Bearonomics News About Bear Stearns

www.interest.co.nz Intro Today, we’ll look at fresh signs of stress in the housing market, where mortgagee sales listings have doubled since early February, And we’ll look at the increase in the staggering amount of bank lending in the last 5 years. Banks are now heavily dependent on the housing market. More on that in a minute Mortgagee Sales But firstly, we look at the latest results from the interest.co.nz mortgagee listings index. We are tracking the number of listings for mortgagee sales on trademe.co.nz and realestate.co.nz. The overall number is up 7% this week alone and has more than doubled since we started tracking these figures in February. It’s a very interesting exercise. Just go to these websites and search for mortgagee to see what type of house is up for sale. There’s a lot of investment properties, particularly anything that looks a little leaky. And there’s quite a few sections as well as developers struggle to get funding to build houses or apartments on that land. The story in Auckland is uglier, where the number of mortgagee sales listings have risen 19% in the last week alone and is also more than doubled in the last 6 weeks. Elsewhere the number of bankruptcies and “no asset procedures”, which is a sort of bankruptcy lite, has risen sharply in the last four weeks. Times are tough and getting tougher. Deposit Insurance Now for a closer look at how exposed the banks are to the housing market. Our analysis of the bank’s disclosure statements for the …