HINSDALE, Illinois (Reuters) - A house in this wealthy Chicago suburb is far beyond the reach of most Americans.
Unfortunately, Hinsdale may also now be too expensive for some of the people who already live here.
"There is a section of the population here that over-extended themselves to buy here and then keep up the facade of wealth," said Sharon Sodikoff, a broker associate at local real estate agency Prudential Homelife Realty. "In the next year or so they’ll be forced out in dribs and drabs."
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THE Dow soared 200 points in a Christmas rush on Friday that belied emerging details that US banking, mortgage companies and credit rating faced collapse while the nation’s mortgage insurance industry plunged into chaos.
Nearly 180,000 US local councils were placed on credit watch, with the credit agency Fitch releasing another $US5.3 billion in credit downgrades involving 27 mortgage companies. The news emerged on Friday night, when the nation’s newspapers, even if they were following the story, would miss it.
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SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Securitization, hailed as the greatest financial innovation of the 20th century, isn’t getting such rave reviews anymore after this summer’s subprime mortgage crisis exposed some weaknesses. With global credit markets still in crisis, experts have already begun debating the benefits and the drawbacks of the process.
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Herb Greenberg
Even before this mortgage mess started, one person who kept emailing me over and over saying that this is going to get real bad. He kept saying this was beyond sub-prime, beyond low FICO scores, beyond Alt-A and beyond the imagination of most pundits, politicians and the press. When I asked him why somebody from inside the industry would be so emphatically sounding the siren, he said, “Someobody’s got to warn people.”
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