From today’s Wall Street Journal article “Banks Push Home Buyers To Put Down More Cash”:
The median down payment in nine major U.S. cities rose to 22% last year on properties purchased through conventional mortgages, according to an analysis for the Wall Street Journal by real-estate portal Zillow.com. That percentage doubled in three years and represents [...]

One of the most interesting court rulings is expected soon is the Supreme Judicial Court’s ruling on the Ibanez case. The case may have some far-reaching consequences both in Massachusetts and for the entire country. The central problem the court will be grapling with is the validity of securitization of mortgages as they have been [...]

Steve Pearlstein at the Washington Post has some interesting points on foreclosures and how to sort this mess, both banks and borrowers must do the right thing
Listening to the fiery rhetoric about the mortgage mess emanating from politicians this week, you’d think that big bad banks were trying to foreclose on hundreds of thousands [...]

Seven more banks were shut down yesterday. Total bank failures since January 2009 – 52

This is when you know you’re having a bad day.
Ted Poetsch lived in this house for 53 years. He made a few mistakes and lost his home, an issue that has affected millions of other households. But what makes this story unique is that the city of Minneapolis boarded him up in his own home. [...]

I, like many individuals out there, have a hard time really wrapping my brain around large numbers. This isn’t to say that I can’t do math, just that after a certain denomination, I tend to lose sight of the impact that such large amount of money can have. So when Fannie Mae recently reported that [...]

David Kellermann, Freddie Mac’s acting chief financial officer and senior vice president, was found dead Wednesday morning in an apparent suicide, according to news reports.
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We all know, of course, that this whole financial mess started with the housing market. But how did a bunch of wacky mortgages mushroom into an all-encompassing threat to the global financial system?
I’d like to call your attention to this piece in Wired magazine – entitled The Formula that killed [...]

At the end of last year, an estimated 13.6 million U.S. borrowers owned more on their homes than their properties were worth, according to Moody’s Economy.com up from 11.8 million at the end of the 3rd quarter of 2008.

From the Boston Globe:
The nation’s banks lost $26.2 billion in the last three months of 2008, the first quarterly deficit in 18 years, as the housing and credit crises escalated.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. said Thursday that U.S. banks and thrifts also more than doubled the amount they set aside to cover potential loan losses, [...]