Archive for February 14th, 2008Filed under: Housing I can’t believe I didn’t see this until this day. This is by far the ideal explanation of what went wrong in subprime — British satirists John Fortune and John Bird conduct a mock interview explaining subprime, CDOs, SIVs, etc. Who needs Harvard Business School case studies when you have this? This clip should be shown at Congressional hearings. Filed under: Bad news, Economic data, Housing
Prices fell in 77 of 150 metropolitan areas tracked, the most since the NAR begin tracking values in 1979. Moreover, 16 metro areas recorded declines of 10% or higher. U.S. median home price declines Meanwhile, on a year-over-year basis, the U.S. median home price also declined 5.8% in Q4 2007 to $206,200 compared to $219,000 in Q4 2006. Even more telling, home prices have declined more than 10% since their July 2006 peak. The metropolitan area with the biggest decrease was Lansing- East Lansing, Michigan, which recorded a 19% decline. Prices fell 18.5% in the Sacramento, California region and 17% in Riverside and San Bernardino, California, and in the Jackson, Mississippi, region, the NAR announced. Home prices fell in each region. The regional totals: West, down 8.7% to $324,100; Northeast, down 4.8% to $261,700; South, down 8.7% to $171,700; and the Midwest, down 3.2% to $156,300. Sobering Q4 stats Economist Glen Langan told BloggingStocks Thursday the NAR’s Q4 2007 housing report offers more sobering statistics. “It is another sobering report, no question. We recorded a almost 6% decline in prices, Q4-to-Q4, which is very bad,” Langan said. “Potential homeowners are obviously on the sidelines, which is rational because they believe prices will drop further. The market is also being hit by foreclosures, which is piling up inventory and further depressing prices.” Further, Langan stated the housing sector is approaching an ominous statistic - - one economists and no-doubt homeowners, realtors and others concerned about the economy do want to cross. “We’re coming up on 18 months of declines in the U.S. median home price,” Langan said. “The last time that occurred was 1932-1933 during the Great Depression, but don’t haul me into court on that. But I know it was in the 1930s during the Great Depression. It’s not a statistic we want to duplicate.” Further, total say existing-home sales, including single-family and condo, were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.96 million units in Q4 2007, down 8.5% from 5.42 million in Q3 2007, and are 20.9% below a 6.26 million-unit pace in Q4 2006, the NAR said. An anonymous reader writes “Comcast’s response to the FCC may have triggered a new avenue of discussion on the subject of Net Neutrality. Rep. Ed Markey (D — Mass.), who chairs the Home Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the World wide web, introduced a bill yesterday whose end result could be the penalization of bandwidth throttling to paying customers. ‘The bill, tentatively entitled the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008, wouldn’t actually declare throttling illegal specifically. Instead, it would call upon the Federal Communications Commission to hold a hearing to determine whether or not throttling is a bad thing, and whether it has the right to take action to stop it.’” Read more of this story at Slashdot. mlimber writes “The NYTimes has up a story about the discovery of a solar system that is analogous to ours. Of the 250 or so exoplanets found thus far, ‘few of them are in systems that even faintly resemble our own. In many cases, giant Jupiter-like planets are whizzing around inside the orbit of Mercury,’ whereas in this new system, ‘a planet about two-thirds of the mass of Jupiter and another about 90 percent of the mass of Saturn are orbiting a reddish star about half the mass of the Sun, at about half the distances that Jupiter and Saturn circle our own Sun.’ The researchers used gravitational microlensing to detect the planets, and two of the lead authors of the paper to be published in Science are amateur astronomers, one of whom describes herself as ‘an ordinary New Zealand mom.’” Read more of this story at Slashdot. Roland Piquepaille writes “Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology have a bright idea — at least at first sight. They want to create a sustainable transportation system by using hydrogen-powered automobiles. They would like to create an infrastructure where people could use a liquid fuel for driving while the carbon emission in their vehicles is trapped for later processing at a fueling station. ‘The carbon would then be shuttled back to a processing plant where it could be transformed into liquid fuel.’ Where will all this liquid carbon be stored? The researchers don’t know. They suggest that it could be stored in geological formations or under the oceans.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. A user writes “US officials state that the Pentagon is planning to shoot down a broken spy satellite expected to hit the Earth in early March. We discussed the device’s decaying orbit late last month. The Associated Press has learned that the option preferred by the Bush administration will be to fire a missile from a U.S. Navy cruiser, and shoot down the satellite before it enters Earth’s atmosphere. ‘A key concern … was the debris created by Chinese satellite’s destruction — and that will also be a focus now, as the U.S. determines exactly when and under what circumstances to shoot down its errant satellite. The military will have to select a time and a location that will avoid to the greatest degree any damage to other satellites in the sky. Also, there is the possibility that massive pieces could remain, and either stay in orbit where they have the ability to collide with other satellites or possibly fall to Earth.’” Read more of this story at Slashdot. yodasz writes “The New Scientist reports that a team of researchers from the UK were able to recreate a black hole’s event horizon in the lab by firing a laser pulse down an optical fibre. The team’s observations confirm predictions made by cosmologists and now they’re trying to prove Hawking’s hypothesis of escaping particles, dubbed Hawking radiation. ‘The first pulse distorts the optical properties of the fibre simply by traveling through it. This distortion forces the speedy probe wave to slow down dramatically when it catches up with the slower pulse and tries to move through it. In fact, the probe wave becomes trapped and can never overtake the pulse’s leading edge, which effectively becomes a black hole event horizon, beyond which light can’t escape.’” Read more of this story at Slashdot. Filed under: Products and services, Competitive strategy, Motorola (MOT)
Motorola’s brand in the cellphone business is a very good one, even though that division’s profit troubles and sales numbers have been really horrid in the last 12 months. Still, unless the company could easily be worth more to shareholders if split up (i.e., Carl Icahn), then refocusing efforts in its handset division should be a top priority. Motorola was once on top of the world with the RAZR. There’s no reason it can’t be there again. It’s hard to believe that Motorola’s brand recognition in the ultra-competitive handset business is tarnished. It’s just the sales and profit that’s lacking. So, within the fast pace that the handset business works in, Brown’s test will be to mend those problems and get Motorola’s nameplate again at the top of the sales charts. The market might give him all of 2008 to do so, but many investors, unfortunately, want instant gratification after former CEO Ed Zander’s results. |
Powered by WordPress, Mandigo theme by tom.
Entries (RSS)
and Comments (RSS).
Home prices fell in a record number of U.S. metropolitan areas in Q4 2007, the National Association of Realtors announced Thursday, 
After 
