Updates: Bernie Sanders I-VT seeks to put hold on Bens renomination; Black Swan says he will shun public life if Ben reconfirmed; Mark Zandi agrees double dip for housing ahead; Flashback: Bernanke in Denial 2005-2007
Update 2: Breaking on CNBC via Politico Bernie Sanders I-VT trying to put hold on Bens renomination hearing tomorrow. But they seem to have the 60 votes they need. Also today Taleb, of the Black Swan said if Ben is reconfirmed he will leave public life, seriously:
Nassim Taleb, the author of “The Black Swan”, said he would retreat from public life if Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke gains a second term at the helm of the central bank.”What I am seeing and hearing on the news — the reappointment of Bernanke — is too hard for me to bear,” Taleb wrote on his blog on The Huffington Post.
“I am not blaming Bernanke (he doesn’t even know he doesn’t understand how things work or that the tools he uses are not empirical); it is the Senators appointing him who are totally irresponsible — as if we promoted every doctor who committed malpractice,” he wrote.Taleb wrote he will not take part in interviews in the press and will not go to the World Economic Forum in Davos in January.
“I need to withdraw as immediately as possible into the Platonic tranquility of my library, work on my next book, find solace in science and philosophy, and mull the next step,” he wrote, adding that “I will only (briefly) emerge from my hiatus when the publishers force me to do so upon the publication of the paperback edition of The Black Swan.”…
Update: Boy it is exhausting having these fancy pants academics and/or advisers to MAC and Obama come along and agree with MiM months after we take a position, like being Cassandra, it sucketh big time. Now I just heard Marty Feldstein agreeing on Kudlow too, lol. To be fair Feldstein came out on this in October...sure now that it’s COOL to say there is a double dip ALL the kids wanna do it!
Soon Orszag and Krugman will be the cheese, and we all know the cheese stands alone.
Mark Zandi of Moodys (who will be at the big job summit this week, and who is at every Nancy Pelosi jobs bill panel as well), the man who advised MAC and later the Congress on the stimulus, is now forecasting a second leg down in housing, a big one, the one we and others have been yammering on about for months.
Maybe now that one of the chosen few who get listened to (despite often being quite wrong) and whose ideas are often quite unsuccessful (see WSJ on Orszag and Stiglitz’ EPIC FAIL on the risk posed by FAN FRED that somehow gets them promoted and invited to all the summits and now they help design all our economic policy and even our healthcare system!!) is on board with the fact that housing is in imminent danger of collapsing under the continuing deterioration of employment and the failure of the mo mods. Well maybe now they will do the damned HOLC and get it done.
FDR did it, in out boom,. Buy the home loans from the banks,w e already own them in FAN FRED anyway, write down 20% everyone underwater, boom, done. Let homeowners pay it off via their taxes to the government. Give a payroll tax holiday. Stop the uber spending in areas that don’t help the underlying economy. The entire 78 billion directed to housing is still sitting there waiting to be paid out on permanent mods that aren’t happening.
The meltdown of the U.S. housing market is not over yet, and home prices will soon start trekking downward again as a flood of foreclosures looms, a well-known economist said Wednesday.
Home prices, as measured by the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price Index, will trough in the third quarter of 2010 after declining 38 percent, Zandi said. The index peaked in the second quarter of 2006 and hit a trough in the first quarter of 2009, a drop of about 32 percent. Home prices in many regions have been rising.That is because foreclosure sales fell over the summer and fall as mortgage servicers have tried to put stressed homeowners into the Home Affordable Modification Program and other modification plans, he said. “This lull in foreclosures sales has resulted in the price gains in the past few months,” he said.
“Foreclosure sales will increase, and home prices will resume their decline by early 2010 as mortgage servicers figure out who will not qualify for a modification,” he said.
Zandi said 7.5 million foreclosure sales will have taken place between 2006 and 2011. The majority of these sales, however, have not emerged yet, with 4.8 million foreclosure sales expected between 2009 and 2011….
Moderate in the Middle 