TPG Makes A Housing Play
The housing crisis hasn’t been good to companies that build them or make products that go into them. Like Armstrong World, which produces flooring, ceiling materials and cabinets. In the most recent...
View ArticleToll Brothers And Rising Home Prices
Some good news from Toll Brothers today: the big home builder says it’s managing to boost prices in some communities across the U.S. The company’s not specifying where, but any sign of rising home...
View ArticleReflections Of More Housing Market Woes
If this trend continues, the housing market (which seemed to be stabilizing) could get worse before it gets better. Moody’s Investors Service today downgraded Commodore CDO III and noted that about 29%...
View ArticleSome Signs Of Improvement For Beazer, But…
By most measures, things are starting to look a little better for homebuilders like Beazer Homes. At Beazer, the cancellation rate for new homes dropped to 34.7% versus a staggering 46.3% a year ago....
View ArticleBeazer’s Clawback Challenge
Beazer Homes USA’s accounting mess is coming back to haunt it. We’re reporting that Beazer’s CEO, Ian J. McCarthy, has received a Wells notice from the Securities and Exchange Commission. This means...
View ArticleParlez-Vous Housing Bubble?
On the long drive back from Quebec on Tuesday (after a little cross-country skiing trip northwest of Montreal), we were listening to the radio (in French) to get a sense what’s on the minds of the...
View ArticleFannie Mae: Is It Sustainable?
Here’s a staggering statistic mentioned in Fannie Mae’s just released financial results – nearly 1 out of every four residential properties in the U.S. (24%) today has negative equity because the value...
View ArticleHovnanian Breaks A Bad Streak – Kind Of
Make no mistake about it. Breaking a 13 quarter streak of net losses is a good thing and K. Hovnanian, the homebuilder, has something to crow about. Investors pushed the stock up 4% in after hours...
View ArticleA Deal That Touched Many Troubled Firms
It’s hard to say that the structured financing transaction at the heart of latest Wall Street scandal was what ultimately led to the credit crisis. But this transaction did involve a number of banks...
View ArticleHousing Bust And Structural Unemployment
In our sporadic, somewhat random, review of commentary about the level of structural unemployment in the U.S., we’ll add some recent comments from Jeremy Grantham of the fund management firm GMO. They...
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