The Blog of Author Mark MacKenzie: It's The Housing Market, Stupid!

According to a CNNMoney.com article written by Les Christie, RealtyTrac is reporting that 342,000 homes received a notice of default or auction notice in April, this is the highest number on record in the four plus years that they have been tracking the data. Additionally, Rick Sharga, a spokespe...

This past week John F. Wasik wrote an article on Bloomberg.com titled, "U.S. Home Prices May Be Lost for a Generation". While I think a "generation" may be an extreme analogy, a lost decade for real estate values is well within our sights based on the continuing supply and demand imbalance for re...

Banking analyst Meredith Whitneyduring a CNBC interview continues to call "bs" on the banking system, "The government enabled the banks to have better than expected first quarter earnings."  While not directly naming names, one can only think that Whitney is referring to the earnings reports of B...

According to the consistently inaccurate Labor Department, the "real" or U-6 unemployment rate hit 15.8% in April. The reason I say "consistently inaccurate" is because for the past six months the Labor Department has underestimated the number of monthly job losses by an average of over 15% per m...

A couple of days ago I wrote a bit about the fiasco known as the Federal Reserve's stress test. Two significant points jumped out at me from the report other than the fact that the whole thing appeared more like a public relations effort more than an actual banking evaluation: "First, that Bank o...

The Labor Department released its consistently inaccurate jobs report on Friday showing that an additional 539,000 Americans lost their job during the month of April. The reason I bring up the "consistently inaccurate" statement is not out of personal opinion but rather past performance.  For the...

The Mortgage Bankers Association announced on Wednesday that the mortgage purchase application rose 5% to 264.3 despite the 30-year fixed rate mortgage jumping from 4.62% to 4.79%. While the reading of 264.3 is an increase from the previous weeks' reading which was an 8-week low, the 4-week movin...

Ok, so let me get this straight because I didn't go to a fancy school; the Federal Reserve wants us to believe that 19 of our largest banks need to raise only $74.6 billion in new capital while at the same time Geithner and the Treasury wants us to believe that we need to leverage $100 billion of...

According to a Reuters survey of private economists, 620,000 job losses are projected for April. The Labor Department report is due out on Friday at 8:30 AM EST. In just the past five months, nearly 3 million jobs have been lost and the "real" unemployment rate has surged to 15.6%. The problem fo...

According to the NAR and their March existing home sales report, home value declines eased but there remains continued downward pressure on home values due to the supply and demand imbalance. Here is what the year over year percentage change in the median home value has looked like over the past ...