Must read article about reverse mortgages – Private Equity & Reverse Mortgages -  thanks John Yedinak – Reverse Mortgage Daily

————
Congress Passes Economic Stimulus Package; Will it Help Housing? – Get ready for jumbo conforming. … Sources suggested to HW on Thursday that the SIFMA committee engaged in determining whether conforming jumbos will trade as TBA is expected to keep the newly-conforming loans out of TBA trades …  – housingwire
————
Fed’s Lockhart Sees Economic Growth By Second Half Of 2008 – please be right! – RTT News
————
Sean Egan: Giving the Backs of Envelopes a Bad Name – A human random-number generator – Remember that $200 billion in new capital Egan Jones said the financial guarantors have to raise? You won’t believe the methodology the firm used to arrive at that figure. You really won’t … – Thomas K. Brown -  bankstocks.com

————
Marc Faber Video    – thanks to Vigilant Investor   for finding this
————

1.  real housing crisis Is the 2007 U.S. Sub-Prime Financial Crisis So Different?  An International Historical Comparison*  – 13 pages  NBER 

2.  Barry Ritholz has thoughts about this paper. – The Big Picture
————
The ripple effect on banks of subprime crisis – Newsday

————
Straight Talk from Buffett (about housing)  -  Chad Brand – Peridot Capitalist

————
The Future of the Monolines – Felix Salmon – portfolio.com 

————

Investment Postcards from Cape Town – Prieur du Plessis’s international investment blog 

————
CLO Auctions Have Started – Megan Barnett -  portfolio.com

————
OTS Approves Hedge Fund Rebuttal of Control. -  On January 15, the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) approved a rebuttal of control filed by the Citadel Group, a hedge fund, allowing it to purchase up to 25% of E*TRADE Financial Corporation’s stock and become one of its two greatest shareholders without being deemed to have acquired “control” of a savings association under OTS regulations.  OTS – approval document      thanks to Buckley Kollar LLP for finding this

————
Dysfunctional credit markets are clearing slowly.  The LIBOR rate spread to other key US rates has returned to normalcy.  LIBOR is down 2 full percentage points in 8 weeks.  The Fed’s Term Auction Facility (TAF) has worked.  The LIBOR banks didn’t trust each other and the rest of the world didn’t trust them.  So LIBOR premiums blew out of historical ranges.   … David Kotok – Cumberland Advisors

————
Raising conforming loan limit not a simple task – Lots of questions remain  – .. one analysis suggests Fannie and Freddie will be able to tiptoe into the jumbo loan business in only 19 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs).   … (median home prices) But where will HUD get the data? And with prices falling rapidly in many markets, will the data be updated monthly, quarterly or annually? – more at Inman

————
New Hitches In Markets May Widen Credit Woes – … low-rated corporate loans — the kind that fueled the buyout boom of recent years — have plummeted in value. … WSJ 

————
Pipe bursts in foreclosed house, flooding neighbor -  you will be seeing more stories like this. – 9NEWS.com