About 5.1 million mortgage holders (or roughly 10% of Americans with mortgages) will own homes that are worth 75% or less than what they owe on their mortgages by mid-June. This is the conclusion of a new study by First American CoreLogic given exclusively to The New York Times. One of the firm’s senior economists, Sam Khater, told the paper, “People’s emotional attachment to their... 

By Alan Beattie at ft.com Put a jaguar, a bear, a tiger and a panda together and you might get a good show but you won’t get a quiet life. The Bric grouping – Brazil, Russia, India and China – has become a shorthand for the rise of emerging markets in the global economy. And after a rather stellar decade, the Brics mainly had a good crisis from which they are now rapidly exiting. Goldman Sachs,... 

In late 2009, former Merrill Lynch economist, now with the Canadian firm, Gluskin Sheff, said the following:   “The credit collapse and the accompanying deflation and overcapacity are going to drive the economy and financial markets in 2010. We have said this repeatedly that this recession is really a depression because the (post-WW II) recessions were merely small backward steps in an inventory... 

New numbers from China’s customs agency say the country’s exports for 2009 were more than $1.2 trillion, slightly ahead of Germany. Exports in December rose nearly 18 percent from a year earlier. At the same time, imports leapt nearly 56 percent. Asian Development Bank economist Zhuang Jian says strong performance in the last two months of 2009 helped China’s export surge. Zhuang... 

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — The unusual circumstances that led the U.S. market to rally powerfully in 2009 might be explained by secret government moves to buy stocks, according to Charles Biderman, the founder and chief executive of TrimTabs, a research firm that tracks liquidity flows in the market. NGE: But why this analysis came just now or is it too caused by PPT? “We cannot identify... 

Jan. 4 (Bloomberg) — Japan’s Prime Minister, Yukio Hatoyama, swept to power by a public seeking an end to economic and political stagnation, is failing to arrest the nation’s decline. Japanese gross domestic product shrank to an annualized 471 trillion yen ($5 trillion) in the third quarter, without accounting for changes in prices, the lowest level since 1991. The tumble is unprecedented... 

it may crush the existing structure of Fannie and Freddy and drag the economy further down, no matter how many dollars the fed throws at it here are the events: each individual event will have no visible effect, but combined will crash the economy: these are all pending events, many listed on MW as individual events, but no one looks at them all together – but that is how we will feel them in... 

(breakingviews.com) — During the recent financial crisis it appeared that America's small banks could do no wrong. President Barack Obama said the world would have been better off if the entire financial system had been more like them. Legislators tried to ease their burden, often at the expense of their bigger banking competitors. Last week, community bankers even won a meeting with...