My CA Mortgage

The Senate did not extended unemployment benefits past February 28.  What this means for those without jobs is no possibility for application of federal unemployment benefits or the COBRA health insurance policy.  Once state funded benefits expire for those who applied, the jobless will be without income, upon which many of whom depended.  More than a million [...]

Existing home sales are now dropping as well.  In the month of January, existing home sales reported a 7.2% drop.  This drop brought the seasonally adjusted annual sales down to 5.05 million.  The national median of existing home prices however, is remaining steady at $164,700.  This price has been the same since last year.
Beyond this [...]

This morning the markets are being pushed around by Jobless Claims, the GDP, a $32 billion 7-yr note auction, and continued testimony from Ben Bernanke. Prior to the 8:30AM EST numbers the yield on the 10-yr was back down to 3.66%. Durable Goods were up 3% for January versus December’s +1.9%. (Ex-transportation the number was [...]

New home sales made an unexpected drop for the month of January.  Economists forcasted a 5% raise in new home sales over December’s sale rate, but they took a turn in the opposite direction.  Dropping 11.2%, new home sales reached record lows, bringing the seasonally adjusted annual sales pace to 309,000 units.  Due to the drop in sales the [...]

The MBA report, according to Mike Larson, a real estate analyst for Weiss Research, is a further sign that the housing market is truly stabilizing.
“We’re now seeing the next piece of the puzzle fall into place,” he said. “Specifically, early stage delinquencies are stabilizing. This is a key sign that housing market conditions are slowly, [...]

As the fixed-income markets worsened yesterday, dealers continued to see heavy selling days by originators. As usual, the only substantive buying has come from the FED (lighter than Wednesday apparently) and a little from servicers and money managers. The lack of interest in mortgages led to them “widening out” a little versus Treasury prices. The [...]