“These substantial home price declines bring positive and negative news. For homeowners and financial market observers, these declines spell further erosion in home equity levels and potentially more trouble for mortgage markets. To prospective home buyers who have been shut out of homeownership because of affordability constraints, these declines may be welcome news, as are continued low mortgage rates.”
—OFEHO Director, James Lockhart
“Over the past year, prices fell 3.1 percent between the first quarter of 2007 and the first quarter of 2008. This is the largest decline in the purchase-only index’s 17-year history.”
“We had a spectacular era of financial success that was extended by the subprime mortgage mania to 2007. But I think the golden age of Wall Street is over.”
—Barton Biggs, managing partner of Traxis and former chief global strategist at Morgan Stanley until 2003.
“Imagine what the U.S. financial system would look like if $69 billion in capital did not come in November, December and January from the sovereign wealth funds. It would have been a lot messier, the credit crunch would have been a lot worse, the de- leveraging would have been a lot more severe.”
—Mohamed El-Erian said at a conference in Los Angeles yesterday.
“the industry’s wage costs are about 10 percent too high after the credit bubble. If the excess were all recouped through job cuts, it would imply an additional reduction of more than half a million.”
—Thomas Philippon, a professor at New York University
73k down. 17k to go.
65000, 25000 to go
NYT cites 65k jobs lost in Financial Services so far. 90k were lost in the last downturn
“From my perspective, I think that we don’t know if the storm has passed or if we are still in the eye of the storm…Are there other shoes to drop and new events or new shocks that will come to the fore? In my view, this is probably as bad or worse than the 1989-1990 crisis and may even rival the worst crisis we’ve seen since the end of the Second World War.”
this comes about 18 months after Quincy Smith took over at the interactive head, promising to find the next YouTube “only a year earlier, when they were 1/32nd of their size.” Translated, it meant that the company wanted to merge big media (read NYC) with early-stage startups in Silicon Valley.
“I’m just not finding a compelling reason to be in India. With little natural resources given their population, inflation might be a problem and the government might end up quashing some of the GDP growth… The Chinese government just has their act together more than the Indian government does. I have no idea what I’m going to get from India.”
—Uri Landesman, who oversees $5.5 billion as head of global growth and international equities at ING Groep NV’s asset management unit in New York
“These central banks know that holding these low-yielding Treasury bills is just an aid program to the United States, and they want to get out of that business”
—Kenneth S. Rogoff, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund
Stilltitled 