The terrifying new speed of global warming and our last chance to stop it

Snap into Action for the Climate | Orion magazine

This paper seeks to explain the causes and consequences of the United States subprime mortgage crisis, and how this crisis has led to a generalized credit crunch in other financial sectors that ultimately affects the real economy. It postulates that, despite the recent financial innovations, the financial strategies—leveraging and financial risk mismatching—that led to the present crisis are similar to those found in the United States savings-and-loan debacle of the late 1980s and in the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s. However, these strategies are based on market innovations that have heightened, not reduced, systemic risks and financial instability. They are as the title implies: old wine in a new bottle. Going beyond these financial practices, the underlying structural causes of the crisis are located in the loose monetary policies of central banks, deregulation, and excess liquidity in financial markets that is a consequence of the kind of economic growth that produces various imbalances—trade imbalances, financial sector imbalances, and wealth and income inequality. The consequences of excessive risk, moral hazards, and rolling bubbles are discussed.

Old Wine in a New Bottle: Subprime Mortgage Crisis—Causes and Consequences

From mighty oaks to humble hazels, our sylvan treasures have never been more highly valued – or popular. As a record 10 million green-fingered Britons prepare to plant saplings, Michael McCarthy explores a root and branch revolution

Green giants: Our love affair with trees

In the interest of promoting better housing policy in the future it is important to have a public acknowledgement of the follies of homeownership ideology. We don't have a bottomless pit of money to satisfy their perverse ideology. If homeownership does not make economic sense, then we should not tell people to sacrifice healthcare and other essential needs to make the ideologues happy. It's time to force some honesty into the discussion of housing policy - renting sometimes make sense.

The homeownership ideology

Income and net worth are two important factors in determining economic well-being in the United States. This report looks at net worth and asset ownership by various socioeconomic factors, including monthly income. The data come from the Survey of Income and Program Participation.

Net Worth and the Assets of Households: 2002

Magnum Photographer Stuart Franklin has spent a decade exploring the beauty of trees and the unique place they occupy in man's world

From the archive:

In 1995, Steve Sillett received a Ph.D. in botany from Oregon State University, in Corvallis. Soon afterward, he took his present job, at Humboldt, and began to explore the old-growth redwood canopy.

No scientist had been there before.

The tallest redwoods were regarded as inaccessible towers, shrouded in foliage and almost impossible to climb, since the lowest branches on a redwood can be twenty-five stories above the ground. From the moment he entered redwood space, Steve Sillett began to see things that no one had imagined. The general opinion among biologists at the time -- this was just eight years ago -- was that the redwood canopy was a so-called "redwood desert" that contained not much more than the branches of redwood trees.

Instead, Sillett discovered a lost world above Northern California.

In the Time of Trees - Photo Essays - TIME

Paul Krugman:

We should expect a prolonged, grinding decline in home prices, back to more or less their pre-bubble inflation-adjusted levels.

Brad DeLong:

My guess is that we will ultimately give back half of the doubling ...

The Future of Housing Prices

This paper provides the first rigorous assessment of the homeownership experiences of subprime borrowers. We consider homeowners who used subprime mortgages to buy their homes, and estimate how often these borrowers end up in foreclosure. In order to evaluate these issues, we analyze homeownership experiences in Massachusetts over the 1989–2007 period using a competing risks, proportional hazard framework. We present two main findings. First, homeownerships that begin with a subprime purchase mortgage end up in foreclosure almost 20 percent of the time, or more than 6 times as often as experiences that begin with prime purchase mortgages. Second, house price appreciation plays a dominant role in generating foreclosures. In fact, we attribute most of the dramatic rise in Massachusetts foreclosures during 2006 and 2007 to the decline in house prices that began in the summer of 2005.

Subprime Outcomes: Risky Mortgages, Homeownership Experiences, and Foreclosures

Consider this troubling question: Do mortgage lenders have any obligation to take over a property that has defaulted on its mortgage?

The short answer, it appears, is no.

Lender-Abandoned, Non-REO Foreclosures | The Big Picture

The Federal Reserve System on Tuesday announced the availability of a set of dynamic maps and data that illustrate subprime and alt-A mortgage loan conditions across the United States.

The maps, which are maintained by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, will display regional variation in the condition of securitized, owner-occupied subprime, and alt-A mortgage loans. The maps and data can be used to assist in the identification of existing and potential foreclosure hotspots. This may assist community groups, which can mobilize resources to bring financial counseling and other resources to at-risk homeowners. Policymakers can also use the maps and data to develop plans to lessen the direct and spillover impacts that delinquencies and foreclosures may have on local economies. Local governments may use the data and maps to prioritize the expenditure of their resources for these efforts.
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The maps show the following information for subprime and alt-A loans for each state and most of the counties and zip codes in the United States:

• Loans per 1,000 housing units
• Loans in foreclosure per 1,000 housing units
• Loans real estate owned (REO) per 1,000 housing units
• Share of loans that are adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs)
• Share of loans for which payments are current
• Share of loans that are 90-plus days delinquent
• Share of loans in foreclosure
• Median combined loan-to-value ratio (LTV) at origination
• Share of loans with low credit score (FICO) and high LTV at origination
• Share of loans with low- or no documentation
• Share of ARMs with initial reset in the next 12 months
• Share of loans with a late payment in the past 12 months

Dynamic Maps of Nonprime Mortgage Conditions in the United States