From the Real-World Economics Review Blog, a timeline of warnings and events going back to 1995 and leading up to the financial crisis of the last few years. Some early warnings from various economists: Sept, 2001 “the new housing boom is another rapidly inflating asset bubble financed by the same loose money practices that fuelled [...]

Completed in February, Ice House Detroit is an abandoned house in Detroit sprayed with water and frozen by two artists seeking to dramatize the foreclosure crisis. The project was funded through Kickstarter, an arts-funding web site that we wrote about last September. Here is the Flickr pool of photos of the house, and below is [...]

Blog post from How To Be Poor In America, by Susan Kemp, who has “gone from being a teenage welfare mother to being appointed Assistant Welfare Commissioner for my State.” Now, due to her health and ‘bad business decisions,” she has fallen on hard times. Foreclosure – Finding the Federal Mortgage Money …The day the [...]

Spotted on Facebook, two photos from Detroit, by Dan Haddad.  

One of the sticking points in enacting the financial reform bill stuck in the Senate is the creation of a new consumer financial protection agency, which Republicans have ardently opposed.

This post from the financial sector policy blog Finance: Facts and Follies summarizes the dismantling of consumer protections in the mortgage and credit card industries in the 2000s.

Many of the steps violating unsophisticated consumers’ protections against predatory lending came from a cascade of federal, not state, regulatory actions and legislation.

University of Michigan economist and American Enterprise Institute visiting scholar Mark J. Perry writes on his blog “Carpe Diem” that things really aren’t so bad. Median priced existing single-family home in the Midwest (January 2010): $127,200 Monthly payment with 20% down payment and 5.1% mortgage: $553 Qualifying annual income required to buy a $127,200 home: [...]

Tip o’ the hat to Laura at EconomyStory for sending us Sub-prime the Musical. The site consists of a series of podcasts by a college student named Madison Koshy, who created them from research she did on the causes of the credit crisis. Naturally, she then wrote song parodies to illustrate the concepts she had [...]

From the blog of You Walk Away, a company that helps homeowners “strategically default” and walk away from their property (and mortgages) when they have negative equity.

As you struggle to pay your mortgage or break even on the sale of your home, does it help to take a gander at Big Time Listings? This blog by a Chicago-area real estate site focuses on the sales of celebrity homes. Considering the current state of the housing market for folks who don’t appear regularly on “Entertainment Tonight”, reveling in the purchase of a $35 million mansion by Dreamworks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg might or might not be just the ticket. Or try this “exclusive”:

Brad and Angelina enlarge their Los Angeles compound further; long-goateed actor quietly pays $1.1M to buy a missing link for his estate in Los Angeles’ Los Feliz neighborhood — a two-bedroom, 3,232-square-foot house that his compound had bordered on three sides

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have increased the size of their compound in Los Angeles’ Los Feliz neighborhood, with Pitt quietly paying $1,100,000 to buy a missing link for his property in the form of a 3,232-square-foot house that his estate largely had surrounded.

In a Big Time Listings exclusive, we can report on Pitt’s latest purchase, which like some other property of his was made through his Mondo Bongo Trust. Records show that Pitt purchased the property on August 6 from the estate of the late Anne Tyler Sherman.

Built in 1920, the two-bedroom, former Sherman house — whose property is shaped like a key — sits on a 0.25-acre (10,759-square-foot) lot in the Oaks area of Los Feliz. It helps Pitt round out his compound and means that Brad now owns close to 2 full acres in the Oaks…

Features in the house include two baths, a stone fireplace, a huge main room, a bonus room, and “a bar area and a secret cave,” according to the MLS.

Last week the Commerce Department announced that new home sales had dropped to their lowest level in almost 50 years of tracking. Below is a chart of Case-Shiller-index price declines in real estate from 2007-9, by city. Posted on Dr. Housing Bubble. Las Vegas has been the worst market for sellers, having dropped from 15% [...]