From the monthly archives:

August 2010

Home Values Rise In The Second Quarter

August 31, 2010
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Tweet Freddie Mac has announced the results of its second quarter Conventional Mortgage Home Price Index, which registered a 3.1 percent (13.2 percent annualized) increase in the second quarter relative to the first quarter on a not-seasonally-adjusted basis. Home values rose in all nine Census Divisions. This is the first time since the second quarter [...]

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Ignore Talk Of A Housing Tax Credit ‘Revival’

August 31, 2010
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Tweet Bring back the home buyer tax credit? Don’t hold your breath. There’s been a lot of breathless speculation ever since Shaun Donovan, secretary of Housing and Urban Development, awkwardly side-stepped a question from CNN on Sunday about whether the Obama administration would consider reviving tax credits to spur home sales. Those credits were credited [...]

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Lennar to Start Construction of New Town Homes Priced from the Low $100s at the Hammocks in New Tampa

August 31, 2010
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Tweet Lennar will start construction of new town homes priced from the low $100s in August at The Hammocks, located off E. County Line Road and Bruce B. Downs Blvd. in New Tampa. Mark Metheny, president of Lennar’s Central Florida Division, said Lennar plans to build 190 two, three and four-bedroom town homes in three [...]

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Where The Super-Brains Are: America’s Brainiest Cities

August 31, 2010
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Tweet Last Friday, my list of America’s Brainiest Cities ran over at The Daily Beast. Boulder topped the list, which comprised a mix of larger knowledge-intensive metros like Washington, D.C., Boston, Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Austin, and Seattle, and college towns like Ithaca, Charlottesville, Madison, Iowa City, and Durham, North Carolina, among others. The index [...]

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A Look At Case-Shiller, By Metro Area

August 31, 2010
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Tweet The S&P/Case-Shiller Composite 20 home price index, a broad gauge of U.S. home prices, posted a 1% gain in June from a month earlier and rose 4.2% from 2009, but the gains decelerated as a government tax credit wound down. Seventeen cities posted month-to-month increases in June – just Las Vegas posted a decline [...]

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Home Prices Gain 3.6% In Past Year

August 31, 2010
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Tweet National home prices jumped a substantial 3.6% in the past year, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index released on Tuesday. Prices also climbed 4.4% in the second quarter compared with a 2.8% plunge in the first quarter. Of course, the positive report was buoyed by the government’s tax credit program, which refunded as [...]

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Consumer Spending Rises 0.4% In July; Personal Incomes Up 0.2%

August 30, 2010
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Tweet Americans spent last month at the fastest pace in four months, helped by a jump in demand for automobiles. Consumer spending rose 0.4 percent in July after three lackluster months, the Commerce Department said Monday. Spending fell 0.1 percent in April, rose a tiny 0.1 percent in May and was flat in June. Personal [...]

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Bankers Say Global Recovery Likely To Stay On Track

August 30, 2010
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Tweet Current and former central bankers from around the world said an uneven global economic recovery was likely to stay on track despite worries about the vitality of the U.S. economy. At an annual Federal Reserve retreat, angst, not panic, was the order of the day among officials and economists chastened by a deep recession [...]

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We’re Not Going To Double Dip

August 30, 2010
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Tweet The pessimism is so thick you can cut it with a paper knife. Yet I remain convinced we’re not in a double-dip recession, and I think stocks should be accumulated at these levels. Here are my three reasons. The first is gold. If the global economy was really heading toward another big leg down, we [...]

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A 15-Year Mortgage Isn’t For Everyone

August 30, 2010
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Tweet A growing number of homeowners are choosing to pay down their mortgages at a faster rate, even if it means a substantial jump in their monthly payments. From January through June, 26% of homeowners who refinanced chose a 15-year fixed-rate mortgage, according to data from CoreLogic. During all of 2009, 18.5% of borrowers who [...]

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