For those of us looking at the golden parachutes handed to some of the top investment bankers recently and wondering how come you get to be paid millions of dollars for F***ing Up Big Time – The Big Picture, a Wall street financial blog, has taken the trouble to post a nice little PowerPoint presentation explaining the whole thing.
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said he has “no particular regrets” and that the deepening slump in the U.S. housing market isn’t a result of his policies.
“Markets are becoming aware of the fact that the decline in house prices is not stopping,” Greenspan said today in Oslo. “I have no particular regrets. The housing bubble is not a reflection of what we did, as it is a global phenomenon.”
What are FSBO homes, and can you really make money flipping them? First some definitions. “Flipping” refers to buying and selling real estate for a profit over a short period of time. Some “flippers” are looking only to make money from buying low and reselling quickly, while others repair and improve or otherwise add value to the property before selling it – an important distinction we’ll get back to in a moment.
While it may be nearly impossible for a homeowner whose home is in foreclosure to get a property-saving loan, it is actually quite common for those seeking to buy foreclosures to qualify for the loans they need to purchase the properties.
When a fairly new company (E*Trade began life in 1996) can wipe $2.2 billion off it’s market value, write off somewhere in the region of $1 billion in assets and the President of the company can sill claim that E*Trade remains “well capitalized by regulatory standards” and would continue to be so even if it absorbed an immediate write-down of more than $1 billion, somethings very wrong. Either the regulatory standards need changing, or the company has been overcharging it’s customers.
Ups:
A slow down in construction has led to buying opportunities. From the Financial Times.
A couple transforms a building on the Greek island of Poros. From the New York Times.
The US housing market is in dire straights, no one could argue with that. House prices are down, house sales are down and developers are cutting prices on new developments left, right and center. But where does that leave the homeowner who needs to sell, whether from financial difficulties or some other reason?
When people talk real estate these days, there’s a whole bunch of ominous terms being bandied about. With some northern US states hit so hard by the housing downturn that over 30% of their houses are empty, and south Florida leading the state , if not the country in foreclosures, the increase in anxiety is to be expected. But homeowners need not panic, there are alternatives to foreclosure.
I’ve known a lot of people who have lost money when they sold their homes. In fact, I’m one of those people, and it’s happened to me more than once.
There are a number of factors can cause a financial loss when you sell your house, including the need to sell at the wrong time due to divorce or an impending foreclosure, or a downturn in the local real estate market. However, it’s also common to lose money simply by making too many expensive changes to the house before putting it on the market. This is how I lost money on real estate, before I wised up.
