Many newer readers of The Simple Dollar haven’t been exposed to the hundreds of great articles in the archives of the site, so this is a weekly series that highlights the five best posts from one year ago this week, as well as the five best posts from two…
Whenever I post a recipe or another food post, I usually hear from a reader or two who tout cooking everything from scratch. They’ll tell me about their very low food bill and encourage me to post recipes that start from even more staple-oriented food. A great example comes…
From Bloomberg: Mortgage-Bond Rally May End on Housing Reality, Barclays Says (ht James) While an S&P/Case-Shiller index for May showed the first month-over-month price increase since 2006 and a 2 percent seasonally adjusted annualized drop, a more-accurate reading probably would have been an annualized decline of 10 percent to 15…
From Carolyn Said at the San Francisco Chronicle: Oakland group buying Contra Costa foreclosures (ht Walt, John) Oakland’s McKinley Partners is betting that low-end foreclosed homes in eastern Contra Costa County will double in value in five years. The real estate development company has formed a $6 million fund to…
The big question of the week was: “Are house prices near the bottom?” My feeling has been that house prices are probably close to the bottom in the lower priced bubble areas with heavy foreclosure activity (Lawler’s ” de-stickification “). Inventories are very low in many of these areas, and…
This is the tenth of twelve parts of a “book club” reading and discussion of Dave Ramsey’s The Total Money Makeover , where this book on debt reduction is teased apart and looked at in detail. This entry covers the eleventh chapter, finishing on page 202. The next entry,…
This post is by Brad Setser and Paul Swartz of the Council on Foreign Relations. No doubt today’s GDP release will attract the lion’s share of the econoblogosphere’s attention. But sometimes it is a good idea to counter-program. Paul Swartz, I and others at the Council’s Center for Geoeconomic…
There is a common argument that the US depends more on China now than before because the US needs to issue so many Treasury bonds to finance its fiscal deficit. I disagree, for two reasons: First, the trade deficit is down significantly, so the amount that the US needs…
Is now rather obvious. The dollar goes down as well as up. Last fall, demand for dollars rose — in part because Americans pulled funds out of the rest of the world faster than foreigners pulled funds out of the US. The dollar soared.
Read more here – The…
From the Herald Tribune series on mortgage fraud in Florida: Lenders failed to heed red flags Fraudulent property flippers had an unlikely accomplice during the real estate boom — the lending industry. A yearlong Herald-Tribune investigation into thousands of suspicious Florida flip deals found that lenders of all kinds approved…