Commentary

Market commentary

FICO’08 – Credit Score Changes

15 years ago
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A new system for determining your credit-worthiness, FICO ’08, rolls out today.  From The Consumerist we have the following 6 changes to credit score calculations. Spouses and children can improve their credit score by being an authorized user on a credit card account, but that’s it. No more [...]

Market Cap vs. GDP

15 years ago
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Produced by Ned David Research this graph shows the ratio of stock market capitalization to Nominal GDP in the U.S. from 1924 to 2007. Unfortunately, I’m not positive if this was constructed using total market capitalization or just the free float, but since the series goes back to 1924 and using [...]

Updated Case Shiller Housing Price Chart

15 years ago
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Versions of this chart have been floating around for a while.  This one is updated with the latest numbers.  As you can see, there is still plenty of room for housing prices to fall further.  Future market are predicting around another 15% decline before bottoming out in 16 months or so.  If [...]

Vanishing Home Equity

15 years ago
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From Calculated Risk we get a graph showing homeowner percent equity since 1952 Approximately 31% of households do not have a mortgage. So the 50+ million households with mortgages have far less equity than 44.7%.  Also, when prices were increasing dramatically in recent years, the percent [...]

12/12 Economic News

15 years ago
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Interesting economic news RMDs likely suspended for 2009 (not 2008) — A one year (2009) benny only.  It has passed house and senate and is now on presdents desk.  It also contains funding relief for company pensions. Auto Bailout Bill dies in Senate — No bill this year, which means it goes back to [...]

Market Valuations – q and CAPE (PE10)

15 years ago
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This is the first of a series of posts that are going to look at current market valuations. The following is a graph of two valuation measures: Cyclically adjusted price earnings (CAPE) and q. It was put together by Smithers & Co. and goes from 1900 throuh October 9th, 2008.  CAPE is based on [...]

Beyond the Credit Crisis

15 years ago
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Relieved, panicked or maybe you have just become numb.  The one thing you are sure of is that nothing feels stable right now and you desparately want stability.  This is the first of a series of posts that will look at the after affects of the credit crisis, where the markets are going and how you [...]

Who to Blame for the Credit Crisis

15 years ago
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You can go bleary eyed reading and watching all the finger pointing going on as to who is to blame for the current credit crisis.  The fact that we are in the final lap of a presidential race means that political pundits are trying to spin the culprit to their advantage.  Why do we care about [...]

Mortgage Modifications are Harder than they Appear

15 years ago
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From the Wall Street Journal we have the following grim statistics. 12 million homeowners currently have negative equity.  Current projections have this growing to 20 million homeowners by the time we reach the housing bottom (from housing futures markets).  This is out of 50 million homeowners who [...]

Crisis Due to Trust Destruction not Wealth Destruction

15 years ago
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When the dot com bubble burst in 2000, technology companies proceeded to lose $5 trillion in capitalization.  That is a huge loss, and it hurt. It destroyed a lot of companies and even damaged the portfolios of those who didn’t have a lot of technology exposure.  It also plunged the US into a [...]
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