we have a new record, 12.07% of mortgages were either at least one payment pa...

I wrote a blog yesterday detailing my concerns about the "new" monetized $8,000 first time home buyer tax credit and how not only will it not have any meaningful impact on demand, but it is likely to cause a lot of confusion as well, understandably. And while we may need to wait several weeks to ...