That was what one wag put up on a billboard on Interstate 5 in Seattle in 1970, when that year’s recession put Boeing in a tailspin, causing massive layoffs.
There was no Microsoft in Seattle then to take up the slack at the time….that company launched in 1975–at the tail end of the 1973-75 recession.
In retrospect, […]
The market got a nice bounce when Ben Bernanke was appointed for a second four-year term as head of the Federal Reserve Board.
Wait for the other shoe to drop…
…when the Fed must once again begin to raise interest rates when we take up the slack in the economy.
Expect the market to get slammed— if and […]
You’d think that with all the sub-prime loan scandals no one would still be working that angle.
Think again.
The FHA, a product of FDR’s New Deal legislation, is alive and well, and may in fact account for one third of all loan originations this year.
For the seriously credit compromised, FHA loans require 10% cash down, but […]
This month we observe the second anniversary of the global financial crisis that most observers agree began in August 2007.
There were tremors before the full calamity became evident, when housing prices crested in 2006 and began their sickening slide and when Bear Stearns’ twin mortgage hedge funds began to implode.
That August, Countrywide Bank came close […]
When the vocabulary of economics is exhausted, we must turn to other disciplines…today that would be medicine.
“Idiopathic,” as defined by Wikipedia, is an adjective used primarily in medicine-meaning “arising spontaneously or from an obscure or unknown cause.”
In plain English, this is the catch all diagnosis MDs reach for when they haven’t got a clue as […]
Now may be an ideal time for you to pay a visit to your friendly local banker.
Not to open an account…but to pry loose some of their toxic defaulted real estate.
Actually, the banking industry is no longer on life support.
They are enjoying their day in the sun, profiting from spread lending, now that their […]
We may be approaching the bottom in the residential real estate market that has been in free fall since 2006.
If not this year, then sometime in the first half of 2010.
It would be a fool’s errand to try to pick the bottom.
The margin for error is much more narrow now that the exuberant excess […]
There appears, at last, to be some adult supervision in the new administration.
Reportedly, Sheila Bair, the head of the FDIC refused to go along with a bailout for ailing CIT Corp, deeming it not to be a Tier One institution (aka “too big to fail”).
Reality may have finally dawned on the regulators.
Some firms…most firms…are not […]
