From Diana at cnbc.com:

(S)everal speakers at the forum said several scary things about housing and foreclosures. Mark Zandi of Moody’s Economy.com is looking for a hybrid version of Fannie and Freddie, or a mortgage market more privatized but with government backing. He said that if the mortgage market were fully privatized, mortgage rates would go up at least one percentage point and home prices would drop ten percent.

Laurie Goodman of Amherst Mortgage Securities put up some truly scary charts about non-performing loans and, with a flurry of numbers I couldn’t follow, said that without government intervention about 11 million more borrowers could lose their homes.

“Equity is the single most important determinant of default, not unemployment,” declared Goodman. This as a new report from CoreLogic this morning showed home prices dipping over 5 percent nationally in December, year-over-year.

“The key thing for investors to look at right now is what’s going to open up for them, what part of the playing field is going to open up where they can actually step in and be part of the mortgage market again,” said Armando Falcon, chairman and CEO of Falcon Capital Advisors, on a bit of a brighter note. “And that’s clearly going to be for the jumbo prime mortgage sector.”

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Jim the Realtor
Jim is a long-time local realtor who comments daily here on his blog, bubbleinfo.com which began in September, 2005. Stick around!

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