Housing Issues

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Bush Admin Shuts Down Website Tracking U.S. Economic Data

Forbes has awarded EconomicIndicators.gov one of its “Best of the Web” awards for compiling data across govt agencies and making it publicly accessible. But as of March 1, the Bush admin has announced that it is shutting down this site due to “budgetary constraints.”

Bush Admin Shuts Down Website Tracking U.S. Economic Data
Thu, 14 Feb 2008 05:20:04 GMT

I actually went to the site and tried to use it. I have a curiosity about Housing Vacancies and Homeownership. I was immediately disappointed when that link did not go anywhere. It quickly became apparent that the site was re-packaging news releases from the Census and Bureau of Economic Analysis sites. After a little investigating I figured out that all of the data I was interested in was already available on the Census site. At least for me the economicindicators.gov site is redundant. If I am going to link to a site as a reference I am going to link to the source of the data. I am pretty disappointed that Forbes awarded it one of its “Best of the Web”. What were they thinking? From my short browsing experience I do not think economicindicators.gov adds any value to the web. I can probably create my own web page in five minutes with the correct links.

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Mortgage Crisis Spreads Past Subprime Loans

The emphasis of the article was that “even borrowers with stong credit are the pinch”. The part that interested me was this:

Banks are responding to the rise in delinquencies by capping home equity lines of credit in areas with falling real estate prices. A few credit card companies have also moved to reduce the credit limits of customers they deem more risky.

Mortgage Crisis Spreads Past Subprime Loans
VIKAS BAJAJ and LOUISE STORY
Tue, 12 Feb 2008 12:06:57 GMT

I am beginning to see more articles talking about the relationship between credit card debt, equity lines of credit, and mortgages. I think the next sign to look for is weakness in the stock price for companies with a large exposure to credit card debt due to increased amounts of debt being written off. This could snowball. With the very high interest rates existing on credit card debt there is no where for the credit card companies to go. I have already seen increased consumer activism to lower credit card rates because other rates have declined. The longer the real estate market declines, the more likely that this financial crisis is going get even uglier.