Word: pricing
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...Besides a few prescient financial sages, though, who could have seen this coming in the fall of 2006, when things were booming and the world was awash in cheap money? There was little fear of buying a house with nothing down, because housing prices, we were assured, only go up. And there was no fear of making mortgage loans, because what analysts call "house-price appreciation" would increase the value of the collateral if borrowers couldn't or wouldn't pay. The idea that we'd have house-price depreciation - average house prices in the top 20 markets are down...
...paying the price for Wall Street's excesses. Some of the cost is being paid by prudent people, like retirees who have saved all their life. They're now getting ridiculously low rates of 2% or so on their savings because the Federal Reserve has cut short-term rates in an attempt to goose the economy and reassure financial markets. Taxpayers are going to get stuck too. By the estimate of William Poole, former head of the St. Louis Fed, bailing out the creditors of the two big mortgage firms, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, could cost taxpayers $300 billion...
...Sept. 17 was a fearful day, that's for sure. The $85 billion lifeline the government threw to AIG may have prevented a total meltdown, but the Dow industrials still finished 449 off points for the day. The price of gold shot up by about $80 an ounce and the yield on the three-month Treasury bill maturing Dec. 18 dropped to 0.04% - from 0.68% the day before. "It's a total flight to quality, which points to the sheer panic that's out there," says S&P Equity Research strategist Alec Young...
...more closely intertwined than they were during the 1970's oil boom. But recently, Arab exchanges have been hit with a double whammy. Western investors have pulled out of Arab markets to cover bad deals back home, at the same time that Western economic problems have pushed down the price of oil from its high of $145 a barrel in July to just under $100 a barrel on Monday. On Monday, Saudi Arabia's Tadawul exchange - the largest in the Arab world - dropped 6.5%, bringing this year's loss...
...starting in 2003, as a long boom in house prices and mortgage lending that had at least some foundation in economic reality (lower interest rates, higher incomes) gave way to an orgy of ever-sharper price increases fueled by ever-dodgier loans, the folks in the drivers' seat were the mortgage brokers that made the loans and the Wall Street investment banks that packaged them into private-label mortgage-backed securities...