What should you have done this year but didn’t because you were too scared, worried, unsure, busy or otherwise deterred from doing? (Bonus: Will you do it?) I should have listed my house for sale this summer. As I’ve blogged about before, I bought a house in 2007. I had a 100% financed (0% down), [...]
[24 Dec 2010]
What we’ve been dealing with ever since is a painful process of “deleveraging”: highly indebted Americans not only can’t spend the way they used to, they’re having to pay down the debts they ran up in the bubble years. This would be fine if someone else were taking up the slack. But what’s actually happening [...]
[13 Dec 2010]
They don’t care that these mortgages wouldn’t have been available in the first place if the banks hadn’t found a way to sell oregano as weed to pension funds and insurance companies. Matt Taibbi just made me snort laugh. I know someone who actually did cut his weed inventory with oregano to boost profits. The [...]
[13 Nov 2010]
The classic explanation of the evils of deflation is that it makes individuals and businesses less willing to use money, because the rational way to act when prices are falling is to hold onto cash, which gains in value. But in Japan, nearly a generation of deflation has had a much deeper effect, subconsciously coloring [...]
[16 Oct 2010]
But the Great Recession was different: It was triggered by a financial meltdown brought on by excessive lending, reckless risk taking, the implosion of an unregulated shadow banking system that assumed that short-term money would always be available — and ignorant and careless borrowing by people and institutions. The key paragraph from Who can magically [...]
[15 Oct 2010]
A short sale is going to be the only way for many people who bought at the peak and who are now underwater to move on with their lives if they have to relocate or downsize. From Jonathan J. Miller, president of the appraisal firm Miller Samuel and a market analyst in New York City [...]
[25 Jul 2010]
But it’s worth remembering that the advantages of homeownership are frequently exaggerated. The mortgage-interest tax deduction doesn’t eliminate the cost of borrowing money; it merely reduces it. The freedom to paint your house any color you wish comes with the responsibility of paying for a new roof when the time comes. The $15,000 or $30,000 [...]
[21 Apr 2010]
From the Columbia Journalism Review’s The Debt Privilege: We all know too much debt is at the root of the economic crisis. And we’ve seen lots of step-back pieces on the conditions that created the environment for that debt creation—monetary policy, of course, but also the advent of securitization, the credit-default swap, etc. But we [...]
[18 Nov 2009]
Two years ago, I bought a house. Last week, DeKalb County confirmed that this was a financial disaster. For the last 10 years, pundits, personalities and the President proclaimed homeownership as the balm to soothe a range of ills, including community stability and the racial wealth gap. For the last 10 years, I listened intently [...]
[26 May 2009]