Research Roundup: Housing and Mortgage Mess
Unless you live in Charlotte, January was not a good month to be selling your home. Home prices there were up 1.8% from a year earlier, but elsewhere prices were down, in some cases (Las Vegas, Miami) by almost 20%.
The S&P/Case-Shiller® 10-City Composite Index set yet another new record, with an annual decline of 11.4%, while the 20-City Composite recorded an annual decline of 10.7%.
It may be that these lower prices lay behind the 2.9 % increase in existing home sales reported Monday, but a significant inventory of unsold homes continues to hang over the market.
Sen. Hillary Clinton’s proposal to have a bipartisan group of “wise men” help clean up the mortgage mess has raised a few eyebrows. It’s understandable that she put forward Robert Rubin, who served under her husband. Less so is the naming of former Fed chief Paul Volcker, an Obama supporter . But most surprising is the naming of Alan Greenspan. Many would no doubt argue that he should help clean up the mess, since he helped create it, but penance does not seem to be what Clinton had in mind. Instead she sees him as a “calming influence” even though she admittedly doesn’t understand what he is saying, as the WSJ reports.
Clinton may want to withdraw the offer if she checks the tape of last night’s NBC News in which Greenspan’s wife, NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell, busted her “misspeaking” on the topic of coming under sniper fire.
Still, it seems Greenspan could always get a job heading up Sen. John McCain’s tax reform efforts. “Whether he’s alive or dead, it wouldn’t matter,” McCain said during a stop in Texas last month. “Maybe it could be like ‘Weekend at Bernie’s’. Put some dark glasses on him.”
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.