Over at the Puget Sound Business Journal, reporter Kirsten Grind posted an interesting story today on their recently-launched BizTalk blog: Crackdown on HomeStreet Bank comes as a surprise Washington state regulators don’t seem to have much patience these days for our struggling community banks and are increasingly slapping them with cease-and-desist orders to force a…
Category: News
News, current events, etc.
National Interactive “Stress Index” Map from AP
The Associated press published an interesting interactive map recently that is worth checking out. They took a handful of economic measures such as the unemployment rate, the foreclosure rate, and the bankruptcy rate, and calculated an “Economic Stress Index” for every county in the country. Here’s a snapshot of their March 2009 map (click to…
Failed / Stalled Mixed-Use Developments Around the Sound
From today’s Olympian: Housing project in foreclosure Thurston Highlands, one of the largest proposed mixed-use developments in the state, has emerged as the biggest example of how the economic crisis has had a corrosive effect on development. Through its trustee, the project’s primary lender, Frontier Bank, has started foreclosure proceedings on the 1,250-acre property after…
Economic and Real Estate Truth One-Liners
I saw this on BoingBoing the other day, and thought it was interesting… Debt is not a good product I just had a great hour-long phone conversation with an old friend, Will Dana (now editor of Rolling Stone), who has strongly encouraged me to come up with one-liners that tell the truth about the economic/banking…
Small House, Big House
I thought this was amusing… From D.R. Horton: Smaller is better in some markets, May 5th: D.R. Horton’s chief executive says smaller, more affordable homes are selling well in some areas and will bring higher profits to the nation’s largest home builder. CEO Donald Tomnitz said the smaller homes were particularly popular in Seattle and…