Affordable Housing Institute : US

“You get all the nifty trips, Holmes, while I’m stuck here in Blogger Street.”
 
“Holmes,” said Watson, “while you were away at your wealthy benefactor’s secluded Lake Como villa, convening with world’s other great housing finance experts, I have been pondering your various expositions of the differences among debt (hard and soft) and equity (hard and […]

Periodically, in the ad slots on my Red Line subway ride to work, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts runs posters of Deadbeat Dads, men who are months and years behind on their child support payments.  Always unshaven in the mug shots, they stare bad, haggard or defiant.
 
 
One thinks, how incredibly low, to welsh on an […]

What’s the price of something that nobody’s buying?
 
For those of you who think the question about as Zen as the sound of one hand clapping, now imagine that billions of dollars – yep, billions – ride on the answer, for reasons that will come into focus real soon now in the subprime and structured finance […]

[Continued from yesterdays Part 1.]

Yesterday, using as a springboard a story from The New York Times, I looked at the prepayment-penalty trap which has now caught many subprime borrowers: loans with low introductory ‘teaser’ rates, that now step up, but that cannot be economically prepaid because of yield maintenance and penalties that make the […]

 
Evolution of the subprime mess leads journalists in a constant search for new angles. If Erle Stanley Gardner had been writing these mysteries, he might have titled them The Case of the Bamboozled Borrower, The Big Writedown, The Evil Securitization Wizards, The Conniving Counterparties, The Horrified Homeowners, and The Laid-Off Lenders.
 

We’re all nervous, […]