From the Sacramento Bee: Sacramento-area real estate market befuddled the experts Home Front spent time in the electronic library this week, looking at how experts misjudged the extent of this decline as the housing market began to wobble and shift in 2005 and 2006, even 2007. We aren't trying to pi...

JANUARY 5, 2009By SUSAN SCHMIDT and MAURICE TAMMAN California Rep. Joe Baca has long pushed legislation he said would "open the doors to the American Dream" for first-time home buyers in his largely Hispanic district. For many of them, those doors have slammed shut, quickly and painfully. Mortgage l...

JAN: I made the biggest mistake of throwing everything up in the air. I came from a month long vacation(well-deserved I have to say) in Davao. It was supposed to just last for 2 weeks but I had it extended for 2 more weeks and pretended to have, well. ’sore eyes’ (why not? hehe I guess I...

by Richard T. Stuebi as posted to Huffington Post Sandwiched around the election of the first African-American President of the United States, we find the debacles associated with the collapse of the international finance sector and the imminent end of the American automotive industry as we've known...

The article below, by Joe Nocera of the NYT, appears in today's Magazine section.  Nocera explains the role, and type, of financial models that contributed to the near demise of our heretofore much vaunted economy over the past three decades or so.  A highly inflated economy, based o...

From the Wall Street Journal: "Housing Push for Hispanics Spawns Wave of Foreclosures" By SUSAN SCHMIDT and MAURICE TAMMAN California Rep. Joe Baca has long pushed legislation he said would "open the doors to the American Dream" for first-time home buyers in his largely Hispanic district. For many o...

A wiseman sketches his vision for the coming year. This essay was originally posted on December 28th, 2008. Forecast for 2009 James Howard Kunstler There are two realities "out there" now competing for verification among those who think about national affairs and make things happen. The dominant one...

Welcome…. Bienvenue … Willkommen … London Calling…. I have the pleasure of opening the batting for the series of 2009 Blawg Reviews. I did my first Blawg Review exactly a year ago.  I cannot quite believe that a year has gone by so rapidly and that I am one step closer to my...

... As summed ably in one graphic: [click on image to enlarge] ... Or by thousands of words (below) that help explain the seemingly inexplicable. From the December issue of The Atlantic magazine, Henry Blodget agrees with my oft-stated plaint: we all are to blame. And the 'interview' with Gao Xiqing...

A new year is usually a time for hope. But today many of us are full of doubt. The financial crisis has brought wave after wave of bad news, replacing the old certainties with a sense of dread and insecurity. And then there's terrorism, climate change and social breakdown... Are our nightmares based...