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

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Real Estate Broker/Owner

ARCHIVED BLOG POSTS

2008 

In July of this year Congress passed the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008. In addition to the Wizards of Washington removing down payment assistance programs, they passed legislation that was supposed to provide a framework that would allow borrowers to refinance out of their current adj...
11/14/2008
Things that seemed like a great idea in the 1980s, things like tight pants, big hair, the Michael Jackson thriller Jacket, the Rubik's Cube, and the Tax Reform Act of 1986, look completely ridiculous during a real estate depression in 2008. OK, I'll make one exception, the Rubik's Cube is still p...
11/13/2008
Today Secretary of Treasury "Hammering" Hank Paulson announced that rather than buying troubled assets with TARP funds, aka $700 billion bailout, (Troubled Asset Relief Program) he was going to continue to pursue additional capital injections into banks and financial institutions. Huh, that's wei...
11/12/2008
Thank you Allen Meltzer. According to an article on CNBC.com written by Jeff Cox, Meltzer is a political economist and monetary policy historian at Carnegie Mellon University. Here is a bit from CNBC's Jeff Cox's article illustrating Meltzer's conclusion about the economic crisis: "Addressing the...
11/11/2008
According to an article on CNBC.com today from Reuters, this is what the CEO of American Express had to say as to the reason why they wanted to turn into a bank holding company: "Given the continued volatility in the financial markets, we want to be best positioned to take advantage of the variou...
11/11/2008
Last month I had a chance to speak at a real estate wealth expo in London, Ontario about investing in real estate in the United States and how to identify market trends for maximum returns and minimum risk.  What it really comes down to is understanding the ongoing relationship between supply and...
11/10/2008
Having recently completed my new book, It's The Housing Market, Stupid! I had a chance to do some research and introspection on the infamous $700 billion "Wall St." bailout. And the conclusion that I have come to is that this was perhaps the largest waste of taxpayer money in the history of our c...
11/09/2008
So far the government has bailed out in one form or another Bear Stearns, AIG, Fannie and Freddie, a handful of banks (some unwillingly) with part of the $700 billion Wall St. bailout, some homeowners via the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008, and now we are talking about the automakers. ...
11/09/2008
So I have been thinking, rather than watching Fox NEWS and CNBC talking heads break the bad news, let's find Clubber Lang, give him a shirt and tie, and put him on TV, and have Clubber tell us what we have to look forward to with our economy. Pain. Remember the line from Rocky III when Clubber is...
11/07/2008
Tomorrow, Friday, could be another ugly day for the stock market as the jobs report is released as well as earnings (kind of an oxymoron) for Ford and GM. Now, of course, some of this could already be "baked in" to market expectations as my financial planner friend always tells me.  And that is f...
11/06/2008
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Mark MacKenzie

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